Mirrors of a lost humanity
Museum of contemporary art (MAC Lima)
Lima, Peru
(2021)

IN RAW FLESH

Rafael Pascuale and the Traces of a Lost Humanity

Peruvian painter Rafael Pascuale (b. 1987) revisits a Baroque notion of the human body through his canvases, offering new and unsettling visual and theoretical proposals. He draws upon the canonical iconographic compositions of José de Ribera (1591–1652), Guido Reni (1575–1642), and Peter Paul Rubens (1577–1640), among others, to intervene in the traditional European imaginary associated with Greco-Roman mythology, the Holy Scriptures, and Catholic hagiography. His large-format paintings—exhibited here for the first time—literally re-present the Three Graces, the Martyrdom and Crucifixion of Saint Peter, the flaying alive of Saint Bartholomew, and the Massacre of the Innocents, not to mention other classical scenes captured in his splendid pen-and-ink sketches.

The common denominator in all his works is the “bare carnality” of the Baroque. Pascuale starts from a raw, almost scientific physiognomic naturalism, from which he constructs imaginary anatomies with dysfunctional limbs. He employs an Italian Renaissance painting technique known as bottegiando, layering paint beneath glazes to give his figures a nearly sculptural, three-dimensional texture. Obsessed with genetic mutations, Pascuale presents these transgressions of the natural order as surrealist representations with moral undertones. In his versions of the martyrdoms of Saints Peter and Bartholomew, the bodies of the saints are physically fused with those of their tormentors. The young, muscular torsos of the aggressors merge with the visibly aged anatomies of their victims. These are distinguished by the texture and shifting colors of their parchment-like, translucent, greenish-gray skin, with folds that hang and peel away from the opaque flesh.

Pascuale transgresses religious art to resemanticize it. His figures have multiple limbs—heads, hands, legs, torsos, abdomens—suggesting they are living, moving beings within the frame. None of them, however, have a face. In other words, they are no longer identifiable historical or mythical figures typical of European Baroque art. In his painting, the Divine Word—the incarnate God made flesh—has vanished forever. It has been obliterated, liquefied into a mass of anonymous, irredeemable collective bodies, without voice or personal identity.

Pascuale has created a powerful visual metaphor that personifies the modern dehumanization of society and war. The Massacre of the Innocents—his masterpiece—is a contemporary Baroque hieroglyph that encodes the total devaluation of the human body in our time, reflected in the immense pile of innocent men, women, children, and elders, stacked upon one another, massacred and inert. Herod embodies the tyrannical ruler who exercises absolute power by oppressing the faceless bodies of dehumanized victims. The biblical scene echoes the current, dramatic war crisis unfolding in the Middle East. For all these reasons, Pascuale’s painting—with its deep black backgrounds and non-existent spaces—is a mental mirror of our lost humanity, in raw flesh.