Almost in its entirety, the work of Paz Errázuriz reflects the reality of her country, Chile. One exception is the project entitled Exéresis, for which she visited numerous museums in Europe and North America, including the Louvre in Paris, the Pergamon Museum in Berlin, the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, and the National Gallery of Art in Washington. The result is a series of photographs of classical male sculptures that focuses on the torso and the genital area. Errázuriz has eliminated the head and the lower extremities in order to more clearly signal the absence of the statues’ sexual organs.

In medicine, the term “exeresis”, from the classical Greek word exaieresis, refers to an amputation, cut, or separation of a part of the body, or the splitting of a lesion. This is what Exéresis I depicts, the classical beauty of a muscular torso whose genitals have been amputated. The photograph points to the painful genital absence, of which the western artistic tradition has developed a twofold understanding. On one hand, the amputation of the stone, the medium through which the genitals have been represented, is analogous to the iconoclastic religious tendency of forbidding representations of the divine. On the other hand, the extirpation of genitalia reveals the body, removing gender and invites reflection on the array of stereotypes that sustain the concept of masculinity.