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HASTA LA VICTORIA SECRET

Hasta la Victoria Secret is a wall-based installation composed of direct quotes from far-right ideologues such as Steve Bannon, Nick Land, Curtis Yarvin (a.k.a. Mencius Moldbug), Julius Evola, and Bronze Age Pervert. Each phrase is handwritten in lipstick—shades of red, pink, and terracotta—across the pristine white walls of a gallery space. The result reads like a series of intimate whispers or stylized threats.

The installation plays on a double register: the violent, authoritarian content of the quotes clashes with the fragile, sensual act of their inscription. Cursive handwriting in cosmetic tones softens the brutality of the words, creating a charged tension between aesthetic seduction and ideological menace. This friction turns right-wing populism into a camp spectacle, where power is eroticized and its rhetoric becomes grotesquely decorative.

The title, Hasta la Victoria Secret, is an ironic twist on the revolutionary slogan “Hasta la Victoria Siempre.” Here, revolution is not represented through weapons or flags, but as a domestic, cosmetic, and desperate scene. The work poses unsettling questions: What is the role of desire in hatred? What is seductive about authoritarianism?

By transplanting these quotes into the gallery and rewriting them in lipstick, the work doesn’t parody—it exposes. It reveals the intimate, affective, and often gendered undercurrents of contemporary reactionary discourse

This work can be read as an early re-edition of Hasta la Victoria Secret, created in 2016. The corrosive humor, the cultural critique emerging from within American popular imagery, and the theatricalization of female identities shaped by desire, resentment, and marginality were already present. The painted bodies, the handwritten phrases, the subversive kitsch, and the tension between pleasure and moral judgment anticipate many of the strategies later systematized in Hasta la Victoria Secret. It’s not a direct reference, but rather a parallel scene.

José Luis Falconi

“Krochmalny’s watercolors don’t illustrate slogans—they strip them bare. By appropriating Bannon’s incendiary language—a mix of Christian apocalypse, political pornography, and cult rhetoric—he subjects it to a choreographic inversion. The soft, the pink, the adolescent, the performative: everything fascism despises, his work absorbs.”

Essays & Lectures


Roberto Jacoby and Syd Krochmalny
Originally published in La Babel del Odio: Políticas de la lengua en el frente antifascista, Biblioteca Nacional,
Buenos Aires, 2021.

THE WRITING ON THE WALL: ON SYD KROCHMALNY

José Luis Falconi
SENA SPACE
October, 2018

SK

© 2025 by Syd Krochmalny

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