These sculptures correspond to a series that the artist Miguel Branco has been working on since 2012. Four figures in black sandstone, anamorphic and apparently expressionless, seem to deny any recognition or empathy on the part of the spectator. As a whole, they are a dense, motionless and silent work that wants to provoke a strangeness in view of the undefined bodies and faces of the figuration. With a more attentive look, we realize that each sculpture has its own identity and, we could almost say, potentially intelligible psychologic qualities. Authority, power or precariousness are some of the characteristics subtly anchored to each figure, which makes them symbolic within the collective imagination of human condition. Still, it is possibly to identify discreet features in the physiognomy and differences in the clothing, the surface finishing being the main distinction between them. In parallel, the titles also reveal the characters - banker, beggar, senator and standing figure - and they are an essential part of the original, historic and metaphoric context. Otherwise, the material itself summons the primordial and essential manual action of modelling, as well as the magic and transforming power of fire that not only takes the material state of malleable clay into the ceramic solidity of shapes, but also finishes the process of creating timelessness. The sculptures behave as artifacts of imagined characters, places and times and the blackness of the shapes absorbs the light and encloses within possible deeper meanings. The four sculptures seem therefore to be disposed in a kind of ancestral ethnographic collection, based on the idea of an interaction between a legacy of a historical past and the proper metamorphic nature of the images.



CQ