The graphic artwork of Pérez Becerra can be placed into a realist tradition. It is a mixture, close to comics in the line usage and the picture fragmentation, along with the use of different techniques. The works that belong to the "Tango Bolita" series go through a plurality of topics. The tango -that already was a motif of previous creations- becomes related to this new work with suggestive beings: the "bolitas". From this "adjectived noun" used in Buenos Aires to call Bolivian, Peruvian and even Argentinean people with indigenous features, the artist creates a mythology filled with beings and realms pierced by an iconography that brings those natives towards a more contemporary modernity, where the characters lose their historic pace and are surrounded by kitsch and campy symbols.Perhaps, the most interesting thing for Pérez Becerra, from a literature and essay background, are the issues of the immigration with the loss of the historical identity, only noticeable and preserved in certain elements, such as the clothes or the aboriginal physical characteristics, clashing with the "europeaness" of the Argentinean, specially of the "porteño" (inhabitant of Buenos Aires).Technically, the work, performed upon planks and with successive layers of resin and varnish that gives a termination alike to the Dutch art movements or the glasses of the centro-european naïf works, makes it similar to renaissance works in a new appropriation, where we can see the characters claiming back their landscape, which is now but a symbolic memory, roaming in a strange town, or being menaced by a twisted bestiary that is not their own.The crossover of incompressible texts between the figures, like in crooked palimpsests of old, remarks the literary nature of this work. Like if the last appropriation was that of the indigenous icon, watched from an wholly plastic aspect, and relinquished from its social-religious-magical characteristics. But all those speculations could remain for an art sociology, and instead, here is the finished work, or in a serial course.
Agustina Perez Rial
Traduccion
Isaura Serrano.