José Bedia. Nomadismos
Falsa Naturaleza, 1994. Cortesía: CAAM
LAS PALMAS DE GRAN CANARIA
CENTRO ATlÁNTICO DE ARTE MODERNO (CAAM)
Is it possible for a truly Christian artist to exist today? I think not, that Christian art is no longer possible, even if there are Christian artists and artists who produce works for churches and cathedrals, such as the notable examples of Miquel Barceló at the Palma de Mallorca cathedral or Bill Viola at the Milan cathedral. However, it is one thing for an artist to believe in Christ, or to serve Christian churches, and another for his or her works to posses the Christian nature of Medieval works, when Christianity was a way of life, and not just an institutional scheme of rites and beliefs.
In our post-Christian –or desacralized, if one prefers—society, art formalises and intensifies a life which, for good and ill, is no longer Christian, and which, faced with a choice between ethics and aesthetics, has decided to lend aesthetics the dignity of a way of life. For this reason, it is always disturbing and revealing to observe the case of the Cuban artist José Bedia, whose work is religious in a radically intemperate and eccentric way. He is decidedly religious at a time which no longer is. Because of this, his willingness to declare himself to be an open follower of an Afro-Cuban, or Afro-Transatlantic, religion, plays a secondary role to the fact that his work fulfils clearly religious objectives. It is true that all of his production–as proven by the seven installations in this exhibition– possesses huge aesthetic value, the product of the overwhelming elegance of the drawings, the audacity of the compositions, the power of the figures and the subjugating skill with which he intervenes on the exhibition space, incorporating it into his work. But the attributes of this unusual beauty are not separate from Bedia’s determination to turn each of his works into a fable, or, at least, a powerful religious parable. In fact, when I asked him whether or not his works conveyed religious messages, he said yes, and told me that, during the last edition of the biennial of São Paulo, a couple of black cleaning ladies–who had nothing to do with art and biennials– interrupted their cleaning work in front of one of his installations, upon discovering the image of one of the Afro-American gods. “They began to argue about the possible interpretation of the narrative I wanted to convey with that work”, he said. Interpretation, it is well known, is an unavoidable process in the field of religious imagery. Post-Christians know that, in a painting, one of the women is Saint Anne, the other the Virgin Mary, and the child with them the Baby Jesus. This is not the case of the legendary inhabitant of the depths of the most remote jungle, who does not know that the whole world celebrates, each year, the birth of Christ. For this reason, the fables and parables which govern the formal and scenographic devices of Bedia’s installations appear hermetic to us, who are unable to see anything more than aesthetic objects. Their meaning is only available to those who –like the nameless cleaning ladies– are in possession of the keys which allow them to be deciphered. By doing this, they confirm the vitality of an iconographic language which still defines the most valuable elements in their subordinate lives. Bedia’s work also proves the capacity of that same language to imagine and fantasise, from the perspective ofsubordinacy, the most urgent and recent issues taking place.
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