Art is a way of symbolic expression of the psyche that leads us through a process of creation through which the artist finds himself by way of an internal dialogue. Art promotes the expression of the discovery from the depths of what we have found and that could be simply repressed or forgotten. It has the liberating capacity to bring to consciousness elements that are in the unconscious and that we need to express but that we cannot do in a rational way, then, these can emerge through the representation of the image or symbol (1) converted in art and it is through this means of expression that the artist can often find himself. It is a way of feeling, perceiving and expanding self-awareness, allowing an exchange of information to take place between the manifest or repressed aspects of the individual psyche.
From this point of view, the work Bípedos by Francisco Pereira provides us with a varied vision of his creative expression. In his bronzes, he shows us the way in which he explores deep spaces of the psyche (2), and with this he feeds our interest in self-knowledge and artistic expression.
A work of art is not only a reflection of the artist’s psyche, but also, in a deeply unconscious way, of the collective psyche. The artist that we all carry within us feels an urgent need to approach the work, to bond with it, to understand it, to look at it, to touch it, and what he produces is a reflection of his own individual psychology. A symbol refers to an element so deep and so complex that consciousness, being limited, cannot immediately grasp it in its entirety.
The totality of psychological processes, both conscious and unconscious.
With this approach, Francisco Pereira’s sculptural proposal has broken with what was stipulated by the Creator at the beginning of animal life. It has broken what is established, it has fought against the natural order of things, it has abandoned its own space that belongs to the animal, transgressing the limits imposed on its existence and, therefore, it has banished them out of their world and also from the world. of men, turning them into strange beings and even apprehensive to our psyche. The irreverence to these principles is reflected in the creation of creatures practicing acts of hubris (3), transgressors of rules and destabilizing order, balance and universal harmony. These Bipeds endowed with extravagant and disproportionate physiognomies such as their long, hard and dense bones that provide resistance, structure and mobility, are close to our search for interior psychic structures, values, principles, ideologies, beliefs and the flexibility to change, to move and make decisions in life, is what we have more hardness and solidity, the deepest on which we lean.
The accentuation of these characteristics is achieved through the combination of psychological traits and human morphological elements with an equally negative and chaotic correspondence, which in psychological terms shows us a body forced into suffering that enables psychic learning; making soul. The Bipeds, act as exaggerations of characteristics incompatible with the Apollonian ideal of the human being and of the animal in general, since they are located on the limit between the rational and the irrational, between man and the beast, between order and barbarism, between the conscious and the unconscious. This bestiary simultaneously frames the creative capacity of the artist to show beauty or ugliness in his work, provoking feelings of fascination or repulsion, symbolizing the sublime or the abject, virtue or vice, order or chaos, obtaining in himself or in the observer admiration or censure. In ancient Greek it means extreme pride or arrogance.
The Bipeds are constituted as possibilities of generating psychic movements in those who encounter each of these creatures, probably awakening the gloom that each one of us carries in our own interiority and that many times we deny it to ourselves. The dynamic towards a psychic development implies the recognition and then the integration of the unconscious contents into consciousness. The dual appreciation that we find ourselves facing these creatures brings to our consciousness the phylogenetic reminiscences of our evolutionary status prior to the bipedal condition and the animal unconsciousness that was inherent to it. In this sense, the step from “down” to “up” initiates him in the human stage of walking and, while he walks, a broader world appears before his eyes, which requires him to relate in a different way with his corporeality and with the world. that surrounds you It is the evolutionary leap towards self-awareness, in the face of the unconscious and instinctive dominant in e composes the Bípedos series, 18 in total, implies a journey through the tensions of the inner world, a perpetual journey through the human psyche itself. Every trip supposes a transit through the “self”, the same unravels an epic for the one who immerses himself in the deep and labyrinthine scenario of his own soul. Didn’t the Greeks treat these ideas through their expression: “know thyself”? Isn’t Ulysses’ return to Ithaca an inner journey?
So, each one of the bipeds created by Pereira builds and houses a particular expressive power and becomes the common thread of the plot that imposes every trip. They are milestones, psychic demarcations: the bifanta and the bifante, the bicerda and the bidog, the bicerda and the bitoro, the biceronte and the bicabre, the bicordero and the biballo, the bipotamo and the bicervo, the bimello and the bipardo. There is in these animated pieces the creation of a mythical, fantastic, supernatural, surreal code. In them the presence of the expressive force of the human is imposed sublimated, which is shown as a sculptural model of his aspiration to recover a lost transcendence and capriciously denied by the will of the forces that govern the destiny of men and women.
There is a link with the tradition of art, an explicit heritage that is important to highlight in the context of this exhibition. The work of Francisco Pereira, his sensitive commitment, weaves relationships with the surreal landscapes of Max Ernst, the commitment to elaborate a representation of the inner world. There are also reminiscences of the sacred symbology of archaic societies, those times in which animals were similar to men. But, we find in the “Nave de los locos” by the Flemish painter Jerónimo Bosch an important, significant reference, the impulses of the human displaced in the whirlwinds of life and death, without destination, without return. Art seems to be in charge of capturing that claim to transcendence that is only built through the deployment, just like the wings of the bigaso, the only biped of the species, of creative freedom.