NIGREDO

The installation artwork takes as a starting point the observance of the putrefaction of a stag whose resulting forms are bones. Such a process is gravity centre to meditate on the transformed matter by a creative act.

The nigredo concept, taken from Western alchemy, is the first of three phases in the transmutation of consciousness. In this context, the notion analyzes decomposing matter’s transformation; it deals with dissolution and returns of forms to an uncreated initial state, the initial chaos.

Suppose there is an image that par excellence represents this initial chaos to which this refers. It is one of Robert Fludd’s engravings in the first volume of his 1617 Utriusque Cosmi, a black square which refers to Genesis as a mystical idea, the beginning as the divine act of a creation that comes from – the prima materia -. In 1915, Kazmir Malevich took it up with his emblematic “Black Square,” a work where we see the nothingness, the void that anything comes.

Dressed as a woman and personifying the mythological figure of Actaeon, with two pencils attached to a horned stag skull, I drew the alchemical symbols of salt, sulfur, and mercury on three black panels.

The male stag uses the horned skull to fight for the procreation of his genes, struggling between the thanatic and the erotic tensions. Once dead, if we separate from the body the antlers still supported by the frontal bone, we obtain an object in where these tensions are in balance because even in the eternity of death, we can see the erotic power of the antlers. Antlers are here an intermediate object that lends itself to the communication of opposites, establishing a dialogue between the living form and the nothingness represented by the black squares.