Violence in the act: three tales of Bernardo Couto Castillo

Abstract

http://dx.doi.org/10.5007/2175-7992.2016v23n1p45

When we speak about the eroticism inside the Latin-American Modernism, the common image is the one of the lovers in a loving contortion; maybe the reader could even imagine paintings or sculptures where the feminine bodies are the erotic and aesthetic center of the play. Nevertheless, in the Decadent Modernism of Couto Castillo the eroticism is diferent, because he searches for the limit aesthetic experience. Therefore, the violence transforms itself in the detonator of this experience. The images of Bernardo Couto are full of dichotomies that fuse themselves in the creative act of art: light-shadow, beauty-ugliness, life-death.