Gustavo Marrone (Buenos Aires, 1962) is an Argentine visual artist whose work is characterized by graphic and painterly fluidity, integrating image and text to explore identity, politics, and sexuality through a critical lens—simultaneously vulnerable and incisive. Trained in Pablo Suárez’s workshop in the 1980s, he further developed his aesthetic thinking during his more than twenty-year residency in Barcelona, where he attended seminars led by philosopher Nelly Schnaith. In addition to an extensive exhibition history, throughout 2024, the Amalita Fortabat Collection in Buenos Aires dedicated three anthological exhibitions to his work, curated by Roberto Amigo and Nicolás Cuello.

This exhibition features works created between 1988 and 2024, organized around the theme of “the self and the double.” From his earliest works, Marrone has shaped the expression of a dissident subjectivity, with self-referentiality occupying a central role. The image of the double appears repeatedly, particularly in his 1990s paintings. The founders of psychoanalysis spoke of the double in reference to the uncanny, the repressed, and identity—a sense of strangeness that permeates the atmosphere of these works. Marrone’s production sustains a persistent tension in which the body, particularly the queer body, serves as both axis and surface for symbolic inscription. His work navigates transitional spaces, questioning the limits of categories, dismantling binaries, and exploring identity as a relational experience.

Today, the international art world embraces and celebrates the self-representation of identity minorities, South American queer voices. Yet as early as the 1990s, Gustavo Marrone boldly and unabashedly asserted the complexities of his identitarian position, as seen in his 1999 *Untitled* work—created during his time in Barcelona—a self-portrait that incorporates the disqualifying gaze of a European “other” and transforms it into pride.

In some of his works, he employs a vibrant color palette that dialogues with incisive phrases. This interplay—between visually joyful elements and discursively sharp commentary—subverts normative ethics and creates a field of tension where discomfort also seduces. His playful ceramic series pays homage to Argentine oral culture: *mate*, fluid speech, sometimes charming, sometimes excessive.

The journey proposed by this exhibition unfolds a sensibility shaped by the political dimension of intimacy. A poetic force, modulated by the counterpoint of his artistic practice, suggests a game between the observing body and the observed. Marrone finds a discursive unity where fragility, irony, and eroticism intertwine as possible affirmations of desire. The inventive power of his work devours fragmentation and embraces multiplicity as both form and narrative. *The Self and the Double* invites reflection on how this tension with otherness is constructed—a continuous process that asserts its own symbolic potency and unfolds an imaginary where the self is never alone, but always shaped by mutation, desire, and reflection.