Office Saint Sebastian

 Office Saint Sebastian

The figure of Saint Sebastian has always been a body marked by repetition. Arrows enter, one after another, until the surface of the body becomes a field of wounds. In this sculpture, the arrows have been replaced by something far more ordinary and contemporary: ballpoint pens. Qué et sembla amb aquestes correccions (no tant oficina sino violencia més general).....Office Saint Sebastian is built from a previous work that had remained in the studio. The old form has been reopened, cut into, and rewritten. Holes that once belonged to another intention now receive the pens. Nothing has been concealed. The cuts remain visible, as do the traces of the tools and the history of the piece. This process of rewriting is important to me. The previous sculpture is not simply replaced by a new one; it remains within it, like an earlier text beneath a new inscription. The work becomes a kind of sculptural palimpsest, where what has been erased continues to leave its mark. What interests me in the figure of Saint Sebastian here is not the classical image of spectacular martyrdom, but a quieter and more persistent form of violence. The office provides an appropriate setting for it. There are forms of aggression that do not need to be dramatic to be effective: repetition, pressure, exclusion, hierarchy, the accumulation of small gestures. The pens are deliberately ordinary. They belong to a world of offices, forms, signatures and instructions. In another context they are instruments of communication; here, inserted into the body, they become instruments of puncture. Something as familiar as a pen acquires another meaning when it crosses the boundary between writing and wounding. The martyr is no longer pierced by arrows. He is marked by the ordinary. As in other recent works, the scars of the process are not erased. The previous form is not cancelled. What remains is a body that has been worked, interrupted and rewritten — a body carrying the evidence of what has happened to it. The martyr of the office does not die dramatically. He continues.