(Gath-Šmânê)
This work represents the uncontrolled bond of fatherhood on children and how it can affect them, becoming an obstacle that will not only make them weaker mentally and emotionally, but will also make them often not bear the burden that the world demands of them and make foolish decisions that affect not only them but also their families.
This work is a critique of ourselves as parents and as children. This is the reason why I did this work, not because of what cosmetically it seems to represent (an offense to the Christian / Catholic religion) and where the most conservative and religious minds could find some offense or transgression to their beliefs, but that I wanted to use this concept because years ago I learned that the communicative message in a work of art can be more intense and controversial if it enters the personal field of the viewer in aspects such as sexual, emotional, ideological and clearly moral.
I represented this theme through the Virgin Mary, since she is the most famous and pure mother symbol in our Western culture and who historically collects the qualities that a mother is expected to have with her children, being the moral standard, of support and greater affection that in most cases we have.
To understand Western art and its evolution, it is necessary to focus on religious art and the way in which the ancient masters used it to show us the cosmology of Christianity or in some cases hide through symbols some no accepted ideas as a form of protest. It is well known that an artist of that time was limited not only by the strength and influence of the church, but also by several of the patrons of these artists were the ones who sponsored these works and commissions.
In this work I used various classic symbols of Christian art, but in favor of its narrative discourse; the criticism of the overprotection of our parents and of ourselves as sons: For the Catholic Church, the colors in the Virgin's tunics have different meanings that represent either her miracles as the mother of Jesus or directly show what she felt at a certain moment towards her son. In this specific case I used the colors that represent purity, sacrifice and divinity because I think is very commendable that parents give us everything with all the good intentions in the world so we do not value it and take advantage of this to manipulate them and always be in a comfortable zone that does not allow us to evolve and learn.
An aura in religious art shows the immensity of the spirit of the person who holds it, as well as its eternal link with enlightenment and the cosmos. In my work I made it replacing it with fire, as a sign of the intensity with parents can love their children, an intensity that like all badly controlled fire goes from giving heat to burning and destroying. "Hell is paved with good intentions"
The cracks in the virgin's eyes represent how the blind love of parents leads them to make sacrifices that destroys them and makes them go through all kinds of sufferings, the cracks are tears that come out of the blinded eyes of parents who do not realize how They ruin their children and continue to feed this overprotection in a dependent behavior and addictive way.
As for the child, the crown has the same meaning as in religion, suffering and passion as two predestined things, additionally I wanted it to be not painted in the traditional way but represented as a barbed wire symbolizing a confinement, a kidnapping or retention to the mentality of the son who cannot evolve and forge his character due to the extreme care of his parents.
The child has a dynamite wick that replaces his umbilical cord (...) symbolizing the detachment towards the mother who overprotects him. The more time he spends separated from her, the closer is his "explosion" and doom, since he did not learn to live and acts in an irresponsible, capricious and adolescent way. That is why the distortion in the child's face creates a shading that looks like a skull ... the classic allegory of death, darkness and pain.
In cases where our parents watch and pray more for us than they should, we are left with no choice to "take off the crown" and face the life to learn the lessons we didn't. Not only parents train children, children also train parents and it is necessary to give them the care and understanding that they once gave us.
