Un pedazo de cielo

Un pedazo de cielo, 2022 by James Bonachea
From the series Plato’s Heaven
Soluble graphite on canvas
Image size: 31.5" Diameter
Frame size: 51.5” H x 40.5” W x 2” D in.

The theory of Heaven is a novelty that Plato introduced to philosophy. Inspired by this concept, the artist proposes a series of works where I imagine and recreate possible worlds only existing in ideas and materialized through art as an ideal means to fable and materialize dissimilar visions of a Platonic space.

In his theory, Plato puts perfect ideas in heaven, understanding that these ideas are geometric. He makes a scheme where he puts heaven, oblivion, the world, soul, and body, in a dynamic cycle where the body goes to the underworld and the soul returns to heaven, in that heaven of Platonic ideas, there are only perfect ideas, contrary to the earthly world that is imperfect and incomplete, to which we arrive for a
forgetting process where we lose the ideal referent of Heaven, from this concept, we adopt the ideal. Platonic, which represents the desire to remember and return to the world of perfection and order.
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The work of James Bonachea (Cuba, 1977) has been characterized as a constant invitation to re-signify both the beliefs rooted in the cultural imagination, as easily as the objects of everyday use. This practice has led him to the intervention of public and private spaces involving both his own body, as well as organic materials and other elements in settings and surfaces, apparently contradictory, within the formal solutions of visual and pictorial discourses. From performance to drawing, his curiosity for rereading the remote past has directed him to establish dialogues between the historical vision and the current condition of reality, resulting in discursive forms that complement an anachronistic universe of resignifications.