Anasor Ed Searom
Mythological Comets
This is the first individual exhibition by the young Brazilian artist Anasor Ed Searom in Spain. The show features, from a present-day perspective of surrealist poetics, the recreation of Western artworks that are genuine icons of our culture. The works on display are divided into three series of oils on canvas (entitled: Mitológicas, Serie Rembrant and Serie Caravaggio) and a series of erotic drawings (entitled Esbocetos), which, according to the artist, blend pornography, the sacred and the concept of ecstasy.
In the peculiar appropriation undertaken by the artist by reproducing the selected works, a procedure that she calls collage-painting, we are presented with a procedure that endows the original work with a new syntactic structure, generating new content and a new compositional structure. All of this gives the images on which the poetical action is based a different form.
By means of the aforementioned procedures, the artist manages to create a completely oneiric perception of classic works, deposited in our collective imagination with a univocal, closed interpretation. They are works that we classify as academic models, which were, and still are, valid instruments for teaching Fine Art, and milestones in the History of Western Art.
The artworks’ transgressive nature is not achieved by following the trail of Dadaism, i.e. by introducing elements that clearly attack the values conveyed (almost immutably) therein, but rather by delicately making the work surprising. To that end, the artist uses visual elements that enhance some of the work’s possible interpretations in a much more subtle way: the spectator knows that he or she is looking at a familiar image but does not identify it immediately.
The artist obtains a first impulse of empathy with the public, by means of a visual trick. She has to make us believe that what we are seeing is a Rembrant or Bernini; she therefore selects pieces of works that have their own identity, so that they will be identified as characteristic motifs of the chosen artist. Moreover, she endeavours to obtain the same effect as the traditional techniques used to create the original work. For example, she creates a kind of conceptual trompe-l’oeil by transferring digital images onto the canvas and making us believe that we are looking at an old painting, retouching the transferred image with oil paint.
On other occasions she subverts the laws of perspective by maximising the very methods used to portray the original work. She thereby interprets the baroque method of the character that is looking at the spectator and inviting him or her to participate in the scene, but now the idea of the scene vanishes and this character is the artist himself: a traveller that has passed over to the other side of the painting, who has penetrated within it and invites us to share her journey.
Anasor Ed Searom’s work is the story of a journey through the landscape of our culture, of our inherited way of seeing the world, of the way we desire, see and experience beauty by means of the icons of her art
which gives us a freer, more amusing and more poetical, in short, more surrealist look at the world.
The artist manages to fill, with her dreams, those works from the past that have been consumed by their sumptuary nature, revealing therein content obscured by years of history. She manages to penetrate within them, feel them and convey her experience to us. By virtue of the sum of all these subtle procedures applied to images (reproduced thousands of times and therefore delexicalised), in this kind of poetical dissection, analysis and fusion of pieces, she makes them recover their lost soul.
Reconverted for us into fertile ground for fantasy, Anasor Ed Searom’s works oblige us to undertake a journey towards the hidden and longed-for universe of the myth sleeping in our consciousness, where images are not impassable doors but roads leading to other worlds.
Monse Cea, 2009.
Biography Anasor ed Searom
1976
Lives and works in Sao Paulo (Brazil).
Has works in public and private collections in different countries: Brazil, USA, France, Canada, Spain, Portugal, Argentina, Greece, Italy, Switzerland and Thailand.
2009
Collective exhibition in Algarve (Porgugal), “Iluminações Descontínuas – surrealismo actual.”
2008 / 2009
Collective exhibition in Eugenio Granell Foundation (Spain), “O surrealismo como fenómeno colectivo.”
2008
Individual Exhibition in the Casa das Rosas, Sao Paulo (Brazil), “Rembrandt Série.”
Illustrates the cover of the poetry magazine “Labios Menores,” by Chile’s Derrame surrealist group.
Collective exhibition in Coimbra (Portugal), “O Reverso do Olhar: exposição de surrealismo atual.”
Publication of Poems-Exquisite Corpses, made along with Romulo Pizzi.
2007
Exhibition of water-colours in the Cité des Arts gallery (France).
Collective exhibition in the Eugenio Granell Foundation, “Sonámbula por unha Xeografía Onírica.”
Illustrates issue 9 of the Lilith magazine (Argentina).
2006
Participates in the Sonámbula group’s project, Surrealismo latino americano.
Contributes as an illustrator to issue 7 of the Derrame magazine, by Chile’s Derrame surrealist group.
Illustrates the O Casulo poetry and art magazine, special issue on Latin American poetry, Sao Paulo (Brazil).
Exhibits her work in the Impulse Art gallery (Italy).
Participation in the Australian Forum on Surrealism and Visionary Art.
Contributes to surrealist VBZ.
2005
Special issue on her painting in the electronic magazine Magadzine (Brazil).
Illustrates the electronic magazine Decir del Agua, special issue on Brazilian poetry (USA).
2004
Illustrates the electronic magazine Zunái (Brazil).
Individual exhibition in Sao Paul (Brazil), “As faces de Lilith.
