Juvenilia by Vicente Cayuela

Issue 160

Juvenilia is a series of still lifes inspired by developmental trauma and romanticized notions of coming of age. Working at the intersections of collage, alternative photographic processes, set design, sculpture, and installation, I explore how photographs can be constructed to serve as a pathway to the regeneration of identity. Each photograph is a combination of graphic overload and visual bait, revealing narrative compositions that lie between the comic and the melancholic, the public and the autobiographical, youth and something vaguely defined as "maturity." By echoing the aesthetics of advertising and crowd-sourcing discarded artifacts from childhood, I seek to create modern allegories of youth, generational identifiers, and shrines of personal catharsis. By representing adolescence as synonymous with survival, these photographs embody the mechanisms I developed to fit into mainstream society, and later discarded in search of inner freedom and individuality. 


Beyond camp and sentimentality, Juvenilia portrays the fleeting but pivotal moments of early character formation that, however quickly they may pass, leave lasting marks on our developing psyche.

Vicente Cayuela (he/him) lives and works in Catskills, New York, United States, and Santiago de Chile
vicentecayuela.com | @vicente.cayuela.art