TABLEU VIVANT

I have carved in wood and intervened in various ways a reproduction of The Raft of the Medusa by Théodore Géricault, 1819. Due to the large size of the final work (600x 400 cm), I have divided it into 7 pieces. I have left 6 holes in the place of some of the original faces to make representations in which actors and the general public show their faces through the holes, substituting the original images, hence creating a kind of tableau vivant. To do this, those people will peek out from behind the carved wooden board in the designated holes, which will remain empty the rest of the time. Both states of the work (show inv the faces of living people or empty) serve to illustrate the idea of the dehumanization of art, the work’s main subject.

The project combines the sense of human drama on two levels; the well-known object of the original work, its victims and suffering, together with the loss of the human trace in a large part of contemporary art, which abandons the protagonism of the epic feeling of the evolution of man. And this absence is evident both when exhibiting the work with the empty spaces in place of the faces, due to their absence, and when incorporating the live faces of the actors in the tableau vivant during the performances, which emphasizes a human presence.

My goal is to exhibit together the woodcarving, alongside the print on paper, and a photograph of the carved work with the actors faces performing the tableau vivant, in addition to a photograph of the original painting by Théodore Géricault. All of it assembled serves to illustrate what I call the biology of the image which I proposse as a concept that has been a constant underlining idea in my recent projects. By biology of the image I mean the way in which the same image emerges in different supports, unlike other artistic practices, such as cinema, in which a multiplicity of different images emerge in the same support.