Untitled I, this photograph opens Sierra's body painting series, establishing his methodology of honoring Afro-Colombian and pre-Columbian cultures through painted performance documented in erotic and suggestive positions. This genesis work sets crucial parameters: cultural tribute will not be performed through respectability or ethnographic distance but through embodied engagement, queer desire, and homoerotic self-representation. Sierra's painted body becomes living canvas where Caribbean Colombia's dual African and Indigenous heritage—often separated in official narratives—coexist in unified aesthetic. The erotic positioning refuses the desexualization that museums and anthropology impose on colonized cultures, insisting instead that bodies, pleasure, and desire have always been part of cultural expression. By documenting these performances photographically, Sierra creates archives where queer Colombian bodies claim ancestral heritage without asking permission or adopting imposed "authenticity."
Body Paint tribute to the Afro and pre-Columbian cultures, taking erotic and suggestive poses such as reading among others.
Painted cultural tribute performance—Afro-Colombian and pre-Columbian heritage claimed through erotic body painting and homoerotic self-representation. Available at The Art Design Project, Miami Beach.
Erotic Self-Representation Art - Untitled I by Jose Sierra
Untitled I, 2016
From the Sin Título Series
Archival Pigment Print
Limited Edition
Unframed
Semi-Matte
Jose Sierra (b. 1991 in Cartagena de Indias, Colombia) obtained his Master in Fine Arts from the University Institute of Fine Arts and Science of Bolivar (UNIBAC) in 2012 with a body of work titled Anti-Personnel Grids, which has since exhibited in different locales of Colombia. Shortly after, he was commissioned by the Colombian Ministry of Culture alongside the artist collective Si Nos Pagan Boys to participate in an urban art exposition titled, La Muerte Se Va de Vacaciones (Death is Going on Vacation) that was executed as a reaction to the traditionalism of Cartagena. In 2014, he exhibited at the Museum of Contemporary Art of Cartagena and in La Presentacion Casa Museo Arte y Cultura. He then exhibited in the Cultural Center Ciudad Movil in 2016 with a body of work created in collaboration with the Colombian photographer, Camo. In the same year, he was nominated for the International Luxembourg Art Prize for his recent work Self-Portrait. Sierra’s ongoing body of work continues to be based around his self-representation from which he addresses a homoerotic gaze through the configuration of abject staged environments that he merges himself within as “a subject of aesthetic creation.”
