Sans Tache #23

In 2014, in the series "Sans Tache", Gabriel Wickbold decides to talk about the beauty and purity of the body and criticizes the excessive use of manipulation in images to erase the effects of the passage of time on human bodies, as if getting old is ugly, wrong or negative. "The world, from the moment you are born, is a place that contaminates us in many ways. It is the pollution of life, whether by the food we eat, the sun that hits us, the air we breathe, the gravity that pulls us down. All these themes were portrayed in the series. "Sans Tache" also talks about the freezing of an instant, one of the main mottos of photography, a snapshot of a time that has passed and will never return. Inspired by Caravaggio's light and Baroque Renaissance art, Wickbold photographs an essay that brings the aesthetics of embalming - as if they were to be preserved and could not be touched at that moment when they were inside the glass -, with bodies decomposed by image treatment and the process of shackling. Fencing" is an ancient practice of ageing paper, as a way of proving that the document is old and true. It consists of letting a sheet of paper be devoured by crickets, giving it an aged appearance. A 19th century technique widely used by squatters to illegally extract wood in the interior of Brazil. The country suffered a lot with this practice and so did nature, so, once again, there is a link of this awareness that involves the element nature in the work. "All to seek an image that questions the aesthetics industry, photoshop and the current standards of beauty". It's a joint reasoning with the previous series, "Naïve", and embraces some of the causes it brought about, such as the destruction of humans themselves and not just nature. "I wasn't wanting to look at the destruction of human beings in a totally negative way. Everything we go through is a construction of an experience, and each of those moments is always going to be contemplated by pain and pleasure, and that counterpoint is what makes us human. Our history will always be based on these two universes".