When opening “Puig World”book printed in Akian Gráfica Editora, bilingual Spanish-English, with photographs by Gustavo Lowry and photograph of the author by Leandro Allochis. the world is represented by flowers instead of images of wars the ones we are used to seeing, no matter the medium.
Is it a superficial, escapist look? Not at all, it is sharp and ironic, full of winks. His actor, Damian Puig (Buenos Aires, 1969) confesses that in the last ten years “he drew and redrawn countless times the images that inhabit these pages, which are almost a travel diary, 50 cities, 50 drawings, infinite stories of what he saw, he recalled , imagined and played in each of those places.
The men are slender, the women are beautiful, sensual, static, dressed in fashion, a lot of Chanel, The interior environments reflect a refined social world. The exteriors are also inhabited by beautiful women with smoked glasses, whether in a street scene in La Paz or in New York on the day the Twin Towers fell.
Scenes from movies from the 50s like the one of the driver who drives a woman whose only legs are visible, very Hollywood, except that it takes place on a waterfront in Punta del Este under the gaze of a young man drinking mate. Scenes from Bali, with monkeys walking along power lines, the inevitable cell phone of a young man in the jungle, the domestic worker who points her bow and arrow at her employer surrounded by art deco furniture.
And so, andIn the middle of the Giza desert, tourists arrived on camels, she drinking tea in a silver set and he photographing the pyramids, a scene from an English film. Also a Machu Picchu in the background with women dressed in colorful textiles from the region. Dublin and its famous bar The Temple, the green of the shamrocks, cruises, lapdogs, and the history of art that sneaks in.
Matisse, Klimt, not even Vermeer is spared in an image of “Girl with a Pearl Earring”, dressed in a jean jacket, Tamara de Lempicka, Erté, Touko Laaksonen, master of homoerotic drawing. There is a constant element apart from the flowers in vases and decorative ciboriums, the name Puig, as a seal of the famous Catalan fashion and perfumery brand that appears in books, handbags, tattoos, a lot of Hockney swimming pools, with languid women in the that danger lurks in the form of a alligator, “the Bond girl” in the Széchenyi thermal bath in Budapest, the geisha about to decapitate a man, that is, airs of thrillers.
In his text, Julio Sánchez points out that Damián creates his own universe, brilliant and enigmatic and, at the same time, it shows us the fragility of appearances and vanity. Patricia O’Donnell from her psychoanalytic vision highlights the artist’s passion for travel, hence “he immerses us in an endless journey through a series of works inhabited by a world populated with stories and enigmas to be deciphered.” She also analyzes the issue of fashion by quoting Pichon-Riviere when she refers to it as “reaffirming the feeling of self, power and prestige.”
As we go through the pages of this magnificently illustrated book, we highlight the creativity of this artist, there is always a story behind each image as well as a latent danger, the fear that something sinister is about to happen. A world of a movie, one of those we saw in the neighborhood cinema, a world that has been lost forever.
Source: Ambito
I am an author and journalist who has worked in the entertainment industry for over a decade. I currently work as a news editor at a major news website, and my focus is on covering the latest trends in entertainment. I also write occasional pieces for other outlets, and have authored two books about the entertainment industry.
