The body, being recognized as a limit that contains what we are allowed to know with the skin barrier - and its solidity - transforms when it is painted, sculpted or seen from the inside through ultrasound images of its insides.

The imperfections of the flesh, with all their social implications and taboos, transcend the simple reading of the body as the property of whoever owns it. The reconstruction of human flesh through artistic expression forms a new perception of the body and its resilience, as well as its fragility.

According to English artist Jenny Saville (1970), “human perception of one's own body is so acute that the slightest suggestion of a body can trigger recognition.” In their representations of the human form, artists can transcend the limits of classical figuration and modern abstraction. The paint applied in fluid or heavy layers becomes as visceral as the flesh itself, each painted mark maintains its own flexible life. The distinctions between living, breathing bodies and their painted representations begin to be blurred.

The reinvigoration of contemporary figurative painting challenges the boundaries of the genre and raises questions about society's perception of the body and its potential. A deep awareness, both intellectual and sensorial, of how the body has been represented over time and across cultures - from ancient and Hindu sculpture, to Renaissance drawing and painting, to the work of modern artists such as Henri Matisse, Willem de Kooning and Pablo Picasso - allows us to understand that the individual body belongs to a collective conception of its own representation.

If we consider that isolation is a condition of the solitary body that reaffirms its own identity in space, we point to motherhood and the countless appearances of the mother and child theme in art - and not only in the figurative art of museums, but in other symbolic systems of human communication: photographs, films, poetry, literature, theater - as a counterpoint to this state, because the body literally reproduced itself in another body. From the votive statues of the primordial era - which had a magical and mystical relationship with birth, growth and death - to the idealized forms of Renaissance Madonnas, pregnant with religious sentiment, the representation of the body can offer a feminine perspective of a body that multiplies.

In the same way, the body that ages and gradually stops having movement as support, becomes isolated in a body that once participated in a collective, withdraws into its final individuality. Lucien Freud (1922 - 2011) painted his elderly and sick mother in a way in which old age is blunt and beautiful in the ultimate rawness of farewell.

The body in its erotic representation leads us to think of the sculpture “Faun Barberini”, which was sculpted by an unknown Hellenistic artist from the School of Pergamum at the end of the 3rd century BC. After being restored, the statue acquired a reputation for erotic art. Nudity in Greek art is nothing new, but the sexuality of this work caused it to be viewed with greater interest in the 20th century.

For the French artist Yves Klein (1928 - 1962), the body was immaterial and pure color. In his famous Anthropometries of the Blue Epoch exhibition in Paris, three nude models were covered in blue paint and printed images of their bodies onto a blank canvas. The models had become, according to him, “living brushes”. Brazilian artist Celeida Tostes (1929 - 1961) created original plastic works with clay, mixing them with different materials, such as trash. She related to clay, raising questions about women and the feminine universe, addressing themes such as fertility, sexuality, motherhood, fragility and resistance, birth and death. The organicity of her work establishes relationships with the earth and the emergence of life. In the performance work Rite of Passage - in which the artist involves herself with the clay, as if she were in a ceramic vessel, similar to an egg, a uterus - she integrates her body with her work material and subsequently slides in and out, as if , symbolically, was being born.

From the perspective of psychoanalysis, the body is a fundamental element in the construction of subjectivity, as it is through it that the subject establishes a relationship with the world and with others. Austrian psychoanalyst Wilhelm Reich (1897-1957) believed that the body responded to repression by generating muscular tension, which, over time, translated into chronic pain and illness. He said it was an "armor" or a "breastplate" that shaped an individual's physique and character and determined how that person viewed his or her existence. For the Swiss psychoanalyst Carl Gustav Jung (1875-1961), there is a body-psyche entanglement through the understanding that the processes considered vital - the physiological ones - and the psychic ones are part of the same configuration in their operational complexities. Finally, psychoanalysis can also contribute to a reflection on the relationship between the body and the earth, since this relationship can be seen as a metaphor for the subject's relationship with nature and its roots.

In the historical search for body perfection, the sociocultural context changes, but the ideal body continues to be pursued. The media encourages a relationship with a beautiful body, which can be purchased through consumer artifacts. The body ceases to be an organic entity to be manipulated by the cultural environment of the society in which it is inserted in a certain period of time. Physical stereotypes are continually shaped by the beauty industry; a generic standard of aesthetic-body appearance dictates how we should behave physically in order to adapt to this perfect image.

How can we look at the individual body - with its hereditary and primordial histories - in counterpoint with the imaginary of what this collective body of a given culture is? If art allows us to represent the particular experiences of body relations as property and individual identity, could it not also produce a collective experience of recognition of the body as a matter free from molding generalizations?

“If my body is your body to the extent that you recognize yourself in me”, art is capable of creating parameters of escape from this common place of equal collective bodies, towards a unique and unparalleled experience of the human being with his or her own body and the other's body.

These are the questions that the exhibition by the Collective of Postgraduate Curators of NOVA FCSH 2023 addresses at the National Society of Fine Arts, by proposing a disruptive thought in relation to the body and its territorialities.

 

What you have inherited from your parents,
Earn over again for yourselves or it will not be yours.
— Goethe, Faust, 1808

 

Sandra Birman, 2023

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Curatorial text for the catalog of the exhibition Every Body is Political, at SNBA - Sociedade Nacional de Belas Artes, Lisbon