About Tatiana Parcero
Tatiana Parcero’s oeuvre explores the body and its implicated connections to identity and the natural world. Parcero juxtaposes the human figure, which in nearly all the work is her own, and found imagery. The work of this contemporary Latin American artist looks beyond the visible exterior. The layers Parcero exposes are both literal and symbolic; beautiful and charged. She has integrated anatomical drawings, codices, colonial and astrological maps, chemical constructions, and naturalist-style drawings with photographs of the body. The process of making the images is performative. The personal performance needed to render the final artwork- from posing the body when making the photograph to responding to it with appropriation and layering. These cumulative actions and responses are an invisible performance; the photograph becomes its documentation. The sacred object of physical actions.
We find Tatiana Parcero’s use of the figure with different elements through time works to reinforce her visual thesis. The work is both a search for understanding and proof of discovery. It can innumerate what it cannot capture singularly through congruence. Something much larger than we can conceive unites us; it is itself ever-present and invisible. Through different lenses Parcero affirms the singularity and plurality of human the experience- one of many; all are one. In this way too the artist shows us that the personal is political.
8M by Tatiana Parcero 2022 -
A charge in Tatiana Parcero’s new work, 8M (above) brings direct political concerns to the forefront. Parcero again borrows gestures she first used in early works- Pasajes Rituales, Corazón, and Inflexiones. Hands on and across the chest hold and protect, open-palms call for pause. This work feels full-circle, like one revolution of a gear, but looking again, these concerns have always been present. Today, more of our eyes are open. Voices become louder together.
Tatiana Parcero’s 8M engages a history of activism central to feminism since the 1970s. These new prints champion the transformation of feminism into a mass movement in Latin America. They celebrate and defend such recently won rights of women as the right to live in control their own bodies, express their experiences, be heard and believed, and the right to protest collectively without fear of violence. Related to these is the right of nature to develop without threat of destruction and extraction.
Universus by Tatiana Parcero | 2013 - 2019
In Universus (below, exhibited at the gallery in 2015) Tatiana Parcero’s work continues to prove there are no borders, beginnings, or endings, just connections and inclusions between humanity and nature. These images again rely on the artist’s own lexicon and involve appropriation. The Universus photographs follow one of two main lines: images of the body with naturalists drawings in the style of Ernst Haeckel and diptychs of a broken landscape.
Fin y Principio, Natura Animalis by Tatiana Parcero | 2007 - 2012
Re-Invento by Tatiana Parcero | 2005 - 2007
In Re-Invento (Reinvented), shown below, Tatiana Parcero expanded her sphere and combined celestial maps and what recall chemical constructions with the body. The macro and micro views underline atomic universality and position our consciousness accordingly. Together, all of these series establish alignments, prove relationships, and outline spheres of influence.
It is in Re-Invento that we begin to grasp the scope of Tatiana Parcero’s interest. Engagement with various appropriated layers and the body works as a whole reveal that the body itself is a symbol for the universal- if the structures humans use to grasp aspects of this concept, then the body must be itself also be a natural unit of this same concept.
Actos de Fé by Tatiana Parcero | 2003 -
Nuevo Mundo by Tatiana Parcero | 1998 - 2004
Tatiana Parcero’s early work, Cartografia Interior (shown below), was somewhat literal. Executed as the artist completed her graduate studies, the work revealed what was below the skin by integrating antique anatomy drawings and Aztec codecies with images of the figure. Nuevo Mundo (shown above) followed followed the next step in a thread of thought. The connection being interest in how the body’s own form and surface mimics landscape. Nuevo Muddo was also made while the artist expected her first child.
Cartografía Interior by Tatiana Parcero | 1994 - 1996
Tatiana Parcero (b. 1967, Mexico - ) earned her Master of Arts in the fields of Art Theory and Photography from New York University and Bachelors Degree in Psychology from Universidad Nacional Autónoma de Mexico (UNAM), Mexico City. She has exhibited internationally in Argentina, France, Mexico, Spain, and the United States of America and beyond.
Parcero’s work is in the permanent collections of Museo de Arte Moderno de Buenos Aires, Argentina; Institutio National de Bellas Artes, Mexcico; Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Castilla y León, Spain; The Mexican Museum, San Francisco; Museum of Modern Art, NY; Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; among others.
