Visions in the painting of Claudio Bravo

Temptation of Saint Anthony, 1984

Abstract

The premise of this paper is that the oil painting called Temptation of Saint Anthony, by Chilean artist Claudio Bravo Camus (1936-2011), in addition to belonging to the pictorial genre of vision, develops a series of grotesque operations that affect the viewer’s imagination. The purpose is to explore the poetics of the grotesque in a chilean case of modern art, based on its figuration and historicity as a religious “vision painting”. This exploratory monograph interprets aesthetically and anthropologically: (1) the notion of spiritual vision and its relationship with the image, behind the author’s pictorial representation solutions and (2) the poetic grotesque operations, under its verb/iconic register: the hagiographic document of great influence in primitive monasticism, The Life of Anthony Abbot, and the figurations in the realistic oil painting by Claudio Bravo Camus, initially exhibited in 1984. In order to achieve the expected result, a bibliographic and exploratory study on the subject was carried out, guided essentially by the reading of the image proposed by the art critic Victor Stoichita. His main conclusion holds that the vision picture is a liminal object whose signaling repairs on the threshold of a series of transformations of forces and interactions different from the human ones.