Via Lucis: the monstrous poetics of the self or how the tragic crosses the body through the profanation of the sacred

Abstract

The crisis of language in contemporary times has led to a paradigm shift in the arts that translates into a systematically deformed aesthetic with the display of the tragic on the body through the abject. This is materialised in the violence linked to the notion of the monster, which implies the reconfiguration of what we understand by beauty not only from an aesthetic point of view, but also from an epistemological one.

With this in mind, in Via Lucis (2015) Angélica Liddell questions her own existence through the exploration of corporeal limits. The mystical-sublime experience that makes resurrection possible is expressed with the artist’s damaged body, combining aesthetic enjoyment with the forbidden and the visceral from the dimension of the divine. In this vein, a deformed vision of the religious ideology is presented through the autolytic and the grotesque. In this way, the aim is to reflect on how suffering is experienced in and on the body in conflict with the aim of transcending to the plane of the sacred through an imperious need for self-destruction.