Marcelo Carlos Marino: The notions of Orientalism and Exoticism in 19th century Latin American Painting

Mobility and Style. The notions of Orientalism and Exoticism in 19^th century Latin American Painting

This project tries to approach the ideas of orientalism and exoticism applied to the tradition of painting of captive women in the Pampas produced by traveling painters such as Johann Mauritz Rugendas and Raymond Monvoisin and considers their projections in the works of some painters in the last quarter of the nineteenth century. Special attention is given to the writing of the history of art and the ways in which these categories were used to classify and analyze images. The project explores the tension between the ideas of the picturesque and the “costumbrista” image (both categories profusely applied to the classification and analysis of images by the Latin American art historians) and those of exoticism and orientalism from an European tradition of art history. What do we mean when we qualify an image produced in Latin America during the nineteenth century as orientalist or exotic? What are the effects of the mobility of these concepts, for instance between an image made by an European artist and one made by a local artist both working in Latin America? Are some of these images perceived as orientalist by European art historians when produced in a context different from the European?

Marcelo Carlos Marino graduated in History of Art from the National University of Cuyo (Mendoza, Argentina). He is a former scholarship holder and researcher at the CONICET (National Council for Scientific Research) and a PhD candidate at the University of Buenos Aires under the supervision of Dr. Laura Malosetti Costa. He was a teacher and lecturer of Art History, Visual Culture and Art Theories working at numerous universities in Argentina. He was also a lecturer at the National Fine Arts Museum of Buenos Aires. He was co-curator of three major exhibitions at the Museum of Hispanic American Art in Buenos Aires. His academic publications focus on the representation of appearance in the visual culture of the nineteenth and twentieth century, the relations between body, politics and orientalism. He is a member of two major research groups on art theories in Argentina. He is a member of the Centro Argentino de Investigadores de Arte-CAIA. Currently he lives and works in Bristol (England) as an independent researcher and cataloguer at the Theatre Collection of the University of Bristol.