Notes about an Infamy Esthetic in the Work of Martha Pacheco

Abstract

These reflections are the result of a series of notes and intellectual curiosities araised from the contemplation of the work of the Mexican painter, deceased on November 1, 2021, Martha Pacheco, whose artistic production is mainly characterized by the representation of madness and death, through realistic paintings and etchings of bodies that no one claims, forgotten in the morgue or in the mental hospital, and faces marked by indigence, abandonment, or madness. The notion of infamy esthetic will be developed as a way of approaching the work of the Mexican artist, to explain the effects of representing dead bodies or faces with traces of madness, and the relationships between eroticism and death, between the sacred and the profane.