Luis Caballero once stated: “What interests me is not producing a ‘work of art,’ but working with people—working with the person I desire but do not have. In that sense, it is a painting of frustration.”
It took decades for art history and criticism to recognize that his work did not merely address “eroticism” through a virtuosic mastery of drawing, but rather explored the melancholic circuit of homoerotic desire and, in a broader sense, revealed the ethical and political tensions that emerge when self-representations of dissident sexualities are inserted into the artistic field.
A few years before his death, Caballero created El Gran Telón, a monumental canvas exhibited at Galería Garcés Velásquez in Bogotá. In the exhibition catalogue, he cited among his sources the religious imagery of the dying Christ, video recordings of sexual encounters, and press photographs of murdered youths taken from popular newspapers. Through these, he dismantled the silence of an art criticism that had de-sexualized his work by means of a formalist and modernist rhetoric.
From another generational standpoint, Felipe Lozano approaches the body through a biography marked by science, technology, and the disassociation between sexuality and reproduction. Conceived through in vitro fertilization, his existence embodies a paradox that runs throughout his work: desire separated from the reproductive function, and the body as a terrain where fragility, loss, and promise intersect.
In his practice, the human figure appears at times as fragment, at others as specter, as archive, or as ritual. More than representing, his works invoke. They are not attempts to illustrate a recognizable body, but to touch its emotional pulse, its distortion, its becoming. There is a constant drive to overflow form — to dissolve the boundaries between the physical and the symbolic, the intimate and the political.
Some of his paintings stem from digital images — such as those that interrupt pornographic scenes with loading symbols — gestures that frustrate the logic of immediacy and open a pause to confront desire through waiting. In other pieces, bodies dissolve into painterly gestures that evoke a state of delirium or transformation. And finally, there are works in which bodies rest in suspension, as if desire had already been exhausted and only the memory of contact remained — the trace of pleasure.
This state — between extinguished fullness and the persistence of an emotion without an object — opens a fertile ground for thinking of a form of melancholy that does not long to return, but rather insists on resisting.
I propose melancholy as a bridge through which to establish a dialogue between these two practices. I do not refer to a melancholy that confines diverse sexualities within physical or psychological pathology. Perhaps melancholy points not to queer subjects themselves, but to the liberal society that, with its heteronormative anxiety, still fantasizes about a social order composed of identities that are visible, legible, and easily normalized.
Melancholy, as a shared tissue between these two proposals, emerges instead as a strategic space of resistance — one that reveals the wounds and losses produced by exclusionary social norms, and as a place from which it becomes possible to reject prescribed forms of life. It is a space open to experimenting with unthinkable ways of being, acting, and signifying pleasure.
