For Untitled Art Miami Beach 2025, Hidrante proposes Perro que muerde, no ladra, a two-person presentation featuring works by Mara Corsino and Culeybo. Through painting and photography, the artists in this presentation explore the genres of portrait and representational art, inviting us to a space of inclusivity and diversity that allows us to explore identities beyond the standard social spectrums. The pairing explores masculinity, our perceptions of aggression and violence, human-animal relationships, and the intersections of microcultures around beauty, pop culture, cars, and animal companionship.
Mara Corsino’s ongoing series, La vida en Las Piedras, focuses on the day-to-day life and culture of Las Piedras, a small town in eastern central Puerto Rico. Her portraiture subjects — human, animal, and machine — come together through a period of familiarization and friendly exchange, as she taps into the particular everyday life in a generous and dignified manner. Through her framing, Corsino ably elevates the local car clubs, horse riding groups, and kin relationships that underlie the networks that constitute community in Las Piedras.
Culeybo’s Perridientes: una vida sin temor al triunfo plays with the portraiture genre’s association with beauty and conformity. The series departs from a taken-to-the-extreme exploration of the 2010 “Doggie dentures” advertising campaign, published by TBWA in the United States and Puerto Rico for Dentastix and Pedigree. Juxtaposing oil on panel paintings of vicious-looking attack and lap dogs with carved bas-relief resin panels of laughing, perfectly toothed individuals or the emotional cues of emojis, Culeybo’s absurd canine portraits draw our attention to our contemporary anthropomorphism of perrihijos and the imposition of human beauty standards on them. Part of a larger, 32-piece series, Perridientes: una vida sin temor al triunfo also speaks to humans’ desire for individuality and ideal beauty, with each piece framed within a tooth-shaped frame, each perfectly white, covered in silver or gold, or bejeweled with gems.
Mara Corsino (b. 1979, San Juan, PR) is a self-taught photographer who lives and works in Brooklyn, NY. Born and raised in San Juan, Puerto Rico, she moved to Italy in the 2000s. Later, in Milan, she began to delve into photography in a nonlinear way. Instead of books and academia, she followed her curiosity and created her own language. In her sessions, she first focuses on her subjects’ physicality and then colors outside the lines, using their body language as a compass to guide each session. Palpable vulnerability translates into approachable beauty, synergising the relationship between photographer, model, and viewer. Corsino invites us to enter her vision as she shares it.
The work of Culeybo (Sebastián Gutiérrez; b. 1996, Gurabo, PR) focuses on the influence of identity on personal behavior and lust as a protagonist in public settings, operating within the matrix of our relationship between the public and private in both the individual and the material. His subjects primarily stem from personal development, as manifested in everyday interactions with strangers and the intersections between beauty, class, and appearance. Culeybo draws on diverse sources to create pieces that reveal contrasting ideas, learned through the intrinsic friction in his work and the layers that mediate our relationship between the covetable and the loathsome.