In the Tragic Series, Flávio de Carvalho devours death and regurgitates pain

Disclaimer: This is a translation of a text originally published in Portuguese at TAB UOL.

For the past four years, I have been writing my PhD thesis that I finally defended two weeks ago. It is always hard to explain what the theme is, but, briefly, it’s a historical panorama of how western societies, mainly European and Judeo-Christian, have been processing the fact and the idea of death in the creation of images (and rituals) that seek to extend human life through materialized images that carry the memory of the deceased. For that, I was mostly inspired by the work of the historian Philippe Ariès, in this case the books The Hour of Death and Western Attitudes Toward Death from the Middle Ages to the Present, as well as Ernest Becker’s The Denial of Death.

During my defense, one of the evaluators mentioned that I didn’t use any Brazilian examples, which is true — I only studied the cases of Andy Warhol’s series “Death in America,” Gottfried Helnwein’s painting “American Prayer”, Damien Hirst’s installations and the mockumentary Treasures from the Wreck of the Unbelievable, the specific event of Michael Jackson’s funeral and a final comparison between the most recent works by Björk and Grimes.