Watercolor as Queer Method

In a 2022 studio photograph by Agustina Lamborizio, La Chola Poblete stands at a worktable strewn with small multicolored silhouettes, a travel palette open beside her. Behind her, a large sheet on the wall blooms with aqueous anatomies, limbs and profiles that seem to have been poured as much as drawn. Her shirt, patterned with sinuous cut-out forms, echoes Matisse’s late vocabulary, those sea-sky bodies floating between figure and ornament. The photograph reads as a thesis about drawing, and this essay takes it as one: for Poblete, watercolor’s liquidity is a method, and a queer one.

Some biography first, because the work insists on it. La Chola Poblete was born in 1989 in Guaymallén, a working-class municipality of Mendoza in the Andean west of Argentina, to a family of Bolivian heritage. She trained in visual arts and art education at the National University of Cuyo, moved to Buenos Aires in 2017, where she completed the Universidad Torcuato Di Tella’s artists’ program the following year, and came to her adopted name deliberately: “chola” is a term long used to demean Indigenous and mestiza Andean women, and she wears it as a reclamation. She is trans, and her practice, which spans performance, photography, sculpture, and above all works on paper, has made that position analytical rather than merely declared. Her 2022 survey at the Museo de Arte Moderno de Buenos Aires was titled Ejercicios del llanto, Exercises in Weeping, which tells you how early the liquid entered her thinking.[1] In 2023 Deutsche Bank named her Artist of the Year, occasioning the exhibition Guaymallén at the PalaisPopulaire in Berlin. The title is her hometown, her tribute to origin as material.[2] A year later, at the 60th Venice Biennale, the jury of Foreigners Everywhere gave her a special mention, the first to a queer artist, praising her “critical play with histories of colonial representation” from a trans Indigenous perspective.[3]

Watercolor’s reputation as a light or secondary medium, fit for travel studies and preparatory thought, has long mirrored entrenched hierarchies of material value. Oil and bronze signified seriousness; translucency and stain, the minor key. Poblete inverts the hierarchy from inside it. In her hands the bleed and capillarity of pigment in water become structural: the sheet does not illustrate bodies so much as model how bodies, icons, and memories move through contact and change.

Calling this a queer method means something specific. José Esteban Muñoz used the term “disidentification” for the practice by which queer artists of color neither assimilate to dominant images nor simply reject them, but inhabit and rework them from within.[4] Poblete’s Virgenes Cholas, the series of two-meter sheets in watercolor, acrylic, and ink shown in the Arsenale at Venice, are disidentification in exactly this sense.[5] The Virgin’s silhouette is kept; her whiteness, her fixity, and her monopoly on the sacred are not. Braids, lilies, sacred hearts, and bread masks migrate between Marian devotion and Andean cosmology, and the wet medium is what lets them migrate: pigment released into water cannot hold a border. Where Muñoz described a cultural procedure, Poblete gives it a physics.

The same logic unsettles the ideology of the white page. Modernism cast paper’s whiteness as neutral ground, a universal stage. Poblete stains that claim. Her washes pool into bruised halos; the paper reads as skin that has been marked, tended, remembered. Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s work on affect and touch is useful here, because it explains why these sheets feel intimate before they are decoded: they present contact itself as a form of knowledge.[6] Even where no fluid is depicted, the surface looks as though it has wept and dried. Evaporation becomes a kind of memory.

Her neo-baroque inheritance deserves more than a name-check. Severo Sarduy, the Cuban writer and theorist, defined the neobaroque as an art of proliferation and displacement, a Latin American strategy in which excess dethrones the colonial original rather than decorating it.[7] Sarduy’s baroque is an ellipse with two centers, never the single center of classical order, and Poblete’s sheets are elliptical in precisely his sense: Marian and Andean, devotional and profane, each motif orbiting two suns at once. Ornament, in this tradition, is where the argument happens. Her scalloped halos and braided currents are the logic by which images make and unmake themselves.

