Asunción, October, 2016.

There are very few possibilities of curating the work of an artist of whom one has, as in this case, great admiration; selecting works to accompany the documentary Feliciano Centurión, abrazo intimo al natural, by Mon Ross, to be released during the American film week, represented a great responsibility with an emotional-sensory load typical of the artist’s work.

The opening of the container, a wooden trunk in which a great number of works were stored, conveyed into a chest that treasured invaluable affections.

Those smooth blankets are plain or with organic or geometric patterns, whose basic function is to give shelter, warmth, protection to the body, the same ones that detonate in associations of ideas of the homelike, the familiar, the almost maternal protection of them.

In some situations the body not only does it feel the climatic changes, but also the much more profound changes that seek a shelter when an external agent influences its natural state, the production of Feliciano during that period contains those difficult sensations to be established in a logical order, combined with other semantic elements even more complex.

At first, the blankets were intervened in their original size generating works of large-format, which were painted in vibrant colors with nature motifs, plants, flowers, insects, sea creatures, farm animals; nature was invading the design of each blanket. With time, the blanket format started to decrease in size, presenting variations in the intervention of the support, plastic appliques were added to the blankets, folk, kitsch decorative elements, which when manipulated by the artist exerted a link with his personal experience, leaving that ornament phase to be transformed into a catalyst for the message that Feliciano wanted to convey in his work.

Curatorial text written for the production that accompanied the premiere of the documentary: Feliciano Centurión, an intimate, natural embrace by Mon Ross at the American Film Week held at the University of Maynooth, Ireland in November 2016.

Buenos Aires, 2004.

His work was filled with a delicate drama.

He was already using new elements to produce: colored threads that he could sew effortlessly, small cloths worn out by its use, tiny cushions on which he rested his bones. Written phrases that he would attach in his heart and helped him to contain his fear. “Death is an intermittent part of my days,” taken from a poem by Alina Tortosa, repeated as a mantra. “Love is the perfume of the flower.” He was moved by Liliana Maresca’s simple phrase.

He embroidered them over and over again, “I just became aware that I live projected into the future”, the phrase of his friend Ariel commands it…

“I want to live up to my work. Embroider what I think, what I feel.” he kept repeating.

In search of that truth, his production moved away from the joyful ease of its beginnings and became lucid, raw, tender.

Feliciano Centurión’s work was a constant declaration of desperate love.

Asunción, 1991.

“Feliciano Centurión got carried away by the diaspora that this country imposed on his children, found himself occupying strange places, delayed in painting studios in Buenos Aires until he arrived at this place that was his with a strange look and a different accent: his paintings brought the baggage of the Buenos Aires workshops ready to be updated with the last cry that could also be the one of the painting in that country; he knows it and, despite his youth, he tries through this exhibition to free himself (because he assumes that his undeniable office of painter is not enough to fulfill the commitment of the search for new truths) he is ready to defend his discoveries and his conquests from the attacks of the sad fascination of the fashions.

This strength is already foreseen in his production, with his color, his spontaneous gesture, his attentive constructions, images of transfigured triviality.”

Buenos Aires, March, 1999.

“Our century has vehemently insisted on a curious item: the relationship between art and life. It has often been held as one of plenitude that could only be viewed by overcoming the restrictive formality of the work. Feliciano immigrates to Buenos Aires very young, the city where his mother dies and whose protective memory seems to gather all his production. Very soon he would feel the need for a more precise corporeality for his paintings and the blankets came to provide him with patchy sensuality (what better protection than to shelter the loved one in a small blanket?)

First there were industrial prints with plain or simple line motifs on the entire surface where he hosted his refined and bucolic animal scenes. Then he would choose more elaborated designs, often with large deer or tigers, to which he would add little, just the essential to highlight their features or to complete the setting: idyllic worlds, dreamlike pictures.

But what happens when that desired plenitude comes to an end? The emergence of AIDS manifested itself in the art world in countries of the northern hemisphere through a combative and militant movement such as that of anonymous artists of the ATC-UP*, and the lacerating testimony of the course of the disease in lives and bodies; the artistic was reconsidered as a tool, fertile space to fight for what has always seemed to exceed it: life itself.

For reasons that would be long to explain, the artists in our latitudes who were affected by the disease did not initially make their condition public. Nor does their production speak about it in a manifested way. However, this deceptive retreat would be the occasion for more wonderful, deep expressions.

