Beats of the Sacred Heart: A Visual and Auditory Journey

Magazine

Las Yeguas del Apocalipsis, Pedro Mardones Lemebel, Francisco Casas Silva. Las Dos Fridas (The Two Fridas). 1989. Inkjet print, photograph by Pedro Marinello Kairath, 49 3/16 × 47 1/4" (125 × 120 cm). The Museum of Modern Art, New York. Gift of Pedro Montes through the Latin American and Caribbean Fund in honor of Pedro Lemebel and Francisco Casas

This feature is presented as part of the Cisneros Institute’s ongoing research project Bridging the Sacred: Spiritual Streams in Twentieth Century Latin American and Caribbean Art, 1920–1970, in which artists and specialists from Latin America and the Caribbean explore modern and contemporary art in relation to spirituality, with a particular focus on Afro-diasporic, Indigenous, occult, Jewish, and Catholic traditions. Here, Monica Espinel, art historian and current Cisneros Institute research fellow, embarks on a journey that explores the symbol of the sacred heart through artworks and music across formats, regions, and cultures.

Watching Celine Song’s film Past Lives reminded me of the beauty of returns. This is something I also think of frequently as an art historian fascinated by Aby Warburg’s notion of the “surviving image,” how motifs return over time and across cultural borders. I am also riveted by how some artworks and their memory dwell in me, returning time and time again. One such work is Vanderlei Lopes’s installation Coração (Heart) (2013). I had never before seen a work illuminated by real flames. The effect was uncanny. A decade after first encountering it, the feelings it evoked remain vivid. So much so that during a recent visit to MoMA, while I meandered through galleries in silence, I saw a number of works that reminded me of its poignancy. As poet Diane Wakoski claims, “Apparitions are not singular occurrences.”¹

Vanderlei Lopes. Coração. 2013

Lopes’s installation features a painting and two life-sized, identical bronze hearts emitting flames, suspended in space at eye level. Drawn to alchemy, natural phenomena, and the transformation of matter, Lopes draws inspiration from the use of fire in the Catholic emblem of the Sacred Heart, symbolizing religious faith and unconditional love. By removing traditional elements like the holy cross and the crown of thorns, he makes their source linger at the threshold of recognizability. Lopes’s “apparition” engages viewers through the ancestral appeal of fire that creates a hissing sound while its heat envelops the viewer. The flames are separated by a tender interval that glimmers with the aura of longing. The hearts are so close, yet they cannot touch. Despite feeling a spiritual surge while looking at Coração, I also felt a blazing desire, akin to the tension generated by the thwarted passion of forbidden lovers. By mirroring and making the hearts disembodied, Lopes creates a sacred and sensual terrain that bravely deflects the limitations placed on love throughout Catholicism’s history. He recalls the work of Felix Gonzalez-Torres, who paired wall clocks, chairs, rings, and light bulbs as stand-ins for lovers, and in their exact symmetry, alluded to homosexual love. Lopes’s transmutation of the symbol of the Sacred Hearts of Christ and Mary into the hearts of lovers recalibrates it, blurring the line between religious symbolism and desire.

Vanderlei Lopes. Coração. 2013

“In the heart of the void as well as in the heart of man, fires are burning.”

Yves Klein

Yves Klein. Untitled (fire-color painting). 1962

Yves Klein. Untitled (fire-color painting). 1962

The rawness of Yves Klein’s Untitled (fire-color painting) resonates with malaise. Painted in 1962, the year of his premature death at the age of 34, it is part of a series enabled by his unprecedented collaboration with France’s national gas company, which allowed him to capture the volatile power of fire visually, while having control over the combustion process. Klein created patterns of soot by scorching the surface with a flamethrower. The ritual physicality needed to create this work embodies the concepts, actions, and gestures that for Klein lay within the immaterial domain of the spirit. He renders palpable fire as the element that changes the physical state of materials from solid to liquid to gas, making it an ideal metaphor for the passage from the material to the spiritual and for the cycle of life and death. His aim was to “register the trace of fire which has engendered this very same civilization. And this because the void has always been my constant preoccupation and I hold that in the heart of the void as well as in the heart of man, fires are burning.”² As a material record, it is evidence that spirituality is impossible to represent and is best evoked. Klein’s inclusion of asbestos as a ground adds to the ominous fields of blue, gold, and red, whose vertiginous drips swoon one into a manic spirituality that borders on implosion. It is womb-like, cave-like.

An-My Lê. đô-mi-nô. 2021

In An-My Lê’s retrospective I came upon đô-mi-nô, an installation consisting of large-scale replicas of Zippo lighters used by GIs during the Vietnam War. Here, fire reappears covertly as the light that sparks when pausing for a smoke or as a destructive force that was used to torch villages. By foregrounding Zippos engraved with personal information, subjective iconography, or messages filled with irony, fear, love, impotence, and hope, Lê asks us to consider how memory is compacted into these everyday objects. A soldier’s individuality surfaces with agonizing clarity, peeling back decades of varnish that have obscured the disquieting psychic aftermath of war under a collective blanket.

