 |
| First Communion Memories/Wood, embroidered saten with golden thread |
Rosana Palazyán
ArtNexus #40 - Arte en Colombia #86
May - Jul 2001
Mexico City, Mexico
| Institution: |
| Museo Rufino Tamayo |
| Luz María Sepulveda |
Museo Rufino Tamayo
Generally speaking, scenes of domestic violence are great fodder for sensationalist publications. The rich content of sickness, lust, and vice frame the headlines: a family man tortures his children and beats his wife; the drunken father kills his wife in a jealous rage and then takes his own life; or the estranged mother, desperate in her loneliness, puts out a cigarette on her baby’s back because he wouldn’t stop crying. These crude episodes of daily life disgust us, but at the same time are attractive in their fatidic violence.
Rosana Palazyan (Rio de Janeiro, 1963) portrays different scenes in which the common denominator is child abuse (of boys and girls, as it’s said in Vicente Fox’s democratic administration). Children who’ve been deceived, persuaded, beaten, raped, and even dismembered constitute the Brazilian artist’s iconographic imagery, though she confronts the spectator with an aura of apparent purity and innocence.
I’m referring particularly to the technique Palazyan has chosen to elaborate her harsh pieces: delicate cotton and nylon embroidery raised on cotton, silk, or satin. The images the artist embroiders on the fabric appear as comic book strips, with no particularly scary detail coming to our attention. When spectators realize that they must read the icons, they also realize they have become accomplices in a terrifying narration in which the child’s fatal destiny is an ineludible and irremediable constant.
In the installation Cajita de música (Music Box), we enter a white room surrounded by a light pink ribbon decorating the wall like decorative trimming, interrupted only by a few decorative windows. While we wind a music box that plays a lullaby, we enter into a heart-wrenching story of a little girl who’s born, breastfed by her mother, becomes a toddler, sleeps, is beaten, raped, and then impregnated, all the while her father drinks from a bottle, at first only watching from the side and then becoming the protagonist in this infernal scene of incest. In the next room we see three small-scale models of pinball machines portraying different stories in which, once more, children are the victims of the grownups’ authoritarian abuse. In the first two, the children die in a shootout. The third machine narrates the episodes of a group of children who go to school, play, and then, for some reason are called by the principal, who reprimands, punishes, beats, rapes, and then kills them.
Before we enter the third room, a monitor shows a video of other pieces by Palazyan. In it, we see more closely at the laborious process of raised embroidery. We also see samples of previous works by the artist, such as children handkerchiefs and underwear alluding once more the topic of violence. In other samples, rag dummies mount the episodes of a family fight as if they were part of a model for a theater presentation. The last installation is titled Recuerdos de primera comunión (First Communion Memories). A satin sheet placed on the floor leads to a kneeling stool padded with fabric and is embroidered with raw stories of a little boy raped by the priest who teaches him catechism. The boy’s parents diligently deliver him to the priest. After indoctrinating and teaching him, the priest assaults and rapes the child. Then he returns him to his parents, who, unaware of their son’s tragedy, thank the priest for the day’s lesson.
The technique of embroidery was rescued from the domestic environment and was embraced as a valid form of high art during the mid-1970s. It has, nevertheless, always been considered a “feminine” technique, and its laboriousness is confined to the representation of decorative elements. The strength in Palazyan’s works is not limited to her exquisite skills in embroidery, but also in the way she decontextualizes the apparently ornamental motifs with hair-raising contents.
Luz Maria Sepulveda
http://www.artnexus.com/Notice_View.aspx?DocumentID=5275
