Past show

http://www.wellcomecollection.org/whats-on/exhibitions/infinitas-gracias.aspx

Infinitas Gracias: Mexican miracle paintings.

Wellcome collection offers a library of extraordinary commemoration stories

By Giuseppe Marasco
Current exhibition of  The Mexican votive Paintings at the Wellcome collection . Are prepared and offered to a chapel in thanks for miraculous assistance or relief in a time of need.  Dating from the Revolution to present times. These small paintings range from the humble to the extraordinary in tone, event and materials. Executed on tin roof tiles or small plaques .  unexpected or poignant, humble painting to skilled work.
Escapes from Revolutionary executions,  hospitalisations or bandit attacks or bursting flood banks in the countryside. Stories which would have been lost or simply have never been made public.
They are Very Mexican expressions. Old world quality lively colours of the new world. and stepped in something of the magic of that time at literature that inhabited that world.
Very often the warm tones of the Mexican country and life are juxtaposed to the jarring tonalities
imposed by modernity create in themselves a very interesting dialogue.
All displaying an ability to take one straight to the heart and electric of the matter.
Theres an immediacy and an intensity of the personal in the details . One man was attacked by bandits, cross country. Shot in the face in the 1800s. Or illustrating the starkness of the situation and alienating nature of hospitals  a man under an enormous medical apparatus from the 50’s told that He had an incurable tumour. Some where problems that are no longer as persistent. But more than anything. It is the confrontation seen in the written note , that is so corrosive, of sciences absolute pronouncements on a situation. The oppressive nature on the imagination of the patient and the leadening of the Medics mind. The sense of being blocked, of impasse. The simple juxtaposition is so telling… so regularly placed in the adjoining sentence, is the Inverse that faith offers, the alleviating hope and correspondence that comes from this. To think of what the image of the Virgin offers. And the gladness brought in offering something back and being able to be public.
The contrast of attitude, that there are no absolutes, we with our knowings are always getting things wrong. It is interesting to think further on this that science, so bluntly used, does not even allow you the possibility of chance, of fluke.  You can sense on many occasions, going through the many painting, that thinking has displaced, deferred to a misperceived absolutism of science. The symptomatic misattribution  a cessation of thinking, imagination  and sensitivity. You can feel the image of the doubly clenched chest of a patient below the words of such bureaucratic pronouncements. (Would you ever really heard, the words sorry don’t know, its out of our hands?)

You can see how the paintings relieves one from a wearing, self beating misplaced responsibility and guilt in the face of events occurrences and illnesses.

The paintings as a signature contain the image of a the Virgin or a Saint invoked.  This use of an image to recur to. Offers, a calm distinct other space when a situation verges on dominating the person. Here use of colour suggests a different  tonal step in one thoughts.  An ideal space private space, expanded, personal and universal.

Forgotten details and sufferings that where, we could not relate to as they are now past and unimaginable, would be lost. And so too a greater sensitivity and attentiveness.
To think that how this ease came about to commission and make monuments to these events. With out commemoration many of these stories would not have been known, so real pertinent, extraordinary. Such a social resource and history would have been invisible.
And that so many persons had such control of their stories and collective narrative, history… much different to a rendering in the news.
There is a wall that had recent Votives. Made of modern items, or letters. it was quite messy, but the sense of embrace was most powerful. Here again was repeated the sense of contract. The completion of a thing set out on and done. Of giving thanks and being public.
It really does beat modern Relational aesthetics… just thinking how Churches or chapels once offered away to communicate these stories, offering a library of what can actually happen in the world. The very real and immediate things that can happen. In the case of the wall pinned with recent Votives, I couldn’t imagine anything more interactive more free.
How extraordinary it is that even when means are limited, paintings were found to be the most appropriate and immediate mode of communication. The materiality indicating a seriousness and weight of intention. This is quite humbling in contrast to the general association painting has in this country with a culture that is often perceive as daunting and it possibility for immediacy or complex story telling out of reach.
Underlying questions of visual literacy and culture in this country. While also highlighting the effectiveness as a mode to convey  heartfelt emotions. A complexity. And mindscape that allows of an outlet and a mode of countering the impositions of events fate and the naming of ones fortunes by others. These paintings offer a way of owning ones story and the positioning one can take. That is at once empowering and a very real and acute reminder of where many modern grievances evolve from.

The Facility with which these various articulations are used. Further highlights the broad “problem” of high culture. This fusion here of high and  low culture. Short circuits the usual circulatory conversation of Arts intuitions and contemporary art practises that shift away from painting as being a bit too hard. The dexterous facility, echos of a cultural legacy, a visually literate people. Articulate and capable of making malleable this material to there pressing and contemporary needs.
The language of painting as cultural norm and as easy expression. How would the public be emboldened to such ownership today?

Highlights and poignancy’s
On pinned on the votive wall, the Manga Jesus render by a teenager, for its carefree hybridity. And the newborns garment written seperately  on the left hand and right sides by the mother and father ,… “I give thanks for this small peice of flesh, this flesh of mine…”
And the collected votive medals arranged in the pattern of two seprate hanging ferrens. In a manner that recall the fluidity of Mexican pictographs.   Almost, one could with only the lightest slight of hand, suggesting pop art started in Mexico a long long time ago.