Conception and collapse of the paternal image in the book When my father met the ET it was a hot day, by Lourenço Mutarelli

Abstract

encontrou com o ET fazia um dia quente (2011), Mutarelli escapes from the comics that consecrated him and presents a “memory” book full of “false” photographs that tells about a past and unreal time. In this memory’s distortion we find an insistent reproduction of the paternal figure. The father is repeated and distorted in the pictures of the book, images are mismatched, blurred and inconsistent as a fake reminder of an alien encounter. In the illustrations, an “imperfect” repetition of the paternal figure proclaims a desire for remembrance and fixation of its materiality, that is, the artist seeks to preserve and isolate this image from the place and from the time of its “real” apparition (BERGER, 1982). In this procedure, Mutarelli’s work dialogues with the specificity of the image as memory and receptacle of the longing for permanence and denial of death. Based on these assumptions, we intend to verify how the construction of this character takes place in the development of the work and as it evokes the essential process of temporality of the image, which only has reality insofar as it refers to knowledge and values previously acquired, that is, recalled (FRANCASTEL, 1998).