The Scowling Mermaid: an anachronistic

Abstract

“We are always, when faced with an image, facing time,” teaches us the historian of art Georges Didi-Huberman. That image carries on its contemporaneity at sight, and at the same time when it sees us. Its past intersects past and present. They are different times in one single image, allowing several senses and significations. The image of the mermaid is closely intertwined by a complexity of senses. This mythological, hybrid, metamorphosed (half woman/ half bird; or half woman/ half fish) wight, provides different approaches over the many facets of modernity and its consequences. It enables the crossing of temporalities and observe how time does not presents itself as Chronos, but as Aion, allowing analyzing the significance of Mermaids in distinct art periods. In this work we highlight Mermaid's sculptures made of ceramic by the plastic artist Francisco Brennand, that mourn and silence the discovered land, as the interferences that modernity had in the “destiny” of civilization. Brennand works over that anachronism. His Mermaids, although they have been seen as mutes, they are in fact talkative. They own countless visual resources, bring us an experience, tell us something. However, it is proposed to us to experiment, “think and not see”, in order to unravel the senses and significations of these Recife's “Carrancas”.