The 2023 watercolor presented here, a sheet of 76 by 56 centimeters that traveled with Guaymallén to Berlin and Milan, makes the case in microcosm. A left-facing head coalesces in mauves and cool blues, and its eye is not painted at all. It is reserved, bare paper doing the seeing, the white ground pressed into service as an organ. Above it a single hand is rendered with naturalistic care while every body beneath it dissolves, so the dissolution reads as choice rather than accident. At the left edge a standing figure trails into red where a foot should be; at the right a curled body drifts, its hair unraveling into filaments. The palette toggles between confection and bruise, never merely cheerful nor abject. Much of it is painted wet-into-wet, letting pigments negotiate outcomes beyond full authorial control, and the tidal marks where color settled as the sheet dried are clocks: they measure duration, not just design. The drawing’s erotics come from adjacency rather than pose. Gendered cues flicker — hips, shoulders, mouths — without clinching into fixed identity. Muñoz’s later account of queer futurity, the “then and there” that exceeds the present’s arrangements, describes the effect: desire staged as a field of imminence, of what bodies might do when they meet.[8]

A note on camp, since the extravagance invites the word. Susan Sontag famously described camp as a sensibility of style over content, and insisted it was apolitical.[9] Poblete’s work is better served by the queer theorists who wrote against that claim, chief among them Moe Meyer, for whom camp is a survival strategy and a critique performed in drag.[10] Her bread masks and pop-devotional excess are camp of this second kind: extravagant, knowing, and aimed. The humor the Venice jury noted is not relief from the politics. It is the politics, delivered smiling.

Poblete works within a lineage of artists who made water carry weight, and the useful comparisons are close ones. Helen Frankenthaler’s soak-stain collapsed drawing and painting into a single absorptive act, but her stain aspired to opticality, color freed from body; Poblete’s stain runs the other way, back toward skin, sweat, and wound. Marlene Dumas is nearer, treating wet media as moral exposure of the figure, yet her subjects arrive through the mediated photograph, while Poblete’s arrive through liturgy and self-performance. Firelei Báez, whose aqueous figures also rework colonial iconography from a Caribbean position, is perhaps the closest contemporary; the difference is Poblete’s Andean archive and her insistence on the trans body as the site where that archive is rewritten.

The Matisse allusion in the studio photograph is more than costume. The gouaches découpées were themselves a water-based practice, color cut and recomposed until bodies floated free of contour into sea and sky. That inheritance surfaces in the vegetal, oceanic bodies that populate Poblete’s pages, a shared commitment across a century to liquidity as structure.

Scale completes the argument. When Poblete clusters large sheets into installations, as in Berlin and Venice (fig. 3), drawing becomes environment; the viewer enters something like a paper chapel, where sacred and profane hang in the same humidity. The Museum of Modern Art’s genealogies of expanded drawing, from wall drawing to notation and score, provide one framework for these rooms,[11] and Sol LeWitt’s dictum that the idea can be the machine that makes the art provides another,[12] since Poblete’s pages often function as both residue and instruction. Motifs born in performance return to paper as liquid emblems; drawings, in turn, script future actions. But her most instructive statement cuts against any redemptive reading of this circuit. The conversation that opens the Guaymallén catalogue is titled with her own words: “I don’t believe in healing.”[13] The stain, for Poblete, is not a wound on its way to closure. It is a record that refuses to dry into resolution.

That refusal is the deepest sense in which her watercolor is queer method rather than queer metaphor. The physics of the medium (porosity, wicking, evaporation) enact a politics of relation that will not honor rigid borders, and she has bound those physics to a specific history: the Andean woman slurred as chola, the Virgin who was made to police her, the trans body that now paints them into the same water. On the sheet from 2023, the standing figure at the left edge ends in red, pigment pooling past the body’s border and refusing to close. It dried where it wanted to. That, in miniature, is the work.