El espanto, the title of El Pelele’s latest exhibition, can be translated as ‘terror’ in English. In Spanish, the word ‘espanto’ also refers to a state of mind, an untimely and sudden reaction that is close to disgust. It is this emotional state that El Pelele wants to generate and sustain with his work.

Fittingly, El Pelele inaugurated his exhibition with a performance in the raucous streets of La Boca, a dockyard neighborhood in Buenos Aires which is walking distance from his gallery exhibition. Riding in the open trunk of a funeral car and greeted by flashing lights and blaring sirens in the background, the artist arrived dressed in a synthetic crimson body-con suit with exaggerated shoulder pads that looked like horns. He further accessorized this devilish ensemble with a whip, high heels, and a matching pointy red hat which framed a monstrously misshapen and pale anthropomorphic mask dotted with bulging blue eyes. Following him around submissively were two nearly naked performers in blood-red face masks and thongs who he periodically teased.

El Pelele introduced himself to the curious and rapt spectators in Spanish as “the high-voltage goddess, the marvel machine!” He made his way through the crowd, wrenching his body and showing off the tumescent phallus that was attached to the suit. He repeated in different registers of voice, at times clamoring like a clown on a loudhailer and at others whispering like a demon: “Beware, beware… (…) Beware of believing… that we are two! (…) Make way, make way!” With this cryptic refrain, El Pelele sought to embrace the ambiguous duality of embodiment.

El Pelele’s character in the performance resembled the Horned God, a monstrous male deity with a giant phallus who was revered by the Iron-Age Celts in one of the earliest documented instances of a homosexual cult. This deity – a lord of the dead, the underworld, and darkness – was worshiped with a ritual of promiscuity in which all participants (regardless of gender) wore clothing designed for women and subverted social values such as heterosexual monogamy, leading the Inquisition to condemn it for being a “non-Christian fantasy.”

Ostensibly haunted by the Horned God and reenacting his bacchanalian orgies in his risqué performance, El Pelele unfolds moods of the present that find their place in his exhibition, a spectral stage devoted to the dark and dense entertainment of reality. To that end, his work referenced the figure of the jester or the puppet to accentuate a spirit of sexual subversion and break away from rules and normality. On the walls of Galería Sendrós, El Pelele displayed relief sculptures crafted from dark latticed wood that depicted scenes from the traditional Argentine circus, shabby harbor taverns, puppet theaters, and clandestine performances in basements or squats, annotating an otherwise pristine white cube with inchoate corporeal entities that do not cohere with reductive bodily expectations. Beneath the exhibition title, also thinly carved in black latticed wood, the artist displayed a book that documented the performance script and staged images.

In recent years, there has been a renewed interest in figures such as the jester, the clown, puppets, and shadow theater in the Argentinian visual art scene, especially in performance. In the 1980s, the performativity of the clown inspired a post-dictatorship generation of artists who were devoted to exploring new forms of subjectivity. In the present day, artists retrieve this tradition of popular art to tell weird, displaced, or forbidden stories. El Pelele can be thought of as part of this revival of the underground, improvised performances of the 1980s. This multi-generational reaction to the hegemonic tradition of performance and its normativity can be better understood as “deformance,” a concept of trans performance proposed by the travesti artist and poet Naty Menstrual to describe her own work. Deformance, for Menstrual, is a state of bodily indefiniteness, one in which body parts, boundaries, meanings, and repertoires are blurred, and monstrous, unpleasant, and intolerable embodiments and emotions are suspended in limbo. Likewise, with his performance as a frightening clown, El Pelele muddles the boundaries between ridicule and deformity to deliver the tenderness and decadence of worlds that were born wanting to disappear.