Baaaaahh
Ah ah ah ah
Há papel para isto tudo?
O aço é duro
O osso é mole
Só sobrou cascalho
O pilim virou pudim
Nem cheta restou
Do restolho ao olho
O cascalho no fogo
E o cão?
ITA Ita ufa UFO

Pizz Buin

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‍From Gold To Gods

‍The golden calf is a classic episode where one can witness a tension between power, representation, and matter — or subject, image, and medium — and the coexistence of extremes in the same object: the creation of images and their destruction, the visible and the invisible, the material and the immaterial, the animate and the inert. The calf is sacred not because it represents God or because it is made of gold, but because it is a divine image — the material object and the image it supports. The image is so powerful that it competes with God as his rival. Its materiality manages to make visible what is supposed to be invisible, manages to make divinity present. This paradox, the concomitance of concreteness and abstraction, also characterizes art.

A Pizzbuinian intervention in this story could invite a laugh, a glitch in the word Baal that turns the Lord into something closer to a talking animal. Pizz Buin may fall into this idolatrous temptation. Still, they do so through an “iconoclash”, a constructive destruction, an ambiguous place of destruction/creation: art can originate in its own destruction, the image can reinvent itself and reproduce itself as an image based on the destruction of the image itself.

Baahahal proposes the veneration of a form that lives on the shapeless. It is a totem of unrecognizable bodies. The work itself establishes a space of search for a potential image. An image-that-has-been transformedinto an image-to-be, or into an “art yet to come” already tested by the furiousness of its appearance’s impact.

Liz Vahia