The origin of this piece is found in the "Two generations" contest recently held by the Peruvian-British Cultural Association. The presented work sought to explore the modular and playful possibilities of structures for drawings, a proposal previously worked on in the exhibition "AnIMaL: 7 districts" (2014). Drawings of different formats are grouped in these structures.

In these drawings, as well as in previous pieces that used other media (digital collage, oil, and paintbrush software), we sought to comment on the city of Lima from an aesthetic that appropriated the compositional resources present in the Paracas cloaks, a line developed since 2002 and that constituted my art degree thesis presented in 80m2.

With the intention of achieving greater precision in these comments, an attempt was made to determine a particular building or an outstanding and differential process of each elaborated district. In this case, the government palace was selected from among the historical monuments of the Cercado de Lima. This selection responded to the intention of graphing a comment anchored to a building that in turn would allow pointing out the state of misrule that the author identifies in the streets and public spaces of the capital when walking, using and living them. It is a comment that is intended to be critical and ironic.

To elaborate the piece, sources were consulted that informed the author about the building, revealing the modernity of this representative construction, present in the collective imagination of many inhabitants of this city and perhaps also of other localities in Peru.

In the upper rotating landscape drawing, both the government palace prior to 1935-1938 and the current one were represented, and an attempt was made to combine the architectural elements with allusions to the animal, such as fangs and snakes. This interest in incorporating to the drawings -with an urban theme and a symmetrical composition allusive to the syntax of the Paracas mantles- blooms of the subconscious, responds to the desire to incorporate spontaneous graphic and textual expressions into an ¿artistic? structured. Another enunciation of this desire is manifested in the unreasoned words and phrases with which the wooden surface of this and previous mobile structures was covered.

Sequential representations of the entire building, constructive and ornamental elements of this construction, as well as the figures of the snake and the turkey vulture, were drawn in the central desk piece.

In the drawing of the lower mobile “inverted table” there are fragments of the government palace and in the center a snout with large fangs. In all cases, the animal figures seek to allude to contextual characteristics such as violence, cunning, abuse of the strongest, mutual advantage, corruption, degradation and servility.

The piece has a diptych that is made up of the mobile doors on the sides of the structure, and four more pieces were made, two of them are in a folding drawer and the others have also been placed on the sides so that their drawings can be seen by both veneers. Visitors who wish to do so are invited to make textual and/or graphic comments about the government palace and the performance of the authorities in relation to the political, social and economic situation that we are developing together as a community.

Gustavo Eme

Acknowledgements: A special thanks to José Esquiche and Family for their invaluable support.