ANA MARIA PACHECO SCULPTURE
Shadows of the Wanderer, 2008 (detail)
ANA MARIA PACHECO has been sculpting now for fifty years. To critical
Shadows of the Wanderer
and popular acclaim she has exhibited in group shows across the world and has had notable one-person shows in many cities including New York, Boston, Miami, Dakar, São Paulo and London. A signal honour was her appointment as the first non-European Associate Artist at the National Gallery, London in 1996. As early as 1991 John McEwen, then art critic of the The Sunday Telegraph, said that she was “ . . . as powerful a figurative artist as we have seen in this country.”
Pacheco says that while working on Land of No Return (2002), an image came into her mind of a young man carrying an old man on his shoulders. She was familiar with scenes in Vergil’s ‘Aeneid’ where the Trojan Prince Aeneas leads a band of refugees from the ruins of Troy, carrying his father on his back. This, and daily media images of similar suffering, led to the two front figures, sculpted from one piece of wood.
Part of this power comes from the relationship of viewer to sculpture. Pacheco encourages people to go close to her figures and exploits the respective scale of each to challenge the viewer’s physical and moral equilibrium. By getting close up the viewer is also struck by the vivid presence of the figures and the consummate craftsmanship with which they are made.
During an interval of years Pacheco experimented with various ways of grouping the background figures, finally settling on the form we see now. Ten larger than life-size presences robed in black loom as the shadows of the work’s title. Like a Greek chorus they observe the men’s plight with a variety of emotions, vigilant but seemingly incapable of intervening.
Each of Pacheco’s major sculptures creates its own environment. The figures perform the dramas of the human condition, as Helen Boorman observes, in “a magical space with echoes of church, street corner and theatre . . .” Their gestures and postures, actions and interactions are shot through with ambiguity, expressed in a range of polarities: evil/goodness; suffering/redemption; force/compassion; anguish/irony; cruelty/humour; strength/vulnerability.
The forward movement of the piece, conveyed by the young man’s dogged advance and the old man’s gaze into the distance, creates a sense that the two protagonists are about to leave their world and enter ours, while yet another world is suggested by the shadowy space beneath the stage.
Ian Starsmore captures the various fusions of which her work is the product: it “is evolved from a tradition of making which lies between South American and European culture . . . It draws on medieval art, expressionist language, Catholic ritual, Renaissance art and classical mythology . . . [it] belongs to the present, but has its sources also in the continuum of scholarship, craft, mythology, narrative and history that individuals between cultures are often so able to discover and maintain.” Robert Bush References: Boorman, H., Unfolding the Magic Spell: Imagery and Imagination in the Work of Ana Maria Pacheco. Ana Maria Pacheco, Pratt Contemporary Art, 1989. McEwen, J., 1991, The human comedy in a vivid new dress. The SundayTelegraph, 29 Dec. Starsmore, I., 2004, Collected Essays, Texts on the work of Ana Maria Pacheco, Pratt Contemporary Art.
In 2012 Shadows of the Wanderer was exhibited at The First Kyiv International Biennale of Contemporary Art, which examined the major themes of contemporary art from across the world.
Previous page Shadows of the Wanderer, 2008 Polychromed wood on a wood and steel base 260 x 390 x 605 cm Photo: Aldeburgh Festival 2008 Opposite Shadows of the Wanderer (detail)
The Longest Journey, 1994 (detail)
The Longest Journey, 1994 Polychromed wood, gold leaf 320 x 335 x 975 cm Photo: Nor th Transept, Salisbur y Cathedral 2012 Salisbur y International Ar ts Festival
The Longest Journey The title of this piece comes from D H Lawrence’s poem The Ship of Death: Build then the ship of death, for you must take The longest journey, to oblivion . . . Ten figures are adrift on a boat without power or crew. Four young adults voyage in states of contemplation, wonder and anxiety, while five large whiterobed figures in the prow are more watchful of the boat’s course and its passengers. A young trouserless child takes keenest interest of all, a lookout precariously perched on a stool amidships, linking the two groups. Where is this 32 foot Broads cruiser headed? Is the longest journey one that we all under take? Are the shrouded figures our guides to an unknown realm? The Longest Journey was the centrepiece of a large show of Pacheco’s work in The Gas Hall, Birmingham in 1994 and was shown again in the Nor th Transept of Salisbur y Cathedral in 2012. Pacheco had been exploring the theme of the journey as early as 1987 in two dr ypoints, The Longest Journey I & II. In 1994 she produced a series of ten dr ypoints, Terra Ignota, where boats carr ying their bewildered passengers are stranded on stilts or swing in mid-air. One other print from 1994, The Dark Night of the Soul, enters the siren-tormented world of Odysseus.
