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Imagem, 2008-2010


                                                                                                       
                           
                 Imagem [Image] is a work made up of a roca head image (holy or religious statuette), from the 18th century, housed in an acrylic dome and placed on a solid animal skin, a skin that covers the top of a 1.20m cut silver mirror cube.

                 The roca image traditionally appears in processions and altars and consists of an articulated wooden structure that only shows the head, hands or arms and, sometimes, the feet of the sculpted saint, wrapped in clothing and accessories that characterize it according to its liturgical uses. The roca image generally presents features rich in realistic expressions and gestures. The body made up of structures, wooden slats, makes it lighter and more portable, favoring the processional path. Most of the roca images were built on a scale close to the natural scale of the human body.

                  In the case of the construction of Image, the work required that the head of the roca image had its gaze directed “forward”, to a virtual vanishing point – something almost impossible in the case of these images which, for the most part, have penitent, upturned, pious looks, eyes exaggeratedly turned upwards, with the white area of ​​the eyeball showing. It was, therefore, a feat, after much searching, that I came across this object in a remote antique shop in New York.

                In this research, the condition had been established that the piece must be historical before the 19th century. The look of the image in Image should be aligned, fixed. I looked for images that had more realistic, glass eyes. It is important to note that these images generally have the sculpted limbs painted using delicate and detailed polychrome work, which gives an especially realistic treatment, as mentioned, to the head, hands and feet. When sculpting the head, for example, glass was used for the eyes, fangs for the teeth, and natural fur for the wigs. In this way, a discontinuous body was already evident in the construction of this object, an inanimate, articulated, cross-dressed, adorned body… The joints allowed the movement of the arms and forearms, hands and legs, enabling the figures to stand, sit or kneel. They also made it easier to put on clothes. Regarding the clothes, they were made of fine fabrics – lace, brocades, silks and velvets –, often embroidered in gold or silver, at other times, with pearls and semi-precious stones.

                 Imagem requested a parallelism of the gaze from the head since it would problematize a relationship with the observer vis-à-vis. Such parallelism would imply a relationship with the observer but could also involve “competition” with him, as the confronted gazes remain external to each other. The work's interest in this positioning was, then, due to the fact that Imagem seeks, as said, a look aligned with a virtual vanishing point. Hence the need for eyes facing forward.

                 The work raises the question about the condition of emergence of the work of art at the very moment of its exhibition, thus interrogating the act of looking – after all, in this act, who looks and who is looked at? – and still seeking to keep a visitor's expectations regarding the works in an art exhibition in a kind of suspense.

Thiago Honório, 2010.