EARLY INFLUENCES AND FORMATIVE PATH
The artist Perdita Lujuria, the stage name of May Novo, was born in 1978 in Gijón, Spain. Her trajectory did not begin directly in the visual arts but was built from a set of experiences spanning different cultural and professional contexts. From a young age, she demonstrated an interest in dark fantasy and horror literature, not only as a reader but also as a producer of images, drawing covers for the works she consumed. This early contact with fictional universes marked by the presence of the unusual, the monstrous, and the unknown constitutes a formative element of her artistic practice.
While still at an age considered early, she had contact with erotic comics published by the Spanish publisher El Cuervo, an experience that introduced another axis into her visual training: eroticism as a graphic language. To this repertoire was added an interest in 1980s horror cinema, whose visual solutions and special effects began to integrate into her imaginary. Although at a certain point she considered dedicating herself professionally to the creation of special effects, her trajectory followed other paths, initially moving away from the arts. During this period, she lived and worked in countries such as Ireland, the Netherlands, and Germany, in activities not directly related to art.
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GEOGRAPHICAL DISPLACEMENT AND ARTISTIC CONSOLIDATION
This geographical and professional displacement did not interrupt the formation of her imagery repertoire. On the contrary, it expanded the set of references that began to cross into her future production. It was only in 2018 that May Novo began to dedicate herself systematically to drawing, establishing a daily practice that consistently articulates elements of eroticism and horror. In the following year, she returned to Spain and, after a period in Madrid trying to make a living from her artistic production, decided to return to her hometown. This was when she began the process of creating her book Tristitia. Perdita Lujuria's trajectory is thus not organized as a linear progression within artistic institutions, as her work is articulated from experiences dispersed across different contexts, so as to avoid academic models by opting for a set of operations that emerge from the relationship between image, narrative, and the body.
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THE CENTRALITY OF THE BODY AND NARRATIVE DIMENSION
Regarding the characteristics of her work, one observes the centrality of drawing as a means of constructing images that operate at the intersection of eroticism and horror, such that the body, in her production, appears as a surface subjected to processes of transformation. Thus, fragmentation, recomposition, and opening, in constituting themselves as recurring procedures in her drawings, allow for the exploration of the instability of the figure. Eroticism, in this sense, does not present itself as idealization, but as a field of tension in which desire, pain, and exposure are articulated..
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