Cracks and Clefts: Dealing with the Pigments of Our Lady of Copacabana

GABRIELA SIRACUSANO

Transcultural Imaginations of the Sacred

Fink Wilhelm Gmbh + Co.Kg

Lugar: Hamburgo; Año: 2018;

In the eighteenth century, Antonio Palomino de Castro justified the necessity of learning the practice of painting : ?I also say that, as well as practice without theory is a body without soul, theory without practice is a soul without a body.? By practice he meant the uses of apparels, oils, varnishes, pigments, canvases, etc. and he linked them with the human body?the holder of fluids, bones, and diverse secretions?by giving them the quality of a necessary material support for the representation of ideas. We might then consider that the material universe of images, either paintings or sculptures, can be thought of as the body that makes representation possible. I´m talking here about matter and substance, but also about a particular way of understanding representation itself. A mental and material thickness, a dimension of the making, in which the empathetic choice of some materials over others, the fascinating and magical experience involving richness of properties, and an earthly substance relationship closely related to alchemical activities converge each time an aesthetic idea and a creative will come together to create shapes. One might even say that there is a powerful and generative energy in art materials, which emanates from them and invades the creative moment. The material power of the iconic displays changes and permanences in its ways of being over time. And the materiality of an image carries significant weight in the service of certain cultural practices as well as social, political, or economic necessities. It is testimony to a set of past practices, which begin a process of elucidation once we identify these materials and place them within a cultural and historic context. The colors themselves lie within these bodies.