One of them has the name Butch, two hearts, and a cross engraved on it. Perhaps the Zippo helped him feel closer to a loved one, or reaffirmed his Catholic faith. Carrying the badge of the Sacred Heart in times of war harks back to the French Revolution, when the counterrevolutionary army wore it as spiritual protection and as a symbolic defense against enemy attacks, a soldier’s declarations of self-sacrifice echoing the narrative of Christ on the cross.

Installation view of the exhibition An-My Lê: Between Two Rivers/Giữa hai giòng sông/Entre deux Rivières, MoMA, November 5, 2023–October 6, 2024

Huguette Caland. Visages. 1979

Huguette Caland. Visages. 1979

Huguette Caland’s Visages is awash in light. Upon close inspection, the seemingly abstract painting, from a series begun in 1970 called Bribes de corps or “Body Bits,” reveals two hearts that touch and emanate a single flame upward. A hushed red glow spills onto the honey fields wedging the flame. Across the top, an orgiastic fusion of energies, blush, and scarlet ripples pulse with rhythmic multiplicity, echoing the movement of flames. Caland’s peripatetic heart took her from Beirut, to Paris, to California, and then back to Beirut. Her fascination with bodies and human interconnectedness is palpable in the hearts near fusion in this unutterably warm, sensuous painting. The thread between the passion for the divine and sublimated sexuality is not new. Five centuries ago the writings of Saint Teresa of Avila and Saint John of the Cross underscored the slippage between spirituality and sensual desire.

Yeguas del Apocalipsis. Las dos Fridas (The Two Fridas). 1989

Following the ineffable joy felt in front of Caland’s Visages, I saw a tableau vivant by Yeguas del Apocalipsis of Frida Kahlo’s double self-portrait, Las dos Fridas (The Two Fridas) from 1989. Pedro Lemebel and Francisco Casas formed Yeguas del Apocalipsis (active 1987–93), a radical collective that redefined artistic engagement via the micropolitics of identity and dissent. Their groundbreaking use of writing, political strategies, and interventions altered the status quo of Chilean society by putting their marginalized and vulnerable queer bodies front and center. Whereas Kahlo probed heartbreak and the divided self in her painting, the Yeguas use blood as a metaphor of union, yet one tainted with the specter of infection during the AIDS crisis, when contagion haunted people’s imaginations. The staged photograph shows Lemebel and Casas connected by a blood trans-fusion probe, while Lemebel holds a condom. These details ground the Yeguas’ “becoming of Frida”³ in their historical moment, Augusto Pinochet’s military dictatorship (1973–90), a time of heightened homophobia when the stakes of claiming an openly queer identity and of pushing back against the cultural stigma attached to HIV/AIDS were enormous.

The photograph whispered into my mind a song of my youth, Fito Paez’s “Yo vengo a ofrecer mi corazón,” from 1985. Both song and image, created at moments of unutterable loss, speak of resilience. The Yeguas celebrate their connection and political agency by sharing it with the world, infecting viewers with their fearlessness and pride in their dissident bodies. “To see the chaos of suffering shaped into something beautiful is one of the main reasons we turn to art,” writes Sigrid Nunez.⁴ The Yeguas’ intense regard proves her right.

Lopes’s Coração has taught me that, like music, an artwork only unfolds for a viewer in time.

Las Yeguas del Apocalipsis, Pedro Mardones Lemebel, Francisco Casas Silva. Las Dos Fridas (The Two Fridas). 1989

Spotify Playlist: Beats of the Sacred Heart

Listen to a playlist inspired by these works. It is a collection of songs, epics of the heart, full of yearning, savage, bawdy, or melancholy, with an insistent pulse and rhythms that spell the poetry of fire, fusion, apparitions, thwarted desire, and the entangled history between spirituality and sexuality.

Title of Wakoski’s contribution to John Giorno’s Dial-A-Poem, 1968/2012
Yves Klein, Chelsea Hotel Manifesto, New York, 1961, quoted in Pierre Restany, Yves Klein: Fire at the Heart of the Void (Putnam, Conn. 2005), p. xv.
“Las Yeguas del Apocalipsis. Las Dos Fridas. 1989.” Audio playlist. Accessed February 4, 2024.
Nunez, Sigrid. “[Waiting in the Snow for a Phone Call, Mixing Memory and Desire]”(https://www.nytimes.com/2024/01/09/books/review/inverno-cynthia-zarin.html), The New York Times, January 9, 2024.

Monica Espinel
Research Fellow, Cisneros Institute