Ernesto Pujol is a conceptual artist who creates photographs, installations and sculptures around memory and masculinity. In his photographic series "Conversion of Manners" he uses himself as subject dressed in a monks robe with gestures of gentleness and humility. Some images are shot from behind,
face hidden and only the vestments and feet revealed. In other images, his face is revealed and his look is one of total submission. But the images that do not reveal his face become monolithic black abstractions of form floating on an offwhite wall. Meditative in their simplicity, the elegant shape emerges as a man of the cloth in the Roman Catholic Church. In all of these works, “What,” one wonders, “is the artist thinking? And is this work satirical or reverential?”
The artist as model is (nothing new) certainly established in postmodernism where identity is an important theme, and the shedding and morphing of identity central. Often, as in the work of Cindy Sherman, identity is a process of active creation emphasizing volition. In contemporary life, art is a realm that can allow for multiple identities to be invented along the way. In some cases, art around identity can heal somewhat discordant realities. In some of Shermans’ work, she mimics the Renaissance paintings of saints adorned in wealthy aristocratic frocks, although by legend the same saints were actually dirt poor. Sherman took on these contradictions and more using devices to mock and reflect the unevenness of what people have accepted over the ages without hesitation.
While Sherman pulls from lore and history in her series, Pujol pulls directly from his own experiences. As a child in an exiled Cuban family, he attended an elite Catholic school run by missionaries, in Puerto Rico. The nuns who taught Pujol by their example, influenced him to attend a monastery for 6 years. In a series entitled “Hagiography” he dresses as the nuns and even creates scenes of St Theresa de Liseaux levitating off of the ground based on photographs of the Saint. His unmistakeable razor stubble on his chin peeps out from beneath the female saints habit in a sequence of images, with blurrier and blurrier backgrounds indicating the miraculous lift. Performative in nature, the works are both humorous and sacred simultaneously.
Pujol’s work is nuanced, particularly because of gesture. It’s without guise. In “Uncommon threads-contemporary artist and clothing” exhibition catalogue, Pujol states: “I am extremely interested in fashioning a visual history of human body, as well as how we have been reduced to our bodies and clothing, in what I increasingly believe to be a post object society; through the rule of fashion…These photographs are as much about the language of the human body, as it has evolved historically, as about fashion, about an esthetic. An esthetic can be like a spiritual experience, particularly if it is synonomous with purity.“ (July 10, 2000).
Perhaps because Pujol is tapping his own experiences, his work has a ring of authenticity. Through the work, he reinterprets masculine body language and ideas via the wardrobes of monks and nuns. In the process, Pujol’s work succeeds in creating a contemplative tone, transcending gender and religion.
ernestopujol.org
Hunt, Barbara, curator. Bodies of Resistance.Visual Aids, N.Y.,2000
Mosquera, Grarado. Ernesto Pujol-Taxonomies, Galerie Ramis Barquet, Mexico,1993
Ulmer, Sean M., Uncommon Threads, Contemporary Artists and Clothing, Hebert F. Johnson Museum of Art
Volk, Gregory., “Ernesto Pujol at Priska C. Jushka- New York” Art in America, Nov 2002
-- “Ernesto Pujol, Conversion of Manners Contemporanea 2000” Absolute Arts.com, July 31, 2000
MV
michelvarisco.com
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