logo-mini

DENUDATIO PERFECTA.

I have come to feel that the idea of tapping into the authentic core of oneself is synonymous with “denudatio,” understood as the process through which imagination, after receiving an impression of the world through our senses, eliminates the accidental, the apparent residues, until the form’s essence is perfected. Paradoxically, this process of denudare, i.e., this process of “denuding” ends strengthening us.

Some years ago, I came across a text entitled “Nudities” by Giorgio Agamben, an Italian philosopher. He speaks in the vocabulary of philosophy and mysticism. He equates being God to being nude (ese autem Deus ese nudum sine velamine est).(1)

Agamben’s thinking reverberates deeply to my own sense that stepping into the core source level, i.e., the bones of our own being, is not only supreme knowledge, but also the process itself of coming to know.

Throughout all these years, one of the most intense elements that triggered my artistic work has been my search for identity, the ongoing question of who and what I am on the deepest level, the quest for the essence of my identity through the dismemberment and dissection of my own corporality.

The images of this exhibition emerge from my ongoing personal search. These images express a visual metaphor formed by multiple layers of my own being.

My work represents a balance between the myriad voices that make me up and their opposites. They are images that aspire to materialize the complexity of my own essence.

Although these images express my own individual experience of these processes of denuding and self-becoming, their archetypal meaning also represents a universal aspect that pertains to all of us.

Overlapping layers, fragility, strength, complexity, uniqueness, fragmentation, dismemberment, connection, consciousness, duality, essence, re-memberment, wholeness, self, synthesis, transformation, transfiguration, bridging, process, perpetual movement, search, incarnated suffering, synchronicity, transcendence, embodiment . . . these processes are the necessary territory of any process of coming to the truth of one´s self.

All the images in this exhibition constitute an intimate journal that reflects the suffering, struggle and healing transformation in my own psychic process. The images emerge first. Then I decipher and articulate them. The further processes of analyzing allow me to come into a primary dialogue with the different parts of myself that are first expressed in these spontaneous images that think me.

It is of deep meaning to me that the suffering and healing in my own process as expressed in my work reverberates to the history of the building for which this work was conceived: the Holy Inquisition Palace which had been a place of torture and murder since its foundations in colonial times. In 1854, it became the headquarters of the School of Medicine. It later on became the University’s School of Medicine and Nursing, today pertaining to the National Autonomous University (UNAM), where healing was sought. The complex duality of suffering and healing inherent to the building itself is embodied in my work.

In creating this work I connected to the tremendous experience of life, feeling the strength and complexity of my own struggle in the process of expressing it in these images. This involves suffering the myriad realities of my own being but out of recognition of the possibility of transcending them.

The deep commitment I have with my psychic growth through Jungian analysis has opened up a very deep pathway that has enabled me not only to find and make my own myth and symbols, but also to understand how they are related to universal myth and symbol.

I have long been attracted to elements of animal origin like nests, turtle shells and pelican bones. Although I had never before integrated them in my work, they have been like presences I have been collecting over time. These elements awaken a feeling of belonging to the universe.

During the process of creating these pieces, these animal remains that have companioned me for years, amalgamated and integrated themselves into the work in an unexpected way.

Many of the motifs that have characterized my work have re-emerged in the pieces that form part of this exhibition. My whole pictorial alphabet is here.

Salvador Elizondo used to say, “works of art must be in a place that is beyond discourse.” I share with him the idea that artwork has a symbolic charge of which we are absolutely unconscious and which need not be articulated.

However, I am being driven to describe my experience out of a sense of need and desire to share both my process of exploration and my thinking process, without minimizing the mystery of the origin of the images that inhabit me, and which I intend to embody.

Once I complete a piece or a series of pieces, I make distance and analyze them. In doing so, I discover synchronies that allow me to become aware of the fact that I am connected to something much greater than I, and that I speak alongside myriad voices.
Underlying these works is the quest to respond to the ceaseless necessity to know and be myself. I believe in the depth and strength of these experiences and know in the depth of my being that they pertain to the lives and endeavors of all human beings.