The Longest Journey, 1994 (detail)
Memória Roubada I Memória Roubada (Stolen Memory). A cabinet contains six disembodied heads that focus in a range of expressions on the pierced heart before them. Images of the Seven Sorrows of Mary, which gained currency in the Counter Reformation, show seven swords, each representing a sorrow that pierces Mary’s heart. Here, swords are replaced by daggers with all their connotations of violent betrayal. The cabinet recalls the Portuguese oratorio, a domestic devotional altar containing items associated with a saint, sometimes with prayers inscribed. On the doors of this ‘oratorio’ is a quotation from a contemporary Brazilian poem describing the fate of the victims of colonisation, robbed of their memory: OLHOS VAZADOS Poked eyes SEXOS CASTRADOS Castrated sexes CHUMBO NOS OUVIDOS Shot in the ears MÃOS ARRANCADAS Severed hands José Lobo Seven years later Pacheco produced a companion piece on the same theme, Memória Roubada II.
Dark Night of the Soul, 1999 (detail)
Dark Night of the Soul
Land of No Return
Pacheco was Associate Artist at the National Gallery, London from 1997 to 2000. Her brief was to produce a work for exhibition, inspired in some way by the National Gallery collection. The nineteen-figure installation Dark Night of the Soul was the result. Apart from its immense scale and variety of poses, the piece is unusual for its radial structure. The focus is a central group where a kneeling, naked, hooded figure, pierced by arrows, is hedged round by four huge enforcers. This hooded figure is directly linked to a young child in that they are the only naked figures in the piece and are also on a sightline. Other small groups look on in dismay or compassion at the central event, while hoodlums on the outskirts are engrossed in their own feuding. Pacheco admired the National Gallery’s The Martyrdom of Saint Sebastian by Piero del Pollaiuolo and her sculpture clearly takes as its starting point the Romans’ punishment of Sebastian for his conversion to Christianity. She felt that by giving her work a title referring to that particular event, she would close the reading and viewers would not then take time to explore its wider implications. The title does in fact have a religious origin. It is the title of a poem and commentary by St John of the Cross which describes the journey of his soul towards unity with God. Wider implications of the sculpture became evident when photographs of atrocities in Abu Ghraib prison appeared in newspapers in strikingly similar images.
On one side, three naked men adopt aggressive gestures and postures, but for all their belligerence their very nakedness conveys a strong sense of vulnerability. On the other side, three clothed women are casting golden cowrie shells in a form of ritual divination. Between these two groups stands a young woman in a white dress and gold sandals, seeming to hesitate, wondering which way to go. The kneeling male is based on the figure at the foot of Giambologna’s The Rape of the Sabines. This is not simply homage paid to an admired sculptor but is, more importantly, a deliberate and subversive use of the language of the Baroque, brought by European colonisers to South America. In fact Pacheco deploys the language throughout the piece and it is evident in more naturalistic human forms and a greater sense of movement than usual. Pacheco’s prints and drawings leading up to the sculpture explore aspects of the Epic of Gilgamesh, the tale of a man-god’s quest for immortality that has fascinated Pacheco since childhood and informs this work
Opposite Memória Roubada I, 2001 Polychromed wood, gold leaf, slate base 200 x 300 x 300 cm Photo: Morning Chapel, Salisbury Cathedral 2012 Salisbury International Arts Festival Overleaf
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Land of No Return, 2002
Dark Night of the Soul, 1999
Polychromed wood, gold leaf, slate base
Polychromed wood, gold leaf, slate base
193 x 540 x 660 cm (dims. variable)
228.6 x 540 x 660 cm (dims. variable)
Private Collection
Photo: National Gallery, London, 1999
Photo: Brighton Museum and Art Gallery, 2004
ANA MARIA PACHECO represented by
Pratt Contemporary
For all enquiries please contact Pratt Contemporary Telephone +44 (0)1732 882326 pca@prattcontemporaryart.co.uk www.prattcontemporaryart.co.uk Text by Robert Bush Š 2012 Photography by Colin M. Harvey Š Pratt Contemporary
Above: Land of No Return, 2002 (detail) Cover: Shadows of the Wanderer, 2008 (detail).