Cavalcade

At the start of his career in the late nineteen-fifties, Juan Carlos Distéfano, like many artists of the time, was reworking figuration. As a graphic designer, he was active at the Instituto Di Tella in the nineteen-sixties. "Cabalgata", a work from that crucial period in Argentine art history, marks the artist’s passage from painting to sculpture. The work’s three-dimensional components are made of polyester, a material central to pop art. The painting shows a group of pigs— one of them mounted by a monochrome headless human figure—running rampant on a plane of vibrant shades of orange and pink. In the upper lefthand corner are a Citroën car and a humble house of the sort found on the outskirts of the city, both of them upside down. That iconography is rooted in Distéfano’s own life: His family owned a grocery store and farm in the town of Tapiales. “My parents butchered pigs—an unpleasant ritual that, as a child, I would participate in. I think that is where the image comes from. It is a sort of tribute to those sacrificed little pigs that, in this image, seem to fly away,” the artist explains.