IDavid Barro ///

NOÉ SENDAS OR THE DEATH AGONY OF A VENTRILOQUIST

I see the whole of Noé Sendas’s work as a sort of agonising, twisted self-portrait in disturbing close-up. Like in Faces, by Cassavetes, rather than showing us a tactile world, coarse proximity makes sight difficult, blurring or choking it. Everything ends up in an obscenity close to blindness, like Bataille’s eroticism. Like the madness of Lady Macbeth. Just as Noé Sendas’s bare spirit in the work that bears the title of that ambivalent Shakespearian character, that assured desire, chilled to the point of requesting calm in its gaze.
“Nought’s had, all’s spent/ Where our desire is got without content: ‘Tis safer to be that which we destroy/ Than by destruction dwell in doubtful joy.”, states Lady Macbeth. This is the paradox of a virtual victory in the shape of destruction incarnate in a metamorphic Lady Macbeth, firstly a criminal, then demented or suicidal. That transforming violence, that delirium capable of disintegrating all ambition, leads us to think that the horror lies not in the crime but in the metamorphosis, in that voyage to oneself that ends up in suicide. And that is what attracts a Noé Sendas who works on appearance and inverts values; or rather bends their meaning, like the darkest Shakespeare.