EDITORIAL

On the Art of Hyperbole

I’ve been thinking about hyperbole since January 21st, and I suspect it will stay on my mind for at least the next four years. The recent images and messages from Washington, D.C., are hyperbolic in the extreme, a spectacle designed not to expand perspectives but to obliterate them. This is not the hyperbole of art, which invites us to see reality from new angles; it is hyperbole as distortion, wielded to erase multiplicity, suppress voices, and impose a singular, manufactured truth.

Nothing I say here is new or shocking, except perhaps the very subject of hyperbole itself, which so often seeks to shock its audience into reflection. Though hyperbole is most commonly associated with language, with the written or spoken word, this issue of The Pasticheur temporarily departs from that tradition. February 2025 does not include poetry or fiction. Instead, it features visual artists whose works embody hyperbole in form, scale, and meaning.

Epistemologically, hyperbole serves to question the limits of representation and knowledge. It stretches language or, in this case, visual expression beyond the literal, confronting us with the tension between appearance and essence, subjective perception and objective reality. Consider Carol Adelman Kennedy, who, as she describes, pushes her materials beyond illusion to capture all her perceptions: light, moisture, space, unpredictable pleasure, and danger. Her surfaces function as both images and sculptural reliefs, embodying the physicality and movement of the creation. This fusion of process and product generates an almost immersive experience, challenging me to question what I am seeing and why I see it as I do.

Aesthetically, hyperbole disrupts the ordinary, making space for the sublime, the grotesque, and the uncanny. It compels audiences to grapple with complexity, ambiguity, and excess. In Steven Labadessa’s work, the force of hyperbole is immediate, yet the meaning remains uniquely personal to each observer. His art speaks to the universality of the human condition, an experience at once exaggerated and deeply intimate.

Ethically, hyperbole is a critique tool, exposing absurdities, injustices, and contradictions within societal systems. It amplifies extremes to provoke moral and emotional engagement. Eddie Rodolfo Aparicio’s sculpture La pan[z]a del público embodies this function. Modeled after the wood-fired ovens his father built in El Salvador, Aparicio’s piece is more than an object; it is a historical and political statement. His research traces how Central American immigrant communities have used food and art as survival mechanisms, selling their creations in public parks to fund resource centers, send money for medicine, or even finance ammunition during the Salvadoran Civil War. As part of his installation, Aparicio burned archival documents from the 1980s and 1990s inside the oven, transforming an act of erasure into an act of preservation. Here, hyperbole is not just a visual tool but a performative question that interrogates the ethics of war, poverty, and memory.

From a broader philosophical perspective, hyperbole is a rhetorical and conceptual strategy. It intentionally distorts reality to challenge assumptions and expose hidden truths. Luiyo Vázquez’s paintings and sketches embody this impulse. His landscapes, marked by disfiguration, demand that viewers engage with reality through disrupted forms and altered lines. His work unsettles our assumptions about shape and color, urging us to see the world anew.

Ultimately, the hyperbolic impulse that unites these artists is not one of excess for its own sake but of necessity. It is a deliberate stretching of perception to its limits, an effort to uncover something essential. In an era where spectacle is so often mistaken for substance, their work reminds us that exaggeration, wielded with intent, is not necessarily a distortion of reality but a revelation of its most profound truths.

Jorge R. G. Sagastume, Editor