Folds.
The Baroque has reinvented itself for hundreds of years in new concepts and interpretations, according to different social and cultural contexts, as folds of matter and folds of the soul according to Giles Deleuze.
In the contemporary it is constituted by excesses, extravagances, and exposure of what was previously veiled and cared for. The exposed body and skin, as commodities, lose their plastic potency due to excessive repetition and reproduction.
In the works Folds I rescue and reexamine the encounter between the Baroque and the contemporary, in reinterpretations of the sculptures of the Baroque sculptor Bernini (1598-1680), who brilliantly represented the contact between skins, and fabrics in exacerbated movements as flows.
I remove the character and redo the draperies. The marble with its weight is replaced by light material. These works are made with parchment, in which I subvert the relationship between what is covered and what is veiled. The skin becomes the cover of nothing.
I keep the titles of the original works, and clothes or draperies have names.
The observer no longer has a passive attitude, leading to questioning. The sculptures call attention to an absence as a power based on the stimulus of the imagination, so scarce in contemporary times.
The viewer's curiosity re-subjectifies the missing body as an active fruition.
Skins.
Baroques I, II e III.
The Baroque is defined by the fold that goes to infinity; the fabric, a garment that releases its subordination to the body. Folds that are no longer explained by the body and have their own autonomy. Drapes in the form of flows, as an allegory that unveils an indefinite time by the combination of the eternal and the instant.
Baroque are works in which I show an exposed body, in which what matters is not the image / body, because in the contemporary it is devoid of plastic importance, due to the excess of reproduction and exposure. The exposed skin and flesh, stripped of their clothes, stripped of their protection, have lost their value. What matters is what is due from these images, from what is subtracted and added to.
We are in a moment of explosion of a Baroque that shows and re-shows, what was previously veiled and taken care of. It is the baroque of a lack of modesty for the pain of the other. It is a Baroque inside out. These are the “folds” carried to infinity by social networks, blood and tragedy no longer covered up.
The Baroque is no longer found in drapes that covers bodies. The body is naked. The skin is exposed and decralized.
It is the tearing of this body that becomes of interest; it is what is taken away from it, what is produced from it, what is a consequence of it and what is transformed from it. Horrors and suffering are no longer covered, they are mediatized. They are objects of exhibition, objects to attract attention. It is the aesthetics of the media that go viral and spectacularize the pain.
Through repetition we become immune to the pain of the other, and live an implicit perversity that we no longer even notice. It is the unfolding of this pain, it is the Baroque of this pain that I want to show.
The movement that was once sought in sculpture, the fluidity, the beautiful, aesthetic and harmonious body are no longer of interest. The body and skin are hard, the skin is exposed, the skin is raw; rigid.
What enters our gaze every day is the flow and unfolding of pain, blood, horror. This is what I want to call attention to and re-subjectify.
By extruding the red and expelling it from the body in the form of an allegory, as a Baroque, I restore the power to what has now become vulgar.
When I show my work, the first question that is asked is: Is this blood?
High relief photo-paintings.
Diatropias.
Mixed media – Photographic print on fabric, acrylic paint, acrylic blanket, cotton denim, sewn on canvas on chassis.
Men until a very recent period, lived most of his existence in a well-defined place, which was gave him as a firm point of reference. This place circumscribed a domain, a territory and made him feel located/safe - it was your topos.
Contemporary fragmentation disfigures these topos. Today, man simultaneously assimilates and introjects innumerable places, undoes borders, and experiences the ambiguity of expanding his limits and at the same time losing them.
In 1967, Foucault coined the word heterotopia, as the juxtaposition of various spaces, constantly reconfigured, which can be incompatible, and be associated with cuts of time; heterochronies.
Diatropias are reinterpretations of landscape paintings and tapestries (Gobelins and Beauvais) in which several topos coexist, creating multiple relationships between space and time. They are heterotopias and heterochronies in oppositions with contemporary urban landscapes, and Portuguese or Brazilian ruins which opens into red rivers, as flows of becomings.
They are photographic compositions printed on fabric, in planes that acquire volumes by sewing with acrylic blanket and steel fabric, overlaid and fixed on canvas on the chassis. The acrylic paint adds depth and drama to existing volumes. I transform two-dimensional photography in high relief.
I subvert what we are used to see as a photographic image. The representational space expands, expressing itself in three-dimensionality. I provoke a strangeness due to the inadequacy of what is seen and what has historically been incorporated as a photographic image.
It is a sculptural work of a landscape.
These are works made for the viewer to be present. When photographed they return to the two-dimensionality, and when printed resembles a painting.
In these works the ruins are like states of impermanence that are opposed to contemporary urban society, which still has a balance and order even if precarious.
When reflecting on memory and the present, I assess our transience and instability. My interest in to think about the present and the past as mirrors.
Sculptures.
Terracotta.
High reliefs.
Objects.
