cefvigo gallery

LIFE AND DEATH OF STATUES

The most varied fantasies, obsessions and dreams that man might have had, have found their place in photography, since those fantasies do not have to be real in order to be photographed.
Imagination, myths and legends have often played with ambiguity, both of images which become real and of living beings which become images.
A statue (sculpture representing a human being) creates a sort of a double very close to man. These sculptures are conceived, made, in order to be watched, but the visual sensations they produce are often mixed in the observer’s perception with mental images of other senses such as, in particular, tactile images suggested by the smooth or rough surface of the sculpture, by the tactile nature of their bulging outline, their swaying breasts and swollen bellies, which make the watcher create a mental idea of that statue, which is this way transformed by the imagination of their observers.
Art has quite often chosen to accentuate the difference between the statue and the man or, on the contrary, to reduce it through processes that try to give the statue an almost complete identity (polychrome sculptures or statues with clothes…)
Images (portraits, statues, dolls…) coming into life is something that can be found in many legends, art or literary works. Animating something artificial and inanimate is seen as a precious gift, like in the myth of Pygmalion, that Cypriot king said to be a lonely man and a mysoginist, who fell in love with a marvellous sculpture of a woman he had made from the whitest marble, a statue which came into life after Pygmalion’s pleas to Aphrodite, and became the king’s wife.
…”the sculptor uses the appropriate tools to cut the initial block- a chisel mainly- and shapes it through the elimination of part of the material, being the part that the sculptor allows to subsist, the part that constitutes the piece (…) The beauty of the whole lies in its symmetry, its proportions, the eurhytmia, objective imagining of the ideal body (and as a consequence, in the lessening of the particular defect)…”

The sculptor acts as a plastic surgeon in the moment of extirpating and deciding what will result beautiful or not, imposing in a natural way canons or fashions to the body in order to create an image. Both the plastic surgeon and the sculptor create a creature to be watched, and made according to the taste and fashion of the beauty of the moment.
This way, Pygmalion creates a woman to his taste, not a woman but a statue without will; he fell in love with a woman who could not speak, who could not express her opinion, who could not complain or decide what she really wished, a woman whose only role was to be beautiful forever.
For me, that former feeling I had for the strange beauty of the statues and their enigma, has become a feeling of pity because they are condemned to stay still so we can observe their beauty, they are women without soul, sensual, voluptuous and with the ideal proportions. They are created as if they were real people, with the only aim of giving pleasure to the imaginative contemplation of the observer, and, on the contrary, despite being exact representations, although one can feel their blood circulating under their throbbing skin, they are deprived of the sense of touch, they are cold, forever condemned to be marble.
The sculpted body exists in an undetermined place between the living and the dead, I call them dead-living bodies since any sculpture lives in time, in the sense that it remains and gets older, something that statues can do more or less well.
The patina can give a statue a sort of supplementary finishing touch which it lacked in the beginning. But the verdigris makes the bronze lose a shine which is necessary for the perfection of forms, iron rusts, stone can suffer diseases, works age and end up destroyed. A sculpture can die (and death is just the definitive interruption of the vital functions; something that was never alive cannot be dead.)
With the passing of time, statues become old and suffer aggressions, mutilations, and the the material wears away; but this ageing is not consequent with them, since they are made in order to stay forever young, and their joyful and coquettish faces are expressionless before their decay. Nevertheless, we still admire them without realising how aggressive they are, these images deprived of sight, touch and extremities. Here is where the suffering of these statues can be seen.
Therefore, in case the sculptures were given their own identity, like those sculptors that tried to create the illusion of a body that breathes, to transmit the marble a quality of vital shuddder and to express the whole range of passions- from brutality to ecstasy- I have gone a step further in the process of representing this life which sculptors have tried to transmit to the sculptures, I have decided to animate them- understanding this word as giving a “soul”, and soul as the principle of life and movement. This is how I transformed the eyes of the statues into real eyes, because the sculpture has a big problem in representing the eyes with its own means, and the eyes are where that liveliness lies, that impulse which gives life, that inner and intimate warmth.
When I want to represent those beings as something alive, so that due to their great similarity with human beings, although they reach colossal dimensions, or become fragmented, or even have to be seen from a disorienting angle, they can still be recognised as a human body, and, before that similarity, we might be able to reach the mental concept of being in front of something alive; I attempt to take you to that moment of metamorphosis – which exists in our minds- when, admiring them, their body experiments a deeper change, as if willing to get free from its own material prison, and from its own limits imposed by the laws of Nature. In these photographs, I try to show the way the flesh and the stone challenge anatomy, biology, time and reason. They dissolve or melt into one nature, the flesh and the object mixing into a unique and enigmatic creature.

Victoria Diehl