Edible archaeologies

Júlio Quaresma, an artist who has felt an enormous interest in the harmony and serenity of the East, uses masks to invoke the power of what is supposedly primitive, introducing us into African rituality. He establishes a strange (dis)torsion of the genre that has to do with the painting of objects that do not move. For, although the mask “rigidifies” the face, it continues to be associated with ritual, with an exceptional performative capacity. We know that the mask is not an “autonomous” reality and that it forms part of a series of rites and myths, that it is involved in moments of festivity and in sacrifices, that it marks the exceptional and affects everyday experience. The “objects” that, in every sense, condition the lives of individuals are set alongside things that nourish us, and they take on a disturbing quality, as if these still-lifes were to set aside their decorative aspect and impose a questioning tone. Quaresma introduces a conceptual withdrawal in his paintings, as he did earlier in his particular images of the decapitated body, those capital visions that deprived it of the physiognomy of the face.In Júlio Quaresma’s imposing still-lifes we also find, together with the striking reality of the mask, the equally disquieting quality of the flesh, such as the enormous ribcage that dominates almost half of the painting entitled Vermeer’s Secret Archaeologies, 2013. This flesh introduces a history of death, violence, sacrifice and hunting that runs through the tradition of painting. Quaresma’s still-lifes certainly also present savoury elements, but they do not fail to introduce the uneasiness or strangeness of the mask, signs of life and disappearance, things that nourish us and also things that we fear, the physical dimension and something that may bring us into contact with the sacred. Júlio Quaresma’s work has always consisted of an exploration of boundaries in which the power of the visible has to do with what we do not really see. The theatrical planes of Júlio Quaresma’s paintings function as a veil, trapping our desires, suggesting that we are faced with an enigma; he meditates on a traditional genre of painting and at the same time introduces something foreign to that tradition, such as the African mask, without losing sight, in his “excess of the edible”, of the terrible situation of the underprivileged of the Earth. This artist’s archaeological images give us the pleasure and recollection of otherness, of magic and ritual, of that which is not identical, making our eyes confront a mask that is distant and that nevertheless questions us with a strange familiarity. This scene devours us and at the same time nourishes us.