Museo Moderno
Cucurto Washington

Washington Cucurto is a writer, editor and visual artist. He was born in Buenos Aires in 1973. During the 90s he wrote a series of books of poetry and fiction that made him a reference for his generation. It was translated into English, French and other languages such as Chinese and Finnish. In 2003 he founded, together with Javier Barilaro, the Eloisa Cartonera publishing project, which consists of the manufacture of artisanal and popular books using cardboard from the streets. Currently, Eloisa Cartonera is directed by María Gomez and Alejandro Miranda Araya. In 2012, the publisher received the Prince Clauss Award, awarded by Queen Beatrix. Among the books that Cucurto published are The Paraguayan Machine and Black Thing. The Adventures of Mr. Corn (2005) generated many controversies, as did The Curandero of Love, two of this author’s best-known books. World personalities such as Beatriz Sarlo, Toni Negri, Ricardo Piglia and Cecilia Palmeiro wrote about his work. He is the inventor of crazy realism and cumbielas (a genre of short narrative that has the peculiarity that the stories take place in the dancers of the Constitución neighborhood). Almost everything that Cucurto paints is related to literature, authors, book scenes, facial and spiritual portraits, phrases that appear in novels by outsider authors such as Zelarayán or Leónidas Lamborghini, Cucurto’s greatest idols. (Perlongher, Reinaldo Arenas and Glauco Mattoso are also central authors and of great influence in Cucurtian art). His best-known technique is collage or painting on papers of different origins, although he also has large drawings made on canvas. This strange and multifaceted author makes some very strange, short comics that he makes with papers that he cuts out of magazines and newspapers. He also, using this same cut and paste technique, writes some visual poems that he calls “graphic poetry.” As a plastic artist Cucurto held a couple of private exhibitions of his visual poems, his comics and his paintings clumsily made on old papers found in the street. Pedro Marial wrote a text about Cucurto’s beginnings in painting. Cucurto exhibited his visual poems in 2015 at the Jungla gallery, an exhibition curated by his friend Facundo Sotolongo. Then he held another exhibition in the apartment of a room belonging to his friend Martin LLambi, in 2018. The exhibition was called Desire and Tenderness. It lasted a year and was visited by 35 people. In 2019 he spoke at the adept of a friend, Ana Ponce, who was in charge of the organization and curatorship. It lasted 20 days and had hundreds of visits. Further back in time, Cucurto exhibited in 2015 at the Castagnino Museum, located in Spain and Rio in the city of Rosario. Cucurto received the scholarship from the Akademie Schools Solitude, Stuttgart in 2005. For this he lived for a year and a half in Stuttgart. Upon his return, at the end of 2006, he dedicated himself to sports journalism with excellent reception. In fact, in other Latin American countries, Cucurto is better known as a sports reporter than as a writer. “But how? Does the businessman Cucurto write poetry?” Fans from Central America and other regions of Latin America where our artist’s columns are read with great attention are often surprised. He was a star reporter for the website Espndeportes.com for 10 years.