How did Antonio Berni use Juanito Laguna and Ramona Montiel to portray urban poverty?

Argentine artist Antonio Berni utilized the fictional characters Juanito Laguna, a street urchin, and Ramona Montiel, a prostitute and seamstress, to symbolize and portray the realities of urban poverty.12

Berni depicted these characters in large-scale canvases that combined a flattened figurative style with mixed-medium collage. To authentically represent the environment of the slums, he incorporated actual refuse collected from those areas—such as cardboard, fabric, metal, newspaper, and bits of paper—directly into his works. For instance, in Juanito Laguna Goes to the City (1963), the boy is shown wearing his best clothes while carrying a sack through the trash-filled landscape of the slum.21

Although these characters represent the harsh conditions of poverty, Berni portrayed them with compassion and humor. Through these series, which also included various prints, Berni used his art to speak directly to contemporary social and political concerns, highlighting the marginalization of the poor within urban society.21