Mercedes Mac Donnell.
The "peinetón", as an object, demands the attention of the onlookers and grants its wearer a proud, dignified bearing, with their head held high and their back straight, their body set loose towards the world, where its shape rises.
Its use as an ornament depleted, no longer a spontaneous step in the evolution of the usual garment repertoire, the peinetón still keeps intact the metaphor triggered by contemplating it as an object. María Silvia Corcuera Terán's peinetones, with their poetic and political elements set in place, grant the object the possibility of becoming something new: no longer a silent symbol of the past, but rather a manifest of the current, existing state of issues and order. They acquire a disturbing semblance. On no account arbitrarily born out of paper, these peinetones state, proclaim, display the tell-tale signs of what befalls the world, demanding that the onlooker stop and observe this scattered record, bound to that which comes and is transformed. In her series, the artist has divided her work in three distinguishable sections.
The brightly coloured peinetones, loaded with multiple meanings - Borgian hells, bills, flags and cauldrons, mythical behaviours of Argentines. As if the hidden intent of the artist's imagination were to turn the peinetón into a mirror that shows words never said, unseen situations, elements that remind us of who we are. There, in the top of the head, crowning our identity, the meaning is revealed to the world, through this anachronistic object that bears and evokes memory.
In her watercolours, the sight is still, no longer in motion. The spectator is thus prepared to enter the area where the strength of the peinetón is transcended, exceeded, its shape transformed. In the boxes, the tense faces possess no arms or legs, and - instead of hair - they have white stem-like fragments, strings that hold them; expressing the wide, intertwined network composed of all the bonds (whoever looks upon the face is the face). The work is thus presented as a mirror from the artifice, dramatic and defying at the same time, upon which the shape is set, devastated, powerless. The object denounces the blow. The metaphor has just taken place.