Samuel Salcedo’s Sculptures Are Creepy And Grotesque
Samuel Salcedo’s sculptures are creepy. Simple as. When I first came across them I thought they were photographs of people in strange prosthetic masks. But no. They are infact very well made and technically accomplished sculptures which, when looked at long enough, are really funny, in a grotesque way. Circus freaks in an art gallery. As always I’ll leave it to the theorists to contextualize his work:
Samuel Salcedo seems to have understood that the moment in which culture is born, reality is covered like a satin wrapper and man forgets how close he is to passion, violence and submitting to dark and powerful instincts. Salcedo’s work helps us to approach the more absurd, cruel and crude side of human existence. Eliminating the contextual elements from his paintings and sculptures, that is to say, abstracting the subjects from their cultural surroundings, Salcedo illuminates all of our best-kept secrets. When we lower our defences and allow ourselves to follow the rules of desire, when we begin to forget what we have learned, when norms and behavioural conditioning vanish and we decide to undress and start skipping on top of an upturned basin – in that moment Salcedo lights a lamp for us which illuminates everything clearly. In this way we see how the ironic, the crude, the absurd and the often disagreeable meet in his work, in a kind of private and intimate chronicle
Via Sweet Station
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