For those who (like yours truly) spent their childhoods dressed in Spiderman Underoos watching professional wrestling on television, the spectacle of a fabulous person battling another fabulous person remains strangely alluring. Since the days of Roman gladiators fighting in the Colosseum, highly stylized violence (with an electrifying wardrobe) has provided unparalleled mimetic entertainment to the maddening crowd—a psychic release of one’s own violent tension through projection. Perhaps this is because professional wrestling, as an artistic form, rivals opera in its ability to truly translate the pain and misery of the world through the lenses of artifice, glamour, tragedy, revenge and redemption. On the heels of 2008’s acclaimed filmic ode to the sport of uncelebrated aesthetes (The Wrestler), comes Lucha Loco, a photography book that celebrates Mexico’s own WWF, the Lucha Libre. The luchadores are a well-known group of masked wrestlers whose vibrant costuming takes the idea of the masked superhero and amps it up to a psychedelic meltdown. Featured in Lucha Loco are the contemporary stars of the show, photographed by Malcolm Venville, who also directed the thug-wild film 44” Inch Chest (now playing). The studio portraits represent the warriors only in mask, as their identities—in true Luche Libre fashion—must always be kept a secret.
LUCHA LOCO will release in March at rizzoliusa.com
