Bookended by bookcase and cupboard, Ana Maria Pacheco’s two Memória Roubada sculptures face each other across a pavement of slate slabs forming a space for the contemplation of suffering.
In this space we come and go throughout the private view blithely speaking of Pacheco, the power and perfection of her art and, in one conversation, offering a jar of 19th century hand-made nails for the artist to drive into future creations of mutilated heads.
And yet I speak with a man who, claiming no artistic sensitivity, feels “got in the gut” by Pacheco’s severed head of John the Baptist which, gashed by chain saw, charred by flame and pierced by nails, rests on a large wooden platter placed on the font of All Hallows on the Wall, the church which houses the gallery in which this exhibition is displayed. In Pacheco’s hands, this church has been released from the safeness of a thousand crucifixes into a real reflection on the reality of torture and its instruments that in turn revives awareness of the suffering which is at the very heart of our faith.
This man is joined at the private view by a National Gallery custodian who having, like myself, walked among the disturbing and unsettling figures forming Pacheco’s Dark Night of the Soul tableau, first exhibited at the National in 1999, had been irresistibly drawn to view more of Pacheco’s work tonight. Such response is the true power of her art.
In Memória Roubada I six heads seem to burst from a cupboard whose doors have been flung wide open. In Pacheco’s Brazilian culture such cupboards are oratories housing statues of saints or the Holy Family and used as private chapels for prayer. Pacheco’s oratory is far more disturbing containing disembodied heads - screaming, still, fearful and anxious – deriving from ballads which immortalised the deeds of Brazilian bandits who were decapitated when caught. Memories of the violence both of their actions and of the vengeance enacted on them by the colonial power bursts from Pacheco’s oratory, each head retaining the emotion of their final moments in the features of their faces.
Memória Roubada II is a calmer work containing fifteen smaller heads and pierced torsos placed symmetrically on the shelves of a bookcase. Here are grieving heads displayed as owned objects, domestic trophies or statuettes, and referring, as is made clear in the quotation carved into the slate slabs, to the state of slavery that was the experience of many in colonial Brazil. With this new work the sense of initial shock is muted in contrast with the first and yet the sense of outrage grows the more these trophy heads are contemplated.
Placed on the slate slabs, one in front of each sculpture, are two images with Christian resonances that offer hope despite the horrors we have faced. In the first, a heart is pierced by seven gold swords. Pacheco has spoken of “the need for all of us to find our way, with our hearts, not just with our heads” but, in this church context, we are also reminded of Simeon’s words to Mary, that a sword would pierce her heart, with its promise of redemption through suffering. In the second, a silver shell sits on the slate, a symbol familiar to pilgrims journeying to Santiago de Compostela and, for Pacheco, a sign that “as with the Santiago pilgrims, there is a way to find yourself.”
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Bruce Cockburn - Soul Of A Man.
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