In the article Beats of the Sacred Heart: A Visual and Auditory Journey, published today, March 13, in the MoMA magazine, Monica Espinel, a researcher in the Cisneros Institute, points to Coração (Heart) (2013), a work by Vanderlei Lopes  (1973, Terra Boa, PR, Brazil), as the basis for a selection of works from the museum’s collection “that address the personal, political, and sacred with hearts on fire.”

“The hearts are so close, yet they cannot touch. Despite feeling a spiritual surge while looking at Coração, I also felt a blazing desire, akin to the tension generated by the thwarted passion of forbidden lovers. By mirroring and making the hearts disembodied, Lopes creates a sacred and sensual terrain that bravely deflects the limitations placed on love throughout Catholicism’s history. He recalls the work of Felix Gonzalez-Torres, who paired wall clocks, chairs, rings, and light bulbs as stand-ins for lovers, and in their exact symmetry, alluded to homosexual love. Lopes’s transmutation of the symbol of the Sacred Hearts of Christ and Mary into the hearts of lovers recalibrates it, blurring the line between religious symbolism and desire.” she writes.