| My work for the past seven years has been revolving around the notions of sexuality and identity. Although during the initial years of my art education it seemed drawing and painting were my strongest visual platform, photography and performance became increasingly my area of focus, and the perfect ground to explore all these questions and ideas I had set my interest, if not obsession, in. Since I was very young I was very interested in questioning gender roles and the deconstruction of masculinity and its pre-fixed notions. I developed a very early interest in sexuality and its representations, initially working for a very long time with pornography and erotic literature. The works produced during this first phase include several series of drawings and paintings using Internet porn as references, porn magazine collages, and some initial self-portraits, such as Cowboys in 2001. | 
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Guillermo Riveros
Courtesy of the artist.My work for the past seven years has been revolving around the notions of sexuality and identity. Although during the initial years of my art education it seemed drawing and painting were my strongest visual platform, photography and performance became increasingly my area of focus, and the perfect ground to explore all these questions and ideas I had set my interest, if not obsession, in.
Since I was very young I was very interested in questioning gender roles and the deconstruction of masculinity and its pre-fixed notions. I developed a very early interest in sexuality and its representations, initially working for a very long time with pornography and erotic literature. The works produced during this first phase include several series of drawings and paintings using Internet porn as references, porn magazine collages, and some initial self-portraits, such as Cowboys in 2001. All these became sketches and references for my photographs later on, when I began my exploration of stereotypes and constructed sexual identities through an exercise of self-production and representation. As in my photographs, where I embody different characters, in their production I also take on different roles. I work as the director, art director, producer, performer, and make-up artist.
I strongly believe in the construction of sexual notions through processes of over-signification and reiteration, channeling some of Lacan’s theories (the mirror stage and the signification of the phallus). This is a constant in my images, and the way they are produced: addressing the idea of sexual identities as performances, through performing both as an actor who plays a character, and as a photographer who plays the director and the actor.
In different projects I’ve used devices to add different layers to my explorations. In recent works like Corrupta, I used body fluids as a physical expression of abjection. I wanted to speak of rejection and marginality; fluids metaphorically accompany the characters that embody sexual identities that are equally perceived as outcast.
On my latest project, the ongoing “series” titled Golden Age, I began using masks as a new device that allows me to interact with other characters that without faces just become extensions of myself as a performer and director. In Golden Age, anonymous animal/human characters appear in a very neutral and sterile fashion in garden-like spaces but also in a bedroom. The performances of the characters are primitive and minimalist, deliberately referencing the ontological-hysteric theater. The questions that arise from these images are linked to the being and its relation to others, the staging for representation and the game of gender-performance. Subjects and their relations, in my case, expand my self-portraits into new grounds where interactions with a Cartesian-other are possible. In fact, these interactions become the main preoccupation of the pieces. The third installment of images from the Golden Age series, titled Die Flendermaus, reflects on sexual interaction: masculinity and primitivism. Viewing these photographs as less attached to my own image, I reinforce the idea that my own identity vanishes in the images as I take upon my visual explorations. I constantly insist that photography, for me, is not a mechanism of reality; it’s very much the opposite.
