To decryalize the sacred and to sacralize the profane, to order the chaos and disrupt the order, eroticize stigmas and stigmatize precepts, purify the impure, to prefer aporia to logic and the peripheral to the central … It is what we deduce that underlies the intentions of Susana Ibáñez.
The artist had already shown in previous works her interest in the wunderkammer or cabinets of curiosities (compendiums of knowledge prior to museum asepsis), in which the natural, artificial and marvelous world were mingled without hierarchies, composing fascinating microcosms that they translated an holistic and inclusive curiosity.
The unclassifiable, the exotic, the equivocal, the strange … occupied a prominent place in the not in vain called cameras of wonders. In Initiation rites, exhibition of drawings and diciplinary or devotional objects, Susana brings together the liminal state proper to the rites of passage with the ambiguous condition of mirabilia.
The allusion to female sexuality takes a metonymic, metaphorical, literal or latent form: holes, rabbits, paleolithic venus, the possessed girl of The Exorcist…, or a version of that painting by Magritte, Rape (with the facial features replaced by sexual organs), icon of the most obscene androcentricity.
Watch out with the rabbit, Susana warns us; the logic is suspended when crossing the threshold, the precepts are diluted, everything has a double edge: demonic possession becomes pubescent pruritus, cilice is adornment and flagellum, refers to the jeweled body and the tortured one, erogenous topography and opus dei …
Infinite erratic readings open to us before the confrontation of passions symbols and pre-Columbian pieces, prehistoric voluptuosities in front of modest virile members in Greco-Roman statuary: the drawing of the genitals of Michelangelo’s David reminds us the ideal of virtue and moderation codified in smallness of the penis according to the classical canons (inherited in the Renaissance).
Alongside the unknown specimens kept in jars, heretical fetishes are displayed, sexualities that avoid the binarity of gender, ambiguous pleasures…
Just as the neophyte during the rite of passage is detached from the social structure, he becomes invisible and impure being relegated to the margins of the community, the aporia of the hole that Susana practices making us enter into the “burrow”, also means to take advantage of that margin of freedom.
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Susana Ibáñez, Ritos de iniciación , solo exhibition
Curated by Alex Martín Rodríguez
in Factoría de Arte y Desarrollo, Madrid
until 26th February 2017
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