LUIS AMAVISCA. CANDOR
With “Candor”, Luis Amavisca builds a story that spins around a universal theme,
and for this, he starts from a very close and specific case. He succeeds
transcending and, thus, making that the message get to all of us, by avoiding the
humorous and preserving only the essential.
The story starts developing with the first photograpgh in the room and grows
gradually in an evermore dramatic and intense tone until the visitor gets to the
video-sculpture that can be seen at the entrance, a piece that actually marks the
end of the story. The estructure is tidy and sharp, based on the infallible
Aristotelian progressive rule: introduction-exposition-denouement. Thus, the viewer
may see how the main character, a woman, subjected to the unbearable pressure
of her environment, passes through the phases of a profound emotional crisis,
which goes from resignation-assumption, becoming aware of her reality, reification,
rebeliousness, and self imprisonment, to the disappearence, the invisivility, the
dissolution in the total white, the void . The sensorial ascepsis to which she appears
subjected and to which she had been led, notwisthstanding the reactions
experienced, contrasts with the sharp emotion felt by the viewer and caused by its
strong cathartic effect.
The word “candor” brings to our mind two different meanings that, instead,
make reference one to another. The status of absolute naivety, completely void of
any malice, should resemble the unspotted, pure one that preceded the original sin,
and which finds itself depicted in immaculate whiteness, and related to clarity and
light - the photographs are printed on aluminium, which increases this light effect,
and are purposely dominated by white and sepia. Thomas of Aquino considers that
beauty requires, among other things, integrity and brightness, and that, just as the
Platonian aphorism says, beauty involves generosity and all the way round – The
Banquet. According to Dionysus Aeropagus and Juan Escoto, light derives from the
good and portrays kindness. In his “Fall of the Middle Ages”, Huizinga analyzes
thoroughly the relation between brightness and Good, darkness and Evil, a relation
inherited from the zoroatrian medieval Scholastic through Greece, Rome,
christianity and then assimilated by Western Europe as a personal discovery. It is
this relation gives birth to the interpretation of the white colour as the symbol of
kindness, ultimate truth, regeneration of the soul, access to a new life, but also a
symbol of purity, virginity, peace, harmony. Mircea Eliade mentions in one of his
works that the white (colour) symbolizes, in the initiation rituals, the colour of the
first phase - that of the fight against death.
The first meaning of the use of white in Luis Amavisca´s exhibition, although not
the only one, alludes to that ingenousness, to that innocence void of any
malevolece or evil of the main character: the woman whose naked body is solely
covered in a white dust, which talks about her condition and points out to her
vulnerability. The other character, – omitted – the society, brings to light a whole
new meaning, very different from that of the white colour. It is a meaning of the
aseptic spaces that perpetuate a domination model, a model of exclusion of the
different, of the minorities, of the weak, a system of social division that makes
room for spatial segregation, through which they (the minorities) find themselves in
environments where decision and prestige mechanisms have no place – J.M.G.
Cortés. This marginalisation transforms them into “absent bodies”, almost invisible,
and this represents, for many of them, a cause of frustration that ends up in
anxiety or another type of emotional distress.
In his “Essay on blindness”, Saramago disguises as “white blindness” the general
madness of the society, a society that looks without actually watching.
Feminity has always been put aside from the power centres, as a consequence of
those historically drawn spatial divisions, in order to fit in the gender defined dual
opposition relations model. José Miguel G. Cortés´s analysis is being confirmed by
Foucault´s affirmation that the small, the daily, the “unimportant”, remains totally
submerged under the power of the great topics and the political transcending
discourses, which, in turn, forget about the structures and rules that organize and
govern daily life.
The woman covered in white dust exhibits her innocence, but her light “attire”
also suggests her positioning in those - emotionally and physically speaking marginal, left behind places. Her locking behind the white tied sheet is very
relevant – and evokes madness. Emily Dickinson decided to dress up in white and
withdrew to a village house, action that brougt her the qualification of an alienated
woman.
A lot of other women have denied to fulfill the role pre-assigned to the feminine
condition, a role imposed not solely by men but condemned and denounced by
many of them. Most of these courageous and passionate women have defied
conventionalities and rules – symbolized here by the lipstick and the pathetic red
make-up of the mouth suggesting a bite – that were suffocating them, and instead
adopted “extravagant” attitudes, showing themselves just as they were and
venturing into the “politically incorrect” experiences. Most of these women joined
the ranks of the hospital rooms where cases of hysteria were studied, an illness
traditionally considered to be of women exclusively and, for this reason, with a
double pejorative meaning. This was curiously signaled at the end of the XIXth
century, when the feminist movement succeeded to enter the public debate forums.
One such famous forum was that of La Salpetriere where Charcot – father of
neurology – explained the inadecuacy of the term, as hysteria was an illness
suffered by men also, and claimed the dignity of the women affected by it,
including the “post mortem” diagnose of Saint Theresa (of Avila).
Luis Amavisca pays tribute to the tormented women by dedicating to them a sort
of an altarpiece conceived as a combination of three light boxes hanging down from
the ceiling and holy cards scattered on the ground.
I.H.
Translation by Cristina Tanasse