The Old Testament Drawings
I was born into a Catholic family, although I am not a practising Catholic. Religion gradually moved away from my everyday life, but the stories of the Bible remained. Their images, conflicts and impossible events have continued to accompany me: creation and destruction, exile, sacrifice, violence, faith, punishment and survival.
Over the years, I returned to some of these stories without recognising that they belonged to a larger direction in my work. Looking back through the charcoal drawings I have made during my years in Berlin, I discovered that the Old Testament had already appeared several times. Its stories were present, but not yet organised as a deliberate or continuous project.
This group of works begins with that recognition. I selected episodes from the Old Testament and began to approach them through drawing, thinking about what it means to illustrate words that have already produced centuries of images. The intention is not to offer a complete or definitive visual interpretation of the Bible. It is to return to particular stories and consider what their landscapes, bodies, catastrophes and silences might look like now.
Some of the works remain close to the traditional scale of illustration. Others expand into charcoal drawings almost three metres wide. At that scale, the image is no longer simply something that accompanies a text. It becomes a physical space: a place into which the viewer enters and confronts the event.
Although the works vary considerably in size, they form one solid body. What connects them is not only their biblical source, but the attempt to translate language into images through charcoal—to give material form to stories that have remained present in me, even after religious belief itself became more distant.
This is also a way of structuring something that had already been developing quietly throughout my work. What once appeared as separate returns to individual stories can now be understood as parts of a larger project: an extended visual reading of the Old Testament.
Jorge daCruz
