Francisco Pereira builds through the exhibition Bípedos (D’Museo Gallery. October, 2013) a fantastic imaginary. An anthropomorphic zoology that operates as a symbolic system to explain a particular reality of the world. This exercise, this change of body, this trip to the archaic stage of humanity, represents a deep reflection on the human being in its inner and outer complexity. It implies, then, problematizing the subject simultaneously with his psychic and cosmological environment, a permanent task of the creative act: offering a mediation between being and his experience in the world.
Thus, the zooanthropomorphic code stands as a reference to establish a particular taxonomy of the various spheres of being. The animal once again becomes the key to explain human and natural realities, a tradition that goes back to the past scenarios of humanity in which there was no clear distinction between animals and human groups. For example; In a cave in France, there is a cave representation that belongs to the Upper Palaeolithic and shows a man (biped) with the head of a bison chasing an animal with the head of a bison and the torso of a deer. Therefore, there is in the use of the animal element (in fables, proverbs, parables, myths and the medieval bestiaries themselves) the continuity of a remote practice that refers us to archaic times in which animals designated hierarchies. of the world; the cardinal points, the months of the year as in the Chinese horoscope and especially the link of man with the representation of the animal erected as a totem of the group, the explanation of his own origin in the world.
Thus, Pereira’s proposal suggests an immersion in the geological, telluric depths of the human psyche. From the temporal plane it also supposes the unfulfilled desire to return, an impossible return trip, the permanent search for the starting point, the vindication of the human conceived through his arrival in paradise lost, the end of the sentence and the expulsion of “sapiens”. of the original scenario where man, woman and nature represented a balance, now lost, in perpetual continuity.
In this sense, the piece “El Viaje” becomes one of the key works for the evaluation that houses the Bípedos proposal, an epicenter of meanings in the context of the exhibition. Here the ark, the figurehead of it, incorporates the figure of an anthropomorphic face. It is, then, a transfer towards the unraveling of the subject and his inner world, the only possible territory for the realization of being.
However, the ship also presents the principle of duality that every mythical reality, that every symbolic interpretation of the world proposes: Although the prow represents the face of a man, the oars that move the ark, while supporting it, present the shape of animal limbs: duality of the beginning of time, duality that integrates the subject to its deep nature. In Genesis God created animals and beasts, then created man. Thus our body-ark, bearer of our identities on the run, remains sustained and mobilized by the forces of a deep and primal animal nature.
Under this dual perspective, the ark clearly symbolizes a journey, a history, an apparent point of departure and arrival. It is a journey in the midst of the deluge. There is a clear allusion to Noah’s ark, so this piece becomes a metaphor for civilization thrown adrift in a universe without gods. The anguish of the cosmological alienation of the subject is expressed before the fall of the golden age that Hesiod narrates and Ovid recites, before the genetic expulsion from paradise lost and the absolute and devastating renewal of the deluge. Interpreted in this way: the fall, the expulsion, the deluge, as a context of the journey undertaken by the human, a deep concern for its future and its existence is justified.
So, Bípedos builds from the representation of the zooanthropomorphic a new code of interpretation of reality. There is a desire for totemic re-enchantment, a rite of passage that the show incorporates as an experience, which returns to the viewer the deformed, zoomorphic image of his own body: elongated like the emaciated legs of bipeds, a metaphor for an aspiration to transcendence. anchored to the earth by the earthly forces typical of the imaginaries of death. The resource of the poetics of dissimilarity, the unsuspected permutations to produce another reality, represents a constant within the framework of the series of sculptures presented by Pereira. There is also a desire to express a reflection on the subject as a sign of the times we are passing through: bipeds without the protection of the gods thrown out into the open and acceleration of the journey of our times without itineraries.
So each piece