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.