Geist (2020) Fotografie von Lídia Vives

Lleida, November 2020. The award-winning Catalan visual artist Lídia Vives, presented her new series "Psyché", which is, so far, the most ambitious project of her career, and in which she addresses one of the themes that for years we have raised: what is the soul? Where is it located? And how can it be represented?

The photographer, together with the Spanish Gallery Fifty Dots, and her father, painter Arturo Vives, combines techniques in which the photographic elements represent the soma (body) and the writings or drawings, symbolize the psyche (soul) to approach the different theories about the “communication of substances” or how something immaterial like the soul can interact with something material, like the body.

In this way, human silhouettes appear in black, almost imperceptible, like X-rays, while texts, drawings, cartesian passages, chemical formulas and musical notations appear in golden pigment, in accordance with the Byzantine tradition to represent what is transcendent.

In addition, in its physical versions, they will be unique editions, resembling jewels, since each of the prints will be hand-operated with golden ink, as tradition dictates."Psyché" is inspired by various cultural references that relate this duality to chemical formulas associated with behavior and spirit; Plato's Phaedo; the Quaestiones Disputatae of Santo Tomás de Aquino; and Descartes's theory of the meeting of body and soul in the pineal gland.

Thus, this series is a pictorial reflection of the theories and attempts to reach an agreement on the location, definition and even conceptualization of the soul, inside and outside the body, on which the Catalan Lídia Vives was inspired by.

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