In recent years I have developed a vast series of works that I have called Ave Miseria. After having explored death, time, madness, and sexuality in my works, Ave Miseria brings forth a new inquiry into silence as manifested in tradition and ritual of being. The body, the remains, the sonic, the light, the water, what is not said or not seen, are now the tools or offerings that attempt to keep alive a silence that renders these works impossible.
COBRE MISERIA MIERDA is the title of this exhibition, which brings together a group of sculptures and the documentation of a performative action that reveals my current state of mind.
The relationship and encounter between the idea I hold in my mind and in my body of sexuality and death circulate through these human-scale sculptures. Their materiality is noble, and the symbolic resources are scarce and recurrent: bed, door, drawer, stick, hole, metal, fabric, tableware, water, soap, feathers, crosses, and a handful of voids, emotions, and austere lines.
In the past years of my life, I have lost and gained so much that making an equation makes no sense at all.
My name and my works are one.
I do not grow tired of thinking about the sound of bodies at rest, or, on the contrary, frenetically relating to one another; of hands that renew their expression as they are washed; and of the possibility of being one’s own lover for an entire lifetime.
In my hands: BREAD WATER SOAP YOU.
Carlos Herrera
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Sculptor without hands.
The uncertain biography of O Aleijadinho (“the little cripple”) says that when his tools began to fall from his hands due to a degenerative illness that prevented him from moving them, an assistant tied the chisels to his wrists so that he could continue working — so that the sensual Brazilian Baroque of the 18th century (the mining Baroque) would not lose one of its most powerful figures.
Carlos Herrera’s works — the sculptures, in fact — share that sensuality, except that here everything unfolds on this side of dogma: an atheist eroticism, whose only faith lies in the organic.
The bodies of these men, like sweat-stained cathedrals: dirty from friction, dripping, burning, playing — from the thousand forms of physical contact. The atheist hands of the sculptor Carlos Herrera grazed these men through the camera — but did they ever touch those bodies? Did they rub against the shine of the feathers of that clothing? What were they doing before and after the shot? Where did they stand? (Let us attempt an apocryphal biography of these hands.)
Yes — we know they managed to construct a homemade and carnal choreography, a tension of forces so close that it reaches us here, in the offscreen space.
A cross was tied to the hands of this sculptor. These sculptures, made of plates, beds, drawers, blankets, socks and shirts, set into motion a desire so shameless it spits in the face of the cardboard world that surrounds these bodies and against which works like these fight.
If the sensuality of the Brazilian Baroque was based on the blow of faith upon the body, then the everyday Baroque of Carlos Herrera reveals the domestic, secular altars through which passion circulates — made flesh/body.
Raúl Flores
