The aseptic body Exhume as an artistic practice of ominous sublimation

Abstract

The present investigation makes a psycho-aesthetic analysis from the individual exposition Brújula de cuestiones (in english, compass of. questions) (exhibited in Galería OMR in 2007) from the Mexican artist Gabriel de la Mora (Colima, 1968). In the exposition he created a familiar portrait of 17 relatives, two (2) of them were already dead. De la Mora exhumed his father and sister tombs; he wanted to use their hair and skull mold from the corpses to complete the art pieces with a containment esthetic, far away from the abject and closer to death idea as a discontinuity, the mourning and the melancholy. Beginning with the psychoanalytic categories of the sinister, totem and taboo, the sublimation of the repress and the real, the analysis deepens in the work of art as a ritual exploration secularized from a familiar secret. The revelation of the secret breaks and, at the same time, returns the communitas pact; it used the corpse’s material between the perversion, the metaphysical and the empty.