Divine Matter

In 2021, Catalan artist Núria Güell invited Mike and I to take part in her exhibition All Order Is Required Pure: a Retrospective Exhibition (Fabra i Coats: Centre d’Art Contemporani de Barcelona, 2021– 22). She commissioned us to make a new work, in response to one of her previous projects, as a contribution and intervention into a section of her exhibition that she called Retrospective in the Third Person.

We picked up on aspects of the 2018 work Una película de Dios (A godly tale) that Núria did with a group of teenagers caught up in sexual trafficking and abuse in Mexico – who she asked to curate an exhibition of colonial-period religious paintings, drawn from various national collections, selecting images that resonated with their own personal understandings.

In response to Núria’s project, Mike and I proposed Divine Matter. An action and gallery work defined by the performed reconstruction of a late-renaissance European colonial-period religious painting, and the interconnections activated and embodied in its material composition. 

We selected an intense depiction of Saint Agatha painted in Naples in 1635-1640 by Massimo Stanzione, and actually held in the collection of the Museu Belles Arts Valéncia. The painting refers to the story of Saint Agatha’s torture, one of the particular narratives of female martyrdom selected by the participants of the original project. We commissioned local painter Pere Llobera to work with us, and attempt as faithful a reproduction of the original painting as possible, in appearance and physical construction.

Considering the painting as a material product of the landscapes it was made from and the processes of extraction and commodification it was made within, we revealed and explored the material interconnections, and geographical and social relationships, embodied in the materiality of the painting. We followed a particular focus on the pigments of the paint and colour itself – which included limestone, soil, animal bone, lead, mercury ore, lapis lazuli, cochineal, etc – the uses and combinations of which inevitably began to embody the trade routes, extractions and status of resources made available by European colonial expansions of the period.

A project commissioned by Núria Güell, and co-created with Mike Brookes – within our series Piles and holes.

With the support of Fabra i Coats: Centre d’Art Contemporani de Barcelona and Aberystwyth University’s Department of Theatre, Film and Television Studies.