(1) Giorgio Agamben. (2010). Nudities. Trans. David Kishik and Stefan Pedatella. Redwood City, CA: Stanford University Press.

Sandra Pani

subir

DENUDATIO PERFECTA.CUERPOS, TEMA Y VARIACIONES SONORAS
EN LA OBRA DE SANDRA PANI POR IGNACIO PRADO.

Proponemos una inmersión visual y sonora en el mundo poético de la plástica de Sandra Pani, hacedora de telas vibrantes en movimiento, hacedora de cuerpos en línea de fuga y devenir vegetal, hacedora de múltiples devenires de su ser a través de la fragmentación dionisiaca y la disección quirúrgica de su propia corporalidad. Un cuerpo-yo y muchos cuerpos y órganos, ojos, oídos……un árbol.

Vamos a conocer y reconocer(nos), vamos a sentir y escuchar imágenes-afección, vamos a desvelar pliegues y texturas, vamos a desnudar(nos) en lo que el filósofo Giorgio Agamben llamaría “denudatio perfecta”. Abrir los ojos y los oídos descubriendo las sutiles caricias entre la música, las formas y los cuerpos. Esta es una exposición con telas-pieles para acariciar(se), sonidos para besar-susurrar al oído, esta es una ofrenda para hacer el amor al arte.
Para vivir esta experiencia sinestésica (del griego `junto´ y `sensación´), para oír colores y texturas, ver sonidos reflejados en el claroscuro de este espacio barroco, nos encomendamos a la filosofía nietzchiana (arte=vida) y a las diosas hilanderas de la mitología griega, las Moiras encargadas de tejer el hilo por el que se rige el destino humano (lo invisible del trabajo artesanal femenino) ; Atenea y su sabiduría práctica; y Ariadna que nos ofrece el hilo que hemos de seguir en el laberinto del autoconocimiento.

Invitamos al público a que se tome su tiempo para escuchar y ver con una mirada diferente, a participar en los diálogos y actividades en torno a la exposición, y a redescubrir el barroco Palacio de la Escuela de Medicina desde este espacio contemporáneo de diálogo neobarroco de las artes como una estética de la existencia.

“Nuestro hermoso deber es imaginar que hay un laberinto y un hilo….”

subir

CITAS IGNACIO PRADO

“ De-velamiento siempre será un movimiento de velo. ¿No consiste éste , en su propia consistencia, en su textura, en acabar con uno, en levantarse, en desaparecer, en retirarse para dejar ver o dejar de ser, para dejar (laisser)?”

Hélène Cixous, Jacques Derrida “Velos”
“El proceso que lleva al conocimiento perfecto se describe, por lo tanto como una progresiva puesta al desnudo de ese “fantasma” que, pasado de la sensación a la imaginación y a la memoria, se despoja poco a poco de sus elementos sensibles para presentarse, pr fin, una vez cumplida la denudatio perfecta, como “especie inteligible”, imagen o intención pura. En el acto de la intelección, la imagen está perfectamente desnuda y escribe Avicena - “si ya no estuviera desnuda, sin embargo se vuelve tal, porque la facultad contemplativa la desnuda de modo que ninguna afección material permanezca en ella”

Giorgio Agamben “Desnudez”
“Habríamos así establecido que la escucha (se) abre a la resonancia,y que la resonancia (se) abre al sí mismo: es decir que abre a la vez a sí (al cuerpo resonante, a su vibración) y al sí mismo (al ser en cuanto su ser se pone en juego por sí mismo). De tal modo, entonces, el escuchador se tensa, para terminar, a causa de un sentido (y no está tendido hacia , intencionalmente), o bien es ofrecido, expuesto a un sentido”

Jean Luc Nancy “A la escucha”
“Traspasa el aire todo
hasta llegar a la más alta esfera,
y oye allí otro modo
de no perecedera
música, que es la fuente y la primera”


Fray Luis de León “Oda a Francisco Salinas”
subir

IGNACIO PRADO.