In Punch, Pupa Neumann turns the domestic sphere into an arena where choreography replaces dialogue and intimacy becomes a kind of sparring. The ring is suggested everywhere. It hides in the wood paneling, in the floral wallpaper, in the disciplined posture of the figures. The gloves are oversized, almost theatrical, yet the tension they signal is unmistakably real.

Each photograph frames a couple suspended in a moment of poised confrontation. The mid-century styling creates a sheen of familiarity, but the scenes are too distilled, too deliberate, to be nostalgic. These are tableaux of repetition, where gender performs itself through costume and stance. The body becomes script, and the script is brittle.

Neumann borrows the language of boxing to expose what often remains unspoken in relationships: the rituals of control, the negotiations of power, the quiet hostilities that shape domestic life. Her figures do not strike. They pose at the edge of impact. That hesitation is the argument. The fight is not physical. It is symbolic. It is the pressure to fit a role that never fully fits.

There is humor, but it carries a nervous undertone. The perfect pleats, the polished shoes, the immaculate hairdos, all heighten the absurdity of the roles the figures inhabit. The femininity and masculinity on display here feel like uniforms worn to exhaustion. The gloves amplify the performance. They make visible the weight of expectation.

Yet these images are not fatalistic. Something subversive is happening beneath the stillness. Each pair resists the script by exaggerating it. The posed bodies become mirrors that distort rather than reflect. The domestic stage becomes a site of refusal, a place where the gap between appearance and inner truth can no longer be concealed.

Punch is not about conflict between people. It is about the architecture of performance that surrounds them. It asks what happens when the roles we inherit no longer hold. When the gestures of affection resemble the gestures of combat. When the home becomes a ring where no blow is struck, yet everything trembles with the possibility.

Jorge R. G. Sagastume