LLEI D'ART 11

Stipl (1968). However, Jinks’s proposal with his Pietà is greatly useful to reflect on the meaning of beauty in representation, creating a dialogue with the iconographic tradition of the pietàs , the greatest example of which we can find in the statue of the same name that Michelangelo sculpted for St. Peter’s in 1498-1499. The iconographic and formal parallels are evident, so Jinks gives himself the challenge of being compared with one of the most renowned sculptors of the Renaissance. In his Pietà Michelangelo makes clear the learning of the classical language of sculpture, transmitted as a synthesis between the dialogue with antiquity, the study of the natural and medical anatomy, as is well known. This work makes a point of balance between the strength of the expression here and the perfection of the form, and distances itself from the affected style of many of his works. The Vatican Pietà is a sculpture notable for its silence, its quietness, for its search for perfection both on the surface and in the composition of the internal formal structure. The pyramidal effect guides our gaze: a prayer made of marble in which the classical language is renewed by the Florentine sculptor’s actions. There is the pre-existent tragic pathos of the theme focussed on the pain of the mother with the dead body of her son in her arms, yet beauty sublimates this pain through which the body is a figure, and not flesh. Five hundred years later Jinks transgresses the iconographic terms while maintaining the same compositional structure. Now it is not the mother who holds the child, but the child who holds his parent. If in the traditional iconography the mother is Mary and the son Jesus, is it now Jesus who is holding God the father, agonizing, as a metaphor of the dying faith of contemporary society? Doubtless this would take us away from our initial proposal, but the existential angst is inherent to the calculated representation of reality produced by hyperrealistic sculpture. Jinks provides us with clues to a possible self-portrait in the figure of the son. The sculpture was created in silicone to resemble the texture of flesh and skin, and completed with hairs inserted one by one in a work of the most subtle make- up. As Nelson says: The sculpture has a powerful presence, which at times is confused with a man’s. This is unusual with sculptures. You’d never confuse a Bernini for a real human. You just accept that it’s an illustrious effigy and not a real person. But, as with the realist sculptures of Ron Mueck, the proximity to human textures is uncanny. The slightly puffy belly, the hardness of the ribs, the lankness of the unsupported legs: it’s almost too lifelike [...] The sculpture is skilful and paradoxical: a figure that oscillates in your awareness between being art and being a man; a stripped down sign of a tortured spiritual history. Robert Nelson, 2005, at http://www.samjinks.com/essay.html, consulted 14/11/2013 This confusion, hyperrealism’s idea of replicating the world, is it not perhaps an attack, an inconvenience, an unexpected answer in art history that renounces the very idea of beauty as an overcoming of the anodyne everydayness of being? The use of organic materials such as hair or other elements removed from the ‘noble’ materials in sculpture is no novelty. We could think of hundreds of wax portraits that have traditionally had natural hair applied to them, from the domestic Roman lares to big city wax museum figures, and so on. The copies of reality created by Jinks are able to reflect modern man’s fear of being, the notion of immobility of a way of life marked by the consumption of materiality: the duplicity of reality exposes the immersion in a thought system that leaves no room for transcendence. For this reason hyperrealistic sculpture probably provokes as much attraction as revulsion. The recreation of the double of reality also redoubles the exaltation of the vulgar, of the ugly, and while this is not unusual throughout history, it makes itself felt especially strongly in the modern day. Both in figurative and non-figurative depictions ugliness appears to have taken an important place; in the face of the spiritual liberation the search for beauty entails, the un-sublimated real condemns us to immanence. The representation of old age, the proximity to the dead body and death is not in itself new. In the Hellenistic world the production of sculptures in which old age and death had a special importance until the unknown moment multiplied. Examples like The Old Drunk in Munich’s Glyptothek or the flayed Marsyas in the Capitoline Museums both show extraordinary realism. Spanish Baroque sculpture joined with the realistic representation of old age and suffering, but without the sense of transcendence through the redemptive action of beauty and, perhaps, an unusually realistic materialization of the sacred. I cannot help but put Jinks’s work to a last comparison with another artwork that has parallels in size, thematic and quality insofar as realistic representation goes, even though the work is very different in its conception and in the aesthetic sensations provoked in the viewer. I am referring to Els Primers Fred (The First Cold) by the sculptor Miquel Blay (1866-1936) in Barcelona’s National Museum of Catalan Art. In this sculpture, the figure of the naked old man is drawn with huge attention to detail, with a perfection and virtuosity expressed in each wrinkle; the deformation caused by the passing of the years is depicted on the body and the treatment of the varying surfaces impress a great degree of realism onto the viewer. However, there is a big gap between the internal concept expressed by both artists in their respective works, and this concept is determined from the very choice of the material to the meaning of both sculptures. Blay chose white marble to create room for a great attention to detail in the carving and simultaneous create new meanings for a classic material in sculpture history. Both works are replete with symbolism in the relationship between the two figures presented in the composition. However, in Blay’s sculpture the expired image of the old man is compensated by the new life offered by the young girl, whose form invites us to discover the beginning of a new, but also a renovated life through beauty. On the other hand, Jinks increases the angst of the depiction: we are disturbed by his excessive realism, disturbed by the forms with excess in their representation. Angst that depends not only on the theme of old age, but is also present in his depictions of young people or even babies. Is hyperrealism unfit for the sublimated representation of beauty? Jorge Egea 67