Beyond Flesh and humanity 
Lima - Peru
(2022)

Our idea of what is and isn’t human—whether we like it or not—depends on how our image aligns with established prototypes, and to what extent it reflects the image and likeness of what the human, in our imagination, should be. In contrast, the crossroads posed by these works is the gaze of the flesh that no longer recognizes itself.

In Ovidian narratives, metamorphosis is both the result and confirmation of a destiny—an inner nature that reveals itself and, in a way, restores order. But in Zamora’s works, metamorphosis has neither an end nor a purpose. It is a process that cannot be stopped, and what we see through his pictorial eye is this dissociation—so characteristic of the modern condition—expressed in a baroque language. Through myths, what we actually see is the perplexity and estrangement before one’s own body and its becoming. This happens when we can no longer halt its transformation, whether due to time or even disfigurement—when the mirror that reflects our soul shatters and we see ourselves horrifically refracted in its thousand shards.

The artist’s aim is to take the archetypes of the collective unconscious, in the Jungian sense, as tools to help understand the behavior of each individual. The various stages chosen to represent this sort of psychic evolution seek to find a sequence beginning with conception—as a symbolic form of the birth of consciousness—moving through the emotional, social, and biological development of the human being, until reaching a stage of both conceptual and physical preparation for death, ending in a confrontation with the void. But what we perceive as culmination is not a process of individuation, but rather a dissolution of this consciousness into the cold darkness and yawning abyss.

The distortion and manipulation of bodies, as well as the creation of monstrous entities, stem from an attempt to comprehend the mysteries of the physicality of being. Thus, a somatic consciousness develops, which finds itself in constant battle with its own preconceived forms. To briefly quote Eielson: what these paintings show us is a true Dark Night of the Body.

Eielson, in turn, referenced a poem by Saint John of the Cross, which brings us to the formal visual language of the images discussed here: baroque tenebrism.

The mysticism of the Baroque includes the flesh—and not only that—the body is the essential vehicle through which divine light is worked and received. This occurs through the purgative, illuminative, and unitive paths. Such was undoubtedly the case in the spiritual exercises of Saint Ignatius of Loyola or for Saint Rose of Lima herself. Of course, this contrasts with the superficial preconception that opposes spirit and matter, but the truth is that, in practice, the mystic’s vehicle is the body. Accepting this fact should not diminish its metaphysical quality.

The tenebrism of the 17th century, so intensely embraced in this exhibition, brought a particular element to Christian painting: darkness. In Byzantine painting, gold is light—divine light that permeates every scene. But painters like Caravaggio adopted a raw language, and were criticized for turning the holy figures they depicted into mere humans—too earthly in appearance, stripped of dignity and hieratic posture, often desperate, people of flesh and blood, lost in shadow, and with dirty feet.

This language also saw the emergence of the camera obscura, which would resemble an early photographic language. It’s due to these formal aspects that this current resonates with modern sensibility in a particular way and has been embraced by those practicing New Figuration in our century. Because it corresponds to our way of seeing, which we naïvely believe to be objective, and which in reality inherits the visual thinking inaugurated in that early modernity.

But there is, of course, the spiritual perspective: it is a visual exercise in negative theology, focused on expressing what God is not, and dwelling in the places where God is not.

But it could also be, paraphrasing Rudolf Otto, that this God is, in fact, more darkness than light.

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José Gabriel Alegría