David Trullo travels to the past again and again. It has done so by collecting visual flashes that somehow contributed to forge his personality (Timewarp), reconstructing episodes mutilated by the heteronormative speech (A true history) … Now, in his two current expositions reviews the queer iconography confronting with pieces of the National Museum of Decorative Arts (Queer cabinet) and tracing a personal homoerotic genealogy impregnated with lyricism and irony in equal parts (Souvenirs).
The truth is that this emotional ambiguity, between the lyrical and nihilistic eyedese, between disenchantment and enthusiasm, is the tone that prevails in many of his projects: on the one hand, irony as a device of distancing to reflect on idolatries of yesterday and today (by comparing ancient gods and heroes or Christian icons with clichés of behavior and suburban aesthetics linked to the gay community); on the other, reliance in the potential of the image as revulsive, in the urgency of having an own imaginary with which each one builds and reconstructs its own truth steadily.
Thus, fiction and photography are double-edged weapons, through them we can find ourselves but also lose our identitiy if we become too overwhelmed by the reflection of our own mirage.
Souvenirs is a title that seems to point to that disenchantment, the revolt transformed into memorabilia, decades of struggles and queer claims reduced to innocuous museum pieces … But Trullo doesn’t understand the term souvenir in a pejorative sense, but that in an intelligent way he endorses the irreconcilable conversion of every dream into a fetish, extracting the timeless essence of it, its non-expiration.
As for Queer Cabinet, Trullo dynamizes the possible readings of the decorative pieces of the museum through mischievous winks that bring his photographs: sacred relics transfigured in sexual fetishes (the perizonium), sado masochistic practices confronting a flaying Marsyas in porcelain, a transsexual cupid versioning the infantile Eros that adorns a table clock, ennobled centaurs in front of the traditional representation of these creatures as transits of bestiality and barbarism, a passionate kiss between masked fighters as a retort to a candid kiss made between modernist arabesques, Endymion (the sleeping shepherd who let being loved by Selene) feeding our scopic drive…
Under these revisions in queer code of classic iconographies we intuit buried histories, reflections on the human necessity to use the myth and the fable like subterfuge to speak of the most intimate drives, of unrully desires, of pleasure and pain …, to fix stereotypes of virility and nobility … but also to transgress them.
It is not surprising, due to the interest of David Trullo to erode any homologating semiotics, also participates in the first exhibition organized by Free Wee Project; an initiative that attacks the binary segmentation of the population from the toilets, inviting artists to devise bathroom signs more in keeping with the real diversity.
Urban signs make passers-by disciplined ants: they lead, hierarchize, segregate by sex and gender, by age or purchasing power …, banish those who don’t fit … Through public symbols we “read”. It is always interesting a project that proposes other possible readings, from the most basic, the need to piss.
Anna Adell
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David Trullo. Queer Cabinet. El museo revisitado en clave homoerótica.
until 2th July 2017
Museo Nacional de Artes Decorativas de Madrid
Included in Word Pride Madrid 2017
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David Trullo. Souvenirs.
until 8th August 2017
Factoría de Arte y Desarrollo, Madrid
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Gender Free
until 29 July 2017
Organized by Free Wee Project
Group exhition in Swinton&Grant, Madrid
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