Hildebrando de Castro

Senseless Heart

Between the unforgiving brightness of a light bulb and the vertigo of the void that the whiteness of the paper displays, the heart stops. This state of suspension, this standstill – they deepen the artist’s solitude. For a year, Hildebrando experiences the certainty of an accomplished achievement and the expectation of an imminent event. He wants to start it over, he turns the light on and lays a big white sheet of paper on the table and, when the settings and characters that have inhabited his previous works come back, he refuses to shelter them on the paper surface. He lives a long time with the brightness of the deserted surface, until he ends up viewing this assent background as the creation setting itself. The plots, the poses, the confined ambient disappear and a sole image imposes itself, shyly at first, fatal after a while: the heart. No more the Eucharistic heart, a stereotype of religiousness present in some of his pictures, but a living and pulsating organ, devoid of any narrative quality.

The white background functions as a glass slide in a lab, the drawing obeys to the rigor of scientific dissection, but nothing can prevent the bruise on the white, wounded by red. Indelible purplish stain macerated on the whiteness of the paper.

It is not difficult to recognize the death desire in Hildebrando de Castro’s work a bit further beyond the principle of pleasure. Since his morbid figures – from 1986 until the beginning of 94 – immobilized as in a wax museum where the eroticism suggested by the nakedness of bodies, by incestuous situations, and by provocative poses, is always blocked away. A deadly aura inhibits all erotic stimuli. The viewer does not feel the same excitement as a voyeur does, but the detachment of someone who observes butterflies transfixed in glass – covered boxes.

In more recent works, the artist adopts a similar procedure as in his previous period: he keeps his cool and operates with precision. Attentive to details, he selects and buys chicken hearts, photographs them and then gives them to people who enjoy this kind of food. With an accurate and self-taught technique, he depicts the subject being observed (he does not resort to slide projection on the white ground), adding consistency to the image through layers of sediment – from a substance as ephemeral as dry pastel – deposited on the paper surface.

An inner trip in search of the essencial. Conceptually, the process is that of reduction, evidenced by dropping the metaphor in favor of the metonymy or the whole substituted by the part. When he painted his feet as those of the crucified one, he was getting started with the cutouts. Formally, cleanliness is evident in the composition’s cerebral approach articulated around variations on a same element. The heart, a particularly emblematic image, appears in all its fleshiness, without the toning down effect of stylization, and is, for this reason, shocking. In contemporary art, after so many disruptions and once the “anything goes” attitude was decreed, it became almost impossible to find something really shocking. Paradoxically, in this series of Hildebrando’s works, it is the traditional technique of pastel drawing that contributes to emphasize the indisputable power of the iconic image.
Publicity artwork is what first comes to our mind, for in this field the image often appears enlarged, rhetorical, frozen. Hildebrando’s intimacy with the advertising world is a long-standing one, where he has rendered his services as a layout designer, not as an illustrator. I would dare say his work is a pop offspring, namely, a perverse and perverted pop. Looking at the pictures, it suddenly dawned on me that the hearts look like marshmallow-covered ice-cream cones, which makes us sick in the stomach and makes Oldenburg’s hamburgers look so innocent. As in Warhol – particularly, Marilyn Monroe’s Lips (1962) – the subject detached from the natural context and laid on a neutral ground causing uneasiness.

A gigantic heart, piled-up hearts and pierced hearts exhibited as still-lives evoke the feeling that such a subject is inadequate for an art exhibition. Even knowing that the organs depicted are of animal origin, the association with the human heart is inevitable. And how diverse and individualized are the veins, the amount of accumulated fat, the protuberances! Uneasiness and even repulsion strike the viewer. However, once the first impact is overcome, symbolism pops up and is nonetheless disturbing. The heart pierced by cupid’s arrow, the heart sacrificed in a ritual: Eros and Thanatos forever mingled. From small barbecued hearts to a cannibalistic nightmare of slashed bodies, repulsive and appetizing, haunting the civilized taste. The weight of the symbolic aspect overcharges the mere heart.

The works presented in this show include two pictures where parts of a doll are portrayed together with the hearts: two arms and a torso. There is something else going on here, linking the natural to the artificial. The dismembered body. It reminds me of children with their usual practice of disassembling all toys, even the most cherished ones: and in adult life, fetichism and the objectification of the human being. In all the works, the void where significants float, holds significations in suspension and at the same time opens itself to all significations. We are witnessing a controlled explosion, which reveals the senselessness that governs us all.

Maria Alice Milliet

April 1995

Translation by: Paulo Andrade Lemos