‘City of Refuge III’, Abbazia di San Giorgio Maggiore, Venice, 20 April – 24 November 2024. Collateral Event of the 60th International Art Exhibition – La Biennale di Venezia.
Johannes Scott, July 2024.
The title of Berlinda De Bruyckere’s art exhibition at the Venice Benedictine monastery recalls a song by the musician Nick Cave, City of Refuge, which is a soundtrack in the romantic fantasy film by Wim Wenders, titled Wings of Desire. The film, about angels who give comfort and protection to the city’s vulnerable inhabitants, provides us with a point of entry to appreciate De Bruyckere’s installation. In addition, the Benedictine monastery, and the way the work is orientated for reception, provides the viewer with context to immerse in a contemporary aesthetic experience.
The monumental white marble church, Benedictine abbey of Saint George on the island of San Giorgio Maggiore, has been an active place of worship since the early renaissance when it was designed and built. Massive, engaged columns and pilasters support the cruciform plan nave and transepts of the basilica, with the high altar on one end and chapels along the side arcades where sacred remains of saints are venerated. In the transepts are renaissance paintings such as Tintoretto’s The Last Supper and Virgin and Child with Saints by Sebastiano Ricci. For the past decade, the Benedictine monks made the monastery available for site-specific art installations that promote authentic humanism – public entrance is open and free.
It is in the nave of the church, amongst frescoes with winged cherubic figures and renaissance saints dressed in draping white garment that the angelic context embraces De Bruyckere’s City of Refuge. At a distance, her installation of marble-grey toned figures mounted high on pedestals alongside silver mirrors blend perfectly with the serenity of the architectural interior. It is closeup that the overwhelming, psychological difference comes into play. Her figures are nothing like angelic saints, they are genderless, faceless, bare, wavering beings, blanketed from head to knees in ‘unwashed’ hide. They show, as De Bruyckere succinctly puts it, how helpless a body can be.
The huge, tilted mirrors, framed by draping, stage-like curtains, serve as imaginary coordinates that activate the viewer’s poetic participation in the unfolding drama. The mirrors provide the viewer with two shifting perspectives: the angelic symbolic in the background interior or the closeup of bare, solitary flesh, void of symbolic veneration. De Bruyckere’s wax modeled figures are hauntingly real in appearance. The wax shows a translucent softness of skin – a human-like tenderness covered in a patina of dirt, from the knees down to the bare, slender feet. A wax-cast of animal-hide drape over the upper torso, arms, shoulders and head – a blanket for interim protection against the onslaught of primordial nature.
In the Sacristy library, adjacent to the nave of the church, De Bruyckere displays an installation of wax-cast tree trunks that recalls her exhibition titled Cripplewood at the 2013 Venice Biennale, held in collaboration with Nobel laureate J.M. Coetzee. The brute scene of felled tree trunks embraced by refined carpentry mirrors her earthly creatures enfolded by the monastery’s saints and angels. Previously, she had referred to these as displaying “pleasure of unattainable, desire without redemption” and “A crippled body in need of support.” Coetzee sums up the given context, “Like all trees, the cripplewood tree aspires towards the sun, but something in its genes, some bad inheritance, some poison, twists its bones.”
City of Refuge exceeds theological connotation – it represents the psychical condition of archetypal being. It implies hominid, prototype homo Sapiens, the adamite expelled from mythical paradise, and, as Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben would have it in The Open, the image of bare life at the end of time when man, again, becomes animal. The protagonist is akin to the image of primordial man created by the Greek god Prometheus – the one who was born naked and helpless – an inferior stranger to the natural world. Lacking the evolutionary instincts bestowed on other creatures, Prometheus supplemented its weakness with enchantment – to invent a fantasy world for symbolic solace. For the viewer in De Bruyckere’s installation mirror, the earthly figure, for interim reprieve, exchanges its marred protection for symbolic desire – to be protected by the wings of angels.
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