In a 2022 studio photograph by Agustina Lamborizio, La Chola Poblete stands at a worktable strewn with small, multicolored silhouettes, a travel palette open like a compact of weather. 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‑like forms, cites Henri Matisse's late vocabulary, those sea‑sky bodies that float between figure and ornament. The image is more than a portrait; it is a thesis about drawing. Poblete's project joins the historical arc that runs from the early avant‑garde to the present-Matisse included, as the viewing room Gesture and Form underscores-yet it bends that arc through a decolonial, queer lens. The medium of choice is watercolor, and she wields its liquidity not as a decorative end but as a method.
Watercolor's reputation as a "light" or secondary medium-fit for travel studies and preparatory thought-has long mirrored entrenched hierarchies of material value. Obdurate oil and metal have traditionally signified seriousness; translucency and stain, the minor key. Poblete flips that script. In her hands, the bleed, bloom, and capillarity of pigment in water become structural, not incidental. The sheet does not illustrate the world; it models how the world-bodies, icons, memories-moves through contact and change.
To call this a queer method is to mark how the work refuses the closed contour as guarantor of identity. Queer theory has described selves as porous, made at the edges where touch and encounter happen. Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick's writing on affect attends to such permeability; José Esteban Muñoz names the ongoing practice of absorbing and reissuing dominant images "disidentification."[1][2] Poblete's wet‑into‑wet procedures enact those ideas materially. The image appears as a negotiation, not a verdict-a page where contours dissolve and regroup, where becoming is legible as a trace of time.
This temporal logic also unsettles the ideology of the white page. Modernism often cast paper's whiteness as a neutral ground, a universal stage. Poblete stains that claim. Her washes pool into bruised halos; the paper reads as skin-marked, tended, remembered-rather than void. The whiteness of the sheet is no longer an unmarked default; it becomes an active interval that choreographs how bodies come forward and recede. In this sense, drawing is not preparatory but constitutive: it drafts relations, not simply figures. (Sarah Lewis's work on visibility as a civic condition shadows this rethinking of the "ground.")[3]
Poblete's iconography-braids and lilies, sacred hearts and bread masks, potatoes and blades-has been widely read as a syncretic weave of Marian Catholicism and Andean cosmology. What changes when those motifs are made of water? A braid, rendered with saturations that separate and recombine along the paper's fibers, becomes a river system; a lily is not an outline but a damp pulse edging toward form; a potato stains like a pressed body. Water makes symbols leak. The neo‑baroque, as Severo Sarduy put it, is a theater of excess and metamorphosis; here, ornament is not trim but argument.[4]
The medium's affinity with bodily fluids is unavoidable-and generative. Tears, sweat, milk, and semen are not transgressive add‑ons in Poblete's universe; they are the grammar of inscription. Even when liquids aren't depicted, the surface looks as though it has wept and dried, registering evaporation as memory. Sedgwick's vocabulary of affect helps clarify why these sheets feel intimate before they are decoded: they present contact as knowledge.[5]
La Chola Poblete. Untitled, 2023. Watercolor and ink on paper. Image courtesy of Zeit Contemporary Art, New York.
The watercolor presented here from 2023 makes the case in microcosm. A left‑facing head coalesces in mauves and cool blues; disjointed arms drift like ribbons along the paper's capillaries; a floating hand hovers at the top edge; torsos smudge into weather. The palette toggles between confection and bruise, never merely cheerful nor abject. Much of it appears painted wet‑into‑wet, letting pigments negotiate outcomes beyond total authorial control. Those tidal marks where color settled as the sheet dried are clocks: they measure duration, not just design.
Crucially, the drawing's erotics come from adjacency rather than pose. Gendered cues flicker-hips, shoulders, mouths-yet none clinch into fixed identity. Desire is diffused across the sheet as potential contact. Muñoz's account of queer futurity as a horizon of the "then and there" is useful here: the watercolor stages desire not as an accomplished tableau but as a field of imminence, of what bodies might do when they meet.[5] The soft edge is not ambiguity for its own sake; it is a politics of possibility.
