The scenario of events is Mount Ida, in modern Turkey, southeast of the city of Troy. Zeus is charmed by a prince, the son of the King of Dardania named Ganymede, who works in his father's herds. The boy is commonly represented in the visual arts as having an athletic body, but not overly muscular, apparently transitioning between adolescence and early adulthood.
In awe of the pastoral vision of this ephebe, Zeus decides to take ownership of him via an eagle - there are sources that affirm that Zeus himself turns into the eagle, while others say that he invokes the animal. Taken away from the family sphere of Dardania, Ganymede is brought to the company of Zeus and becomes the one in charge of serving wine to the gods. As a treat to the boy and in generosity to his devastated father, Zeus grants immortality to the young man. The Greco-Roman narrative of Ganymede may be interpreted as an example of the power of rapture of an image in different spheres: aesthetic, generational, sensual and sexual.
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This exhibition by Zé Carlos Garcia speaks to this myth. It is possible to connect the artist's research, with a path of about ten years, to the mutation between human and animal lived by Zeus. The sculptures and objects generated by him are found several times in the structural recognition of furniture and animal anatomies, and the estrangement created by the torn plasticity of odd bodies. Bird feathers come out of an old wooden chair, and a small insect sprouts out of the hay weaving of another piece of furniture. Artisanal and zoology motions meet and generate images that seem to be changing before our eyes.
For the occupation of the room intended for the Zip'Up project, the starting point of the work was the meeting point between the human body and the architectural limits in the space; working from site specifics is something that the artist has become increasingly interested in. The image of a suspended three-dimensional structure composed by a chromatic variation of black feathers emerged before our eyes. When observing the making of the piece, it seemed difficult to distance it from a large black bird, which finally referred us to the story of Ganymede.
Instead of running away from the talons of this remnant bird, we want the audience to surrender to its call and exploit its movement through an active physical posture. Frozen in time by the hands of Zé Carlos, this image calls for a slow enjoyment of his sense of imprisonment, rendering uncertain its landing or rise movement established by his presence.
We invite the public to do more than just fictionally put themselves in the shoes of the kidnapped youth, but to subvert the source and to recode it from their personal visions of the sum of desire and possession. Such attitude is dialogic to the artist's gesture of moving the organic material and creating a narrative that asks for different beginnings, middles and ends.
It is expected that the bird sent to Mount Ida will land in São Paulo, being part vulture, part peacock and part crow; that the ghost of Ganymede's immortality return to its homeland and that the images, whether artistic or carnal, continue to entice and throw us into this shifting place between passion and violence.
Raphael Fonseca