Sèrie: Detenida

Julia Montilla engages with portraiture to address both artistic questions and issues that go beyond art. In this series, she investigates the nature and limits of the realist sculptural tradition, which takes the human body as its starting point. Classical treatises focused their analyses on the aesthetic qualities of the represented figures and groups, while omitting their structural elements. In this self-portrait series featuring life-scale photographic reproductions, Montilla tackles one of the earliest technical problems of volume: the empty spaces of the body’s blind spots, fissures and cavities. Whereas classical sculpture worked through hollowing-out, Montilla inserts props that fill crevices and orifices, exposing the problematic points that sustain the three-dimensional figure. In doing so, she alludes to the freezing of gestures and ideas, for just as in Montilla’s portraits, Western thought has also silenced certain “dark” regions of the mind and soul.