Silent witness

Sculptures conjure up specter of torture

February 29, 2008|Greg Cook, Globe Correspondent

FRAMINGHAM - In the darkness stands a crowd of agitated people. When you walk between them, at their center you find a man, naked except for a black bag over his head. He would easily be the tallest in the room if he stood up. But he is kneeling, with his hands pulled behind him and tied to a post. And he is shot full of arrows.

So it goes in Ana Maria Pacheco's haunting sculptural installation "Dark Night of the Soul" at the Danforth Museum. Though completed in 1999 and inspired by the figure of St. Sebastian, this wood passion play viscerally conjures up the specter of American torture committed in the name of the "war on terror," from Abu Ghraib to CIA waterboarding. Other artists have incisively addressed this subject; Jenny Holzer's screenprints of government documents currently at Mass MoCA and in Massachusetts College of Art and Design's "War Stories" exhibit come to mind. But few make you feel so caught up in the middle of it.

The 19 men, women, and children depicted in "Dark Night" were chainsawed, blowtorched, chopped, and chiseled from wood and then painted folk-art style. They have overlarge heads, some with nails for hair and mouths full of creepily realistic prosthetic teeth. They watch one another - and us as we walk among them - with onyx eyes that shine in the shadowy gallery.

The wounds of the bound, hooded man are bruised and bleeding. A crack runs down his wooden chest, from his neck to his groin. Who knows what his crime - if any - might be? But Pacheco's sympathy is certainly with him.

The figure references traditional iconography for the martyrdom of St. Sebastian, a third century Roman soldier whom, tradition has it, a Roman emperor ordered executed for his Christian faith. First they tried shooting him with arrows, a scene that became a favorite motif of Renaissance artists. But Sebastian supposedly survived and denounced the emperor, who then had him beaten to death.

Pacheco, born in Brazil in 1943 but based in London since 1973, also draws on themes from her native country's troubled history. She crafted "Dark Night" while an artist in residence at London's National Gallery, taking inspiration from a Renaissance painting of St. Sebastian in the museum's collection as well as a photo from Brazil called "Death squad victim" and a Robert Mapplethorpe shot of a hooded naked man. The title, which refers to a crisis of faith, comes from a spiritual treatise written by the 16th-century Spanish Roman Catholic mystic and reformer St. John of the Cross after escaping imprisonment by Catholic leaders.