CONVERT BODIES/ Series

Text: Alicia Amador and Yaocí Pardo

Conversion entails a change of being. It must be understood as a process—and not just an event—which manifests itself concretely in the body. Any conversion is significant because it involves a change of beliefs effected by a change of signs, a language of new symbols. The convert’s rereading of the world rewrites the body as a reinterpreted text.
CONVERT BODIES is above all a process of re-symbolization of the female body. Unlike the idol, which reduces the sign to its manifestation and appearance, the symbol admits the invisible and sets itself apart from the fetish. The convert body recovers the symbolic aura of the human figure in its process of metamorphosis. Due to the undergone transformation, it becomes a manifest and unmanifest being under two different laws that simultaneously reveals and hides its essence. The convert body can only be understood as a permanent duality much like a palindrome: “Never odd or even.”
By redrawing certain representations of the female body in Renaissance painting, I convert the expressiveness of the female body in the Western pictorial tradition to a fluid line. As a pictorial support for this series, I use ovoid structures, in different formats, painted from the inside and/or the outside, to comment on the long-standing tradition of feminine symbols condensed by the egg, the moon, the pearl and the seashell. I recover the symbolic aura of the sacralized body through its dis/figuration. I deconstruct with a contemporary outlook the historical opposition between the veneration of images and iconoclastic faith. By effecting a conversion of styles, I restore painting as one of the most powerful tools of sacred art.
In the re-symbolization of the body as pure expression, I read acts of subversion and resistance: the images become visual palindromes. How is the convert body relevant today? Can the conversion of the classical form to an abstract line liberate the female body from its fetishization and restore its hidden dimension? Can the sacredness of the symbol be recovered if we redraw its fluid dimension?