$2,700

Artwork Description

The body is what remains constant to us amidst millions of gestures. It is our first language in the world, the first verb, or the first sentence with its own enigmatic meanings. The Egyptians understood this more profoundly than almost anyone; they saw the body as a fragmented experience. Their mythology recounts how Osiris is dismembered so that Isis can recover the parts of his body. Osiris, therefore, is not perceived as a body in the Greek sense—beautiful, agile, an idealistic, complete, even fatalistic body. Instead, Osiris represents the body par excellence, made of recovered and disjointed parts, gaining its meaning only when these parts are abstractly reunited. We never see our arm alongside our hip; we assume them and reconcile them in faith. The fragmented body begins to generate that language of hieroglyphs that lasted thousands of years because the body, being what it is—tools for interpreting the world and not an ideal of beauty—manages to resist trends. It was not positioned as a trend but as extensions of experience: world, body, image, language, word. The body is what gives rise to language. The body and the world, in their turn or whirlwind of opposing currents of gestures, produce words in fits and starts. The Capitulares are inspired by the Egyptian language to evoke a “riddle” in the title of the image presented to the viewer. Without writing or scribbling any word, the image’s content must lead to the discovery of the word, helping it emerge into the world through the image. For instance, if the word is “touch,” the painting will nurture the desire for the word, from the viscous way pigment is applied to obvious cues like a finger touching a wound.