This work is part of a larger, ongoing project that explores the links between the economic cycle of Brazilwood, art conservation technologies, and penal reforms in Europe. By unfolding an ‘archaeology of the image,’ the project traces the presence of Brazilwood as a natural pigment found in oil paintings within museum collections.The installation features five enlargements of 17th-century still-life paintings from the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam, displayed on backlit structures. These microscopic cross-section prints reveal traces of a translucent red lake pigment made from highly valued imports from Brazil: cochineal and Brazilwood.
Cochineal, a parasitic insect found on certain cactus species, yields its pigment when crushed, while Brazilwood’s colorant is extracted by rasping and boiling the tree’s bark. After being shipped from the Dutch colony in Pernambuco, Brazilwood logs were stored in Amsterdam’s Rasphuis prison, where inmates were sentenced to the forced labor of rasping the wood. By the late 17th century, this prison held a monopoly on processing Brazilwood for paint production in the Netherlands, tying penal labor and colonialism directly to the art production of the time.
Due to their light sensitivity, Brazilwood dyes degrade into faint, almost geological remnants of the colors that once animated these artworks. On the enlarged images, the life-like details dissolve into abstract sediments, revealing another kind of realism buried in their materiality – the ‘dead nature’ beneath the still-life compositions.
