Housed throughout the central rotunda of Lisboa’s National Pantheon, Aryz’s newest set up takes full benefit of its emblematic environment to re-frame the centuries-old dialog about our personal mortality. The 2 works reference the vanitas work of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries which sought to emphasise the transience of life. An archetypal example by an unknown artists hangs elsewhere throughout the former Church of Santa Engrácia and this nonetheless life is populated with an assortment of memento mori: a recently-extinguished candle, an hour-glass by means of which the sands of time have run and a cranium, as the last word reminder of loss of life.

In stark distinction to those invariably small, achromatic work of the Dutch Golden Age, the diptych by the Spanish artist has been painted on a monumental scale and are saturated with shade. However maybe an important differentiation lies within the element: the candle continues to be lit, the flowers stay in bloom and the cranium is imbued with a type of frenetic el Día de Muertos power. Context has at all times been centrally essential to the work of artists like Aryz who reduce their enamel portray on the street and, certainly, the setting of the set up throughout the Pantheon supplies the important thing to understanding these variations. 

Entombed with the Pantheon are a few of Portugal’s most influential public figures such because the footballer Eusébio, the singer Amália Rodrigues and the author Aquilino Ribeiro. Demise might have come for all of them, as forewarned by these vanitas painters of the previous, however their contributions nonetheless echo by means of Portuguese society and reside on by means of the wonder, ardour and perception which they’ve given to others. Within the phrases of the author Jeffrey Cranor ‘Demise is just the top if you happen to assume the story is about you’.

The set up is a part of the Underdogs Public Art Programme and continues till twenty third June 2024 on the Nationwide Pantheon, Campo de Santa Clara, 1100-471 Lisboa.

Photograph credit score: feralthings