In Feliciano Centurion’s production, his stars or flowers hatch. He has begun to personally make his own frazaditas**from the classic Scottish pattern, very common in every kid’s childhood memory. Feliciano then selects circular and concentric crochet ***and ñanduti**** tapestry made by Paraguayan and Argentinean women living in Buenos Aires, often his friends’ mothers and grandmothers. He would collect these carpets at random without indicating anything in terms of shape and color. He was fascinated with the dialogues that these circles created, as they were arranged in rounds and constellations following their own logic. His most radical step had been inaugurated with this sort of creator’s will randomness.

Feliciano Centurión used to work on practical visualizations and therapeutic statements. The phrases that until then lived on his house’s walls found accommodation in these small blankets, after hours and days of sewing and sewing.

Why such a commitment when carving a word on a small cloth that it will be confined in the most secret domesticity?

Intangible, minimal and repeated ceremonies like a prayer. The absolute day by day. Finally, Feliciano meets other people’s wishes, other prayers and other dreams. Other hopes and salutations. He can now, stripped and light, “open his gaze to the discovery, that encounter of the spirit with the world, with All That Is.”

He rummages through secondhand object stores as a sentimental archaeologist to find anonymous embroidery, often unfinished.

Napkin rings, handkerchiefs, aprons, pads. Mysteries of other lives, capricious tasks lost from their meaning to which he adds a word or completes the missing petal. Or perhaps not even this seems necessary and he only needs to accommodate them on his frazaditas and silky cloth edgings restoring them to their splendor, returning them to the circulation of the things in the world. As a graft of dreams onto an old soul which had been left and dissolved before. Gone already in caravan, for the time of things.

Incognito purposes, stations of the soul and an infinite post, overflowing. Anything flows. There is no end to it.

The artist, who has dedicated to instilling in us his opinions and reflections, has already withdrawn completely, so that the affairs of life radiate his thorough and constant animation.

No more testimonials or comments. Nor the raw and stubborn sterility of fighting against death, because life has already won, by shortcut, subtracting itself from the didactic vocations of the art world, liberating its territories from the labors of the soul, where nothing has an end.”

Curatorial text written for the Last works (Ultimos Trabajos) exhibition held between May and June 1999, at the Juan de Salazar Cultural Center, Asunción, Paraguay.

Asunción, January, 1997.

“Having decided to return to his personal hometown history, he burst into the art scene in Paraguay in the 1980s, with a vehement, straightforward kind of work and image filled with expressiveness, animated by a great sense of humor, and a concern about the conflicted human condition; aspects that would later permeate his whole artwork. This conflict has basically been intended in terms of a tension between the subject and the adverse or complicit time that conditions it; that limits it and redeems it.

Simultaneously, connected with the idea of domesticity and the guidelines of industrial aesthetics referred to the multiple conflicts that overwhelmed the panorama of the contemporary aesthetics and faithful to his time, Feliciano knew how to detect in the air the presence of complex questions of entangled oppositions that perhaps posed as unsolvable, and that were connected confusingly with pure interrogations; with errant metaphors that looked for nothing more than a scene in which to present themselves without trying to reveal figures or giving away the idea of secrecy.

The supports have named the issues that confront the craft and the serial work. The issue of the aura, the theme of the industrial reproducible, and the uniqueness of the creativity, as well as the technical aspects that has obsessed a culture that outburst stereotypes and molds. The artist promotes a debate between the feverish design of blankets, folders, gobelins and the interventions he himself has generated through the use of acrylic painting, applications and embroideries. When facing each other (designs and interventions), the most direct craftsmanship and industrial manufacturing, they both release a constellation of materials and values that transcend the merely ornamental.

One of Feliciano’s latest works of art about the corny and the trivial, fall into an almost radical position. The small pieces of lace and gobelins are hand-embroidered with short legends that speak of ideal love, fear of loneliness; farewell and hope are small conspiracies, common places rehabilitated by the truth of the borderline situation that makes them vibrant and extreme, almost circumspect. Feliciano does not lose the edge of humor or leave the parody game with language, but his search for the reverse of a worn aphorism leads him to glimpse scenes and to suggest the dramatic vein that encourages the smallest word to shout with genuine force.

The artist has gone quiet now. We are left with the disturbing keys to his world of everyday images that from his artwork language and ornament, conjure death vigilantly.”