CORPOS SANTOS ( HOLY BODIES)

Art in our time, owing to the growing influence of American culture, has become thoroughly puritanical. Minimalism and conceptual art have removed the body from their representations to such a degree (probably a legacy of a Protestant and iconoclastic tradition) that today art almost has to ask permission to depict the body.

A rich tradition of exalting the body, above all in Southern Europe, with a long history stretching from the Renaissance and still going strong as late as Picasso, has gradually been replaced by the impoverished dimension of an art-as-language, wholly turned towards what prevails in the art of the various neo-avant-gardes since the 1960s, with the usual exceptions that only serve to prove the rule. Along this already long path, the unruly figurations of the Italian Transavanguardia or of the various European neo-expressionisms were little more than interludes, which soon gave way to a reassertion of the incorporeal and the immaterial.

That is why it is so shocking, if not scandalous, that some artists insist on the explicit figuration of bodies. One may think of Julião Sarmento in Portuguese art, or of Albuquerque Mendes, naturally. But one may also reflect on the equally exceptional case of Filipe Rocha da Silva. (…)

I would say that Filipe’s painting is inhabited by a deep strain of melancholy. It comes from realizing that his space-devouring crowds have gradually taken over everything, all the available space. And that, among them, no body earns the right to thickness and carnality. Or that those larger bodies standing out from his endless crowds, like the architecture and the landscapes, are in themselves holy bodies, that is, without weight and without matter, destined for the long crossings of those crowds. New York invading Florence in the strange dream of some hypnotic trance. (…)

Bernardo Pinto de Almeida
June 1998
From the catalogue of the exhibition Corpo Santo: large-format figurative painting by Filipe Rocha da Silva.
Organised by Galeria Quattro at Alcântara Estúdios, Lisbon.