---

Aleijadinho, 2017-2023

---

               
                
                  
                 
                 The work Aleijadinho is displayed in the baptistery of the Morumbi Chapel / City Museum, amidst the frescoes that represent the scene of Christ’s baptism with angels with indigenous faces painted by the Pernambuco artist Lucia Suanê (1922-2020) in the 1940s.

                 This is a work that discusses the notion of a work made by several hands, from hands, and that problematizes a “morphopsychological projection”*, to use an expression by Bazin (1901-1990) in “O Aleijadinho and baroque sculpture in Brazil”: hands that sculpt, hands that work, hands that project, projected hands, deformed hands, severed hands, amputated hands, crippled hands, ghostly hands, but also discusses what has crossed time – experiences and knowledge –, what has passed through several hands, hands that make hands.

                 Two hands from a sculpture by Aleijadinho** are carved by stonemasons from Minas Gerais in a 1:1 natural scale, and went through the process called carnation. They are embedded in the position of sacred imagery and, also, in a direct relationship with the spectator’s body on a crystal easel by Lina Bo Bardi ( 1914-1992).

                 Lina Bo Bardi proposes an assessment of Brazilian popular civilization as necessary and says:

•                  “ This account is not one of folklore, always parternalistically pampered by higher cultures, it is the acount ‘seen from the other side’, the participating account. It is Aleijadinho and Brazilian culture before the French Mission. It’s the Northeasterner with his leather and empty tins, the inhabitants of the villages, the Negro and the Indian. A mass that invents, that produces a contribution that is indigestible, dry, hard to swallor”***.
  

                 
                 In the case of the work Aleijadinho, given the transparency of the crystal on Lina Bo Bardi’s easel, the spectator’s body, in front of it or behind it, can be part of the work “merging”, so to speak, into it.

                 In this work there is a discussion about the status of the hand in different areas, a work carried out by several hands: the hands of the sculptor Aleijadinho, the hands of Aleijadinho’s assistants, the hands of the sculpted image, the hands of the popular saint-makers responsible for the replica, the hands of the architect Lina Bo Bardi when designing the crystal easels, the hands of the technicians who created the easel, the hands of the artist in carrying out the projects, sketches and studies for the development of the work Aleijadinho, the hands of the artist’s assistant, the hands of the curatorship, the hands of the assemblers who will inlay the sculpted hands in the crystal skin.

                 The encounter between distinct temporalities and displacements directly relate both to what is present in the construction of the Morumbi Chapel, ruins of a vernacular architecture – the rammed earth – with modern architecture via the restoration gesture of the Ukrainian architect Gregori Warchavchik (1896-1972), and to the work Aleijadinho, the replicas of hands carved and embodied in cedar by stonemasons from Minas Gerais in the crystal skin of the easel created by the Italian modern architect Lina Bo Bardi.

Thiago Honório, August 2023.



* Germain Bazin, “O Aleijadinho e a escultura barroca no Brasil”, 1928. In: BAZIN, Germain. O Aleijadinho e a escultura barroca no Brasil. Rio de Janeiro: Editora Record, 1971, p. 195.
** The hands of the imaginary São João da Cruz, in Carmo, in Sabará, Minas Gerais.
*** In: BARDI, Lina Bo. Times of rudeness: design at an impasse. In: Tempos de  grossura: o design do impasse. São Paulo: Instituto Lina Bo e P. M. Bardi, 1994, p.1.

---

---

---