For several years now, James Mathison (Caracas, 1966) has been tirelessly evolving the human theme, that bodily shell which every so often cries out for spiritual reappraisal. His undertaking is tireless as if nothing had happened since Adam’s downfall or as if art had not exhausted that quest for likeness that has driven it since the dawn of time. The question is still present in the bronzed flesh of his sculptures, in the dismembered bodies and the anatomical fragments that abound at their risk in his workshop. Heads, arms, and hands prefigure the unfinished humanity of the subject, perched atop the abyss. There it sits, a blank page waiting for the artist to etch or emboss its surface with lines, text, hollows, grids, warps, and wefts.

His delving deep into the idea of what is human suggests an analogy between the bodily structure of the subject and sundry instances of spiritual activity, moving in an expressive gamut that ranges from naturalism to hyper-reality. The subject itself hangs in abeyance, shaken by contradictory impulses, between narcissism and melancholy; incomplete yet serene humanity facing the gaping precipice of an age-old interrogatory whose answer lies somewhere in the middle, equidistant from Dionysian impulse and Apollonian severity. His characters are distant and resemblant, the expression of multiple ontologies that manifests themselves in diverse facets and where the ego is the sum of all the identities that inhabit them.

His sculptures, therefore, explore that irreducible proximity of the subjective and the corporal. Arms, hands, faces, torsos, and heads take on the consistency of a “plural” ego in which the carnal and the spiritual commingle. In some ways, these pieces could be deemed the interception of those “identifiable flows” which according to Deleuze pass through the body, leaving behind a contradictory imprint of repression and desire.

Felix Suazo
Caracas, April 2013