Poblete's wet morphologies also reframe the old suspicion of ornament. Historically coded as decorative (and therefore minor or feminized), ornament in these works is where thinking happens. Scalloped halos, floral veils, braided currents-these are not embellishments; they are the logic by which images make and unmake themselves. Camp, in Susan Sontag's sense, loves style while staging critique; Poblete's sheets are camp at its sharpest: extravagant, knowing, and politically armed.[6]
Placed within a century of innovation in drawing, her work clarifies how watercolor can carry world‑scale stakes. One can sketch a watery lineage-from Schiele's spare, stained bodies and Klee's pedagogies of color to O'Keeffe's desert washes and Frankenthaler's soak‑stain procedures that collapsed drawing and painting into one act. More proximate are Marlene Dumas's alchemical portraits, Firelei Báez's aqueous cosmologies, and Wangechi Mutu's hybrid anatomies that seep into the paper. Poblete belongs to this trajectory yet refocuses it: the medium is not only a vehicle for interiority; it is a technology for remapping colonial and gendered iconographies.[7][8]
The allusion to Matisse-implicit in Poblete's studio shirt and explicit in the broader genealogy-is more than stylistic. The gouaches découpées were themselves a water‑based practice in which color was cut and recomposed, a kind of scissor‑drawing that let bodies float free of contour into sea and sky. In the Gesture and Form presentation of drawings, a Matisse work of leaves helps anchor this throughline: from botanical silhouette to the vegetal and oceanic bodies that populate Poblete's sheets. The connection is not influence chasing; it is a shared commitment to liquidity as structure.
Installation image of the exhibition La Chola Poblete: Guaymallén at PalaisPopulaire, Berlin, Germany, 2023.
Scale completes the argument. When Poblete clusters large sheets into installations, drawing becomes environment. Viewers don't stand before a single image; they enter a weather system of stains and veils. MoMA's history of tracing drawing's expansion into space-from wall drawings to choreographic notation-provides a framework for reading these environments. Poblete updates that story by binding scale to liturgy: the rooms feel like paper chapels, where the sacred and profane mingle in damp air.[7]
Even as performance and photography remain vital in her practice, watercolor acts as the hinge that lets images travel. Motifs born in performance-bread masks, ritual gestures-return to the page as liquid emblems; drawings, in turn, script future actions. Conceptual art taught us to see instructions and scores as artworks; Poblete folds that lesson into the body, so that the page is both notation and sweat.[9][10]
For readers encountering this essay independent of any single exhibition, the wager is clear: watercolor-long relegated to the margins-has become one of the most intellectually charged sites for contemporary drawing. Poblete shows why. Gesture here is not bravura stroke; it is the calibrated release that lets water decide. Form is not a noun; it is an event-capillary, relational, time‑stamped.
As an independent contribution to the discourse and in dialogue with the project Gesture and Form, this essay argues that Poblete advances a materially grounded, conceptually rigorous, queer poetics of drawing. She does not rehabilitate watercolor's reputation; she weaponizes it. The stains do not only depict bodies-they model how bodies and beliefs permeate one another, how images become sites of contact rather than containment.
Ultimately, calling watercolor a queer method is less metaphor than description. The physics of the medium-porosity, wicking, evaporation-stage a politics of relation that refuses rigid borders and fixed identities. In Poblete's hands, those physics become a theology of the mixed and the minor: a practice that makes room for tears without apology, for ornament as intelligence, for bodies allowed to bloom and blur. We feel these drawings before we read them because they operate where feeling lives-at the edge of the skin, in the place where color seeps in.
NOTES
[1] Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Touching Feeling: Affect, Pedagogy, Performativity (Durham: Duke University Press, 2003).
[2] José Esteban Muñoz, Disidentifications: Queers of Color and the Performance of Politics (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999).
[3] Sarah Lewis, ed., "Vision & Justice," Aperture, no. 223 (Summer 2016).
[4] Severo Sarduy, "Baroque," in "The Baroque and the Neobaroque," trans. Suzanne Jill Levine, Yale French Studies, no. 41 (1968): 190-216.
[5] José Esteban Muñoz, Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity (New York: New York University Press, 2009).
[6] Susan Sontag, "Notes on 'Camp'," in Against Interpretation and Other Essays (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1966), 275-292.
[7] Connie Butler and Catherine de Zegher, On Line: Drawing Through the Twentieth Century (New York: The Museum of Modern Art, 2010).
[8] Laura Hoptman, Drawing Now: Eight Propositions (New York: The Museum of Modern Art, 2002).
[9] Benjamin H. D. Buchloh, "Conceptual Art 1962-1969: From the Aesthetic of Administration to the Critique of Institutions," October 55 (Winter 1990): 105-143.
[10] Sol LeWitt, "Paragraphs on Conceptual Art," Artforum 5, no. 10 (June 1967): 79-83.
