Transfigurations

Jorge Cabieses's La Transfiguración (The Transfiguration) is situated at the point of intersection of seemingly irreconcilable visual languages. At first glance, his intervention seems to disrupt the purity of a mass-produced devotional image: the central element of the poster Cabieses has altered is the body of a transfigured Christ, traditionally shown in images of this type while  experiencing a transient yet intense moment of metamorphosis through divine enlightenment. The intervention at hand partially obscures this all-important moment, replacing the body of Christ with a geometrically abstract image that seems to have migrated to the poster from some region of the related universes of abstract, minimalist or concrete graphics, painting, and sculpture. Awkwardly yet decisively, this abstract presence now finds itself at the crux of a narrative that it simultaneously truncates and enhances.  This encounter echoes the multiple virtual juxtapositions between images drawn from 'high' and 'low' culture, as well as from multiple cultural and religious traditions, that many of us juggle with in our media-saturated lives. Yet central to the work's  impact is the intense materiality of the encounter at hand, which may stage a transfiguration quite different from the one the text at the bottom of the image describes.