Ana Pacheco’s stunning wooden figures: A solid hallucination

The title piece of Ana Maria Pacheco’s stunning survey show Remember is a sculptural epic, a multiple grouping of many larger-than-life polychrome lime wood figures arranged in the cavernous space of the Festival Gallery. These figures, adults and children, variously attired in archaic and contemporary clothing, are waiting. Some — displaced, in transit, weary? — rest, sitting on the ground, some observe, an otherworldly chorus. Trouble is brewing within two knots of males, as victims are singled out. A goddess oversees.

There are myriad connections and interactions between the individual figures and groupings even as they seem to occupy different worlds, or perhaps different levels of being. Rather than spelling out an authoritative narrative line, or specifying identities and circumstances, Pacheco invites our interpretative inquiries. Viewers’ own associations and perspectives articulate the work.

Remember is a particularly ambitious instance of the ensemble pieces for which Pacheco is best known, and the show features three of her earliest, rather chilling examples of the form, Some Exercise of Power. Power and memory are, she explains, two dominant constants that run through her oeuvre.

Pacheco was born in Goiás in central Brazil, in 1943. Notably youthful for her age, she is especially animated and enthusiastic about her art, cheerfully owning up to being obsessive about it. As she grew up she was drawn to both art and music, and her studies straddled both. Teaching at third level in Rio de Janeiro, her life appeared settled into a predictable pattern when, aged 30, she took the radical step of accepting a British Council scholarship to the Slade in London to study sculpture. It meant opting for art rather than music, though music, she points out, is still vital to her.

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Why England, though? Because, she says, it wasn’t the easy, obvious choice that, for example, Portugal might have been. At The Slade she studied with the prominent post-war sculptor Reg Butler. He was, as she puts it, fine to deal with until you said no to his guidance and advice. During the 1970s Butler controversially began to make rather fetishistic, life-like, painted bronzes of contorted female nudes with real hair. It’s tempting to conclude that Pacheco learned what she thought might be useful from Butler without becoming in the slightest invested in his vision.

She has never taken to bronze, for example, and doesn’t even like it much, and she is definitely a carver, not a modeller. Wood is her favoured medium (“I need the resistance”). She draws a lot, and beautifully (as witness a tremendous group of silverpoint drawings in the show), and she is a keen printmaker: “Printmaking is like a kitchen where I come up with recipes and try them out.” She is not given to meticulous maquettes. “I make working models as I go along, but as guides. If I was to recreate something small on a large scale I’d just be repeating myself, and that is not interesting to me.”

It took Pacheco seven years, she recalls, to figure out where she was going: “It was difficult. I found the sculptural language I had developed was redundant in London.” Someone chanced to show her a slide of a religious procession; it triggered recollections of processions from her childhood. “During Holy Week, the darkness, the candlelight, the painted statues — it was all very intense for a child.” Her mother was Protestant, her father Catholic. “The reformation and counter-reformation loomed large in Brazil.” She attended a Jesuit university: “Art history began with the Baroque.” The Baroque style, in part a riposte to the austerity of the reformation, was for long widely known as “le style jésuite” and was embraced, and a given distinctive form, in Latin America.

She has long cited the renowned colonial-era sculptor and architect Aleijadinho as a major influence. His masterpiece, the Twelve Prophets, comprises 12 larger-than-life soapstone figures dispersed around the grand staircase of a basilica in Congonhas do Campo, an utterly extraordinary site-specific sculptural monument. The links to Pacheco’s work are clear.

The first piece you encounter in her show is the imposing Shadows of the Wanderer. Flanked by a sombre, black-clad chorus, a young man stoops under the weight of an older man he carries on his back. The image stems from Virgil’s Aeneid, as Aeneas bears his father from the burning city of Troy, but it’s important to point out that the source is a starting point and the work is not an illustration.

Rather, Pacheco draws on mythic and literary motifs as a kind of collective cultural memory, accessing archetypes, some acknowledged, some hidden and forgotten, as they persist in the contemporary world: “I like to bring the past into the present.” Brazil, for example, she argues, is a place largely indifferent to, because uncomfortable with, its own complex past, uneasy about its amalgam of layered identities, from African slaves and indigenous Indians to Portuguese colonists.

These considerations, together with the brutality of regimes based on arbitrary political or religious absolutes, fed into her early mature works on the exercise of power, Kafkaesque nightmares in which terrifyingly bland, soulless authority figures brutalise and in one case symbolically devour hapless victims. “Humans haven’t changed,” she points out. “Darkness is part of our nature.”

One of her power trilogy, The Banquet, crystallised one Baroque facet of her work for her. The ensemble is organised so that, she realised, the viewer completes the composition and holds it all together, a tenet of the Baroque that has been central for her since.

The prone, naked victim in The Banquet raises its head. “I was going to make the head lowered, hidden, but as I worked it occurred to me that the piece was stronger with it raised because hope somehow endures, despite everything.” Misplaced hope? “Not really. That’s the way it works. There’s continuity in the cosmos, people carry on in the end. Perhaps religions come from that.”

Also, she likes to slightly subvert assumptions. The two figures in Acrobats are in a ghastly position, suspended by their ankles from a scaffold, “torture victims” essentially. But they are wearing cheerful M&S swimming trunks, and even the upbeat title militates against the horror of their predicament.

Each of her figures, she emphasises, is carved from a single block of wood, which makes the process challenging, arduous and expensive. It has to be so, she feels: their mass and density contribute to their imposing presence. The huge blocks of wood shrink and contract, opening up cracks and fissures in their surfaces, which can be disconcerting but convey a sense of vulnerability and, despite their intractable physicality, of life and impermanence. Perhaps unusually, she likes viewers to get up close to her work, even to touch it. You can wander among the many individuals who make up Remember, a development of her idea that the viewer completes the sculpture.

She used to manage all the manual labour alone, usually in freezing cold studios. Now, she says appreciatively, she has a cherished assistant who really understands wood and wields a chainsaw with expertise. All the same, she reckons she is unlikely to undertake a project on the scale of Remember again, not least because it would be enormously expensive. The sculpture was funded by The Williams Charitable Trust.

While drawing on various precedents, her sculpted figures are distinctively her own. The heightened realism of Spanish and Latin American polychrome religious sculpture was clearly an influence, but her work is hyper-real not in terms of literal verisimilitude, as with a photograph, say, but in a vivid, stylised, dreamlike way, with something of the quality of a solid hallucination. The eyes of her figures are onyx, and the teeth are dental artefacts, individually inserted.

Although she has not played the piano for some time, she still loves music and in the course of our conversation mentions music as a point of comparison more than once. Musical performance, she notes, requires the musician being so comfortably familiar with a piece that playing it transcends conscious effort. “Then, in performance, music takes place.” She aims for that state of mind when she works.

Also, she observes, that although she deals with highly charged material, she is not an expressionist. “What I love in Bach is structure, and that’s what is important to me in sculpture.” Here is another principle of the Baroque: every element should quietly contribute to the balance and integrity of the whole.

• Ana Maria Pacheco’s exhibition Remember is at the Festival Gallery, William Street, Galway, July 11th- 24th. Entrance is free. giaf.ie