Ana Maria Pacheco – Be Aware
Wednesday 14 August 2024
Here are seven objects for thought. Physical objects with a weight to them: seven blocks of limewood, each 28 centimetres high, 38 wide and 12 deep, that have been carved in relief with deep, shadowed undercuts and in places studded with nails and wires. Yet these objects are not insistently physical, because the labour of carving them has been hidden away under burnished paint and goldleaf. Heraldically bold colours have been applied in tempera to the close-packed convolutions, with top layers of sheen and gilding adding to their glamour. Which is to say, this seven–piece set resists reduction to plain fact. Instead, its intricate surfaces and recesses soak up your attention, inviting you to reverie.
This has not always been the way with the sculptures of Ana Maria Pacheco. She has been best known for groupings of figures that stand tall over us, seeming stronger than ourselves and more fearfully alive. Conversely she may confront us with items that lie prone and at our mercy – a severed head on a dish, for instance. But confrontation is not the mode of Be Aware, the present project. Here we come upon little figures interlocking in self-contained internal worlds that appear bizarre and obsessive. The imaginative propositions stay closer to those of the painting and printmaking that Pacheco also practises.
Seven tableaux: seven knots of strange behaviour. Examine their content, and you will encounter seven styles of blind-heartedness, given imaginative form by a reflective intelligence. We might opt to call them ‘sins’, and to identify each with an eye to the old theologians’ checklist: ‘Pride’, ‘Greed’, ‘Lust’, ‘Envy’, ‘Anger’, ‘Gluttony’ and ‘Sloth’. And yes, Pacheco has here been mulling over that ancient analysis of human behaviour. Yet these compositions have in effect slipped away from their moorings in morality. To put it another way: they turn ‘sin’ – their ‘deadly’ initial premise – into something of vital worth. For what they embody, in their intricacies and their heavinesses, is the will to distil experience: to concentrate, and to intensively reflect. To be aware.
©Julian Bell 2022
