If A Canvas Could Speak
Saturday, December 10, 2016
Juan Manuel Sánchez & Julia I |
There is the cliché (and I love clichés because by their
very nature they work) that we call: the artist and his (her, to be modern)model.
What if we could find some sort of technology that when
pointed at a painting like da Vinci’s La Gioconda, or at Van Gogh’s self-portrait
could tell us the circumstances from the point of view of the subject of the
painting? Not a chance! That would be speculative/fantasy science fiction and no
more.
But there is a variant that is possible but most rare.
Consider the following: What if I told you that some canvases can speak of
their experience of being painted?
Argentine painter Juan Manuel Sánchez and his former wife
Nora Patrich did not body paint as such. They used canvasses, paper and
sculpture as their principal artistic medium. But in a few occasions (and
luckily I was present to record it all) the two painted their visions on an
undraped human being. No, not body painting. They transformed the real flesh
and blood into a canvas of their imagination that could walk and speak. They
imposed (gently) this vision on a naked body and the results were spectacular.
I am hoping that I might convince some of these living
paintings to tell us of their own account on how it felt to be transformed into
someone else’s vision – a superimposition willingly executed.