The work of Raúl Avellaneda (Lima, 1960) has remained largely hidden from critical art history and memory in recent decades, despite his crucial position in contemporary Peruvian and Latin American art. A sensitivity to and rejection of his immediate parental environment, later extending to that of a privileged class that falsely perceived itself as dominant, in which that environment is located, early on awakened an attitude that has allowed him, even today, the privilege of inhabiting the margins as the epicenters of his artistic projects.

His life and creative journey, both individual and collective, has allowed him to integrate, develop extreme affinity, and even completely coexist with almost all the social exclusions that, contrary to the most respected ways of thinking or acting, we can initially imagine. From a proximity to ideas of political insurrection and visual insubordination linked to his own homosexuality, to psychic-mental forms that rise as a banner of some radical disagreements with reality, the artist uniquely explores alternative modes of coexistence far from the elites who have promoted contempt for other sectors as a method to sustain their exploitation under the currently unacceptable orders and precepts imposed by hypocritical religious devotions, moral prejudices, or military authoritarianism.

This selection of representative series from his work speaks to us in different ways of the fragility or vulnerability with which Avellaneda perceives, in shamelessness or opulence, a proximity to decay. It is an almost organic confrontation with impulses, desires, and equally gloomy worlds, from which he constructs, with a disturbing and always lucid imagination, a visual proposal that springs from reality and returns us to it, even when presented in a much more believable way than the previous one.

(Emilio Tarazona. Curatorship and texts)