The autopsy of the incorporeal

I was always intimidated by the perfection and hieratic beauty of Salima Black’s subjects. This was due both to the undeniable technical skill with which she captures them and to the perpetual youth they display, and especially to the way in which the depth of their introspection determines that they ignore the viewer, segregating an unbridgeable distance; always fresh and alone—like deities—in an undefined space. (What I also interpreted as an implicit proclamation against old age and decrepitude touched me and brought me back painfully lucid to—this thing we call—reality.)

I also recognized in them the cultural legacy from which they emerge, the link they occupy in that vast representational system in which the portrait—believable or imaginary—is reinvented and renewed if its author understands the rudiments and rules of their tradition, as is the case with our artist. A technical knowledge that even serves him well to portray—or capture—with the gentle resources of painting, the essence of characters of a more ubiquitous, fleeting, and elusive nature who—like phantasmagoria—approach us from the iridescence of an electronic screen. Therefore, anyone who perceives echoes of classical statuary or Flemish portraiture, as well as glimpses of glamour photography and Japanese illustration in his works, is not mistaken. All imaginaries are susceptible to landing on the hospitable flat space of the blank canvas.

In this series on paper, however, we find the elements that constitute the artist’s habitual world in jeopardy: several of her characters appear suffocated, assaulted, and fragmented by a visible «blood» entity, whose appearance, simultaneously organic and mechanical—omitting between a malignant effluvium and a damaging prosthesis—we perceive as a metaphor for the plague that recently ravaged the world and which, it seems, will be followed by other calamities, biological or climatic, in addition to those we eternally generate as a species.

One need only reread some of the titles of these pieces to get an idea of the overall tone: «The Vulnerability of Existence,» «Anhedonia,» «The Acceptance of Suffering,» or, most explicitly, «Infection,» which, along with «Breakage,» simultaneously depicts the faces of its figures canceled or annulled with irreversible brushstrokes of black ink. «Matter» and «The Encounter,» for example, remind us of the predominantly mournful atmosphere of Victorian photography.

If it’s true that art is clairvoyant, it’s better to pay attention to this collection of «mixed media on paper,» with which the artist seems to have single-handedly atoned for our collective suffering.

Manuel Munive Maco