In a new exhibition, artist Sonia Cunliffe cuts out portraits of the master Teodoro Bullón to multiply the “Country of Jauja”

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From a button to a bicycle: there was everything in Don Teodoro Bullón’s bazaar. A century ago, the businessman was popular in the then cosmopolitan city of Jauja both for organizing target shooting or cycling championships, for taking the first car to its cobbled streets or donating the land to build the airport. Today, this man linked to the modernity of his time is remembered for his vocation as a photographer, a profession with which, curiously, he never identified himself. For him it was just one of the many services offered by his bazaar located in front of the Plaza de Armas.

For years, the visual artist Sonia Cunliffe not only investigated Bullón’s photographic production, but also the main disseminator of his work, of which she has an important collection of glass plates. And it is from the digitized reproductions of these plates that she presents the exhibition “All Names” by Bullón [y los tiempos indelebles de Cunliffe], in which the artist intervenes and cuts current copies (certainly not ‘vintage’ material) of the old master and adds them manually with backgrounds, skies, ceilings and gates portrayed by her, juxtaposing registers, weaving images in the manner of “patchwork” and putting together curious altarpieces that remind us of stories whose illustrations emerge with the “pop up” technique. “Today digital is very much in vogue, but I like to get away from it and use the manual. I prefer the feeling of contact with the material, putting the composition together, achieving three-dimensionality,” she explains.

Cunliffe recycles the laboratory tests carried out for the exhibition dedicated to Teodoro Bullón that he presented in June 2017. Each of the 300 cropped photos seems to be a fragment of the profuse representation of the Andean world that the Jaujino merchant knew how to do. “Just as Bullón portrayed people in his studio dressed in their typical attire, posing in front of curious European backgrounds, he also portrayed the same clients, in the same place, with westernized clothes, the men with their ties and city hats, the women with the llicllas and their blankets. He is registering both worlds, like an anthropological study of what Jauja was like a century ago”.

The artist cuts out each group of characters and builds and multiplies the presence of these anonymous characters, attentive to the dialogue that occurs between them, subtly suggesting the forms of the altarpiece or the Sarhua panel, a wink from a contemporary artist who is inspired by regional traditions. And as if she opened her game, each Cunliffe work has a magnifying glass next to it that allows the viewer to stop at each face, whose name, unfortunately, has not reached us. “For me this is a two-person show, a collaboration between Bullón and me, playing with the times”, adds the artist.

More information

Place: Inca Garcilaso Cultural Center of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Jr. Ucayali 391, Lima. Date and time: Thursday, June 9, 12 noon. Hours: Tuesday to Friday, from 10 am to 8 pm; Saturdays and Sundays: until 6 pm. Admission: free.