Opening 14 December in Santiago
Dissections
What lies within the crisis between man, nature, and the city? Who occupies the deep fracture that forms between the hand (which creates) and the object (created), the foot (which treads) and the ground (which resists), between the skin, the bones, and the viscera? Some might argue that it is unnecessary to look at the sparks of fractures and crises (which, in a way, are self-created); instead, the core of the investigation lies in affecting, touching the point already impacted, and affecting it again, as far as the scalpel reaches.
A hypothesis for filling it can be born within the privilege of that apparent void. Thus, the artist looks to a generation of anatomists, philosophers, alchemists, illegal dissectors, grave robbers, and heretics who lived in Counter-Reformation Europe. The inhabitants of Tommaso Campanella’s City of the Sun, and more or less illegitimate descendants of Hippocrates and Leucippus, observed the body as a microcosm of all that exists physically and metaphysically and as a model for everything that can be constructed.
The body, which has been the measure of the city and the artificial world for most of history, stands in contradiction to monumental architecture. Monumental architecture develops vertically, elevating man toward the divine or dividing power into celestial palaces far from the people who tread the earth. This did not escape the anatomical-urban projects sketched in the lead by Leonardo and persists even in the contemporary world. Vicente revisits this ancient technique in his paintings, typically architectural, inevitably connecting them to the body. From these premises, in his work, the artist seeks not only to relate the body to architecture and the city but also to investigate, through the analysis of the body's stratification, what lies between layer and layer—in the space that separates skin from skin, skin from muscle, muscle from bone, and bone from spirit.
Using the body as a microcosm, emptying and recomposing it, dissecting as an anatomist would, Vicente Prieto also reconstructs everything man has built in his image: the city, society, and his crisis of identity and relationship with nature. It is a dialectical process played out between clay and lead, an ancient technique like fired clay and the industrial production of metal, and between a sensitivity to the precolonial and an internalization of the European world. In a way, it is a process that takes us back not only to Leonardo's notebooks, Miguel Servet and his theory of the pulmonary soul (which undoubtedly suffered the suffocation of fire), the surprisingly sculptural Andrea Vesalius of "touch yourself with your own hands and trust them," but also to the often-forgotten Ulisse Aldrovandi and his Theater of the World. Each of them sought, as the artist seeks, in a point between the liver and the femur, an empty space from which to speak.
Agnese Mussari
November 2024
