The present paper analyses the existing relations between art and representation of pain, taking as central thesis the idea that, since romanticism, art has increasingly tended to a presentation of the "real", understood as that what escapes our power to symbolise. Art bonds itself more and more to presentation (instead of representation) of the constitutive violent moment of human being. Throughout the article, the author describes three modalities of the art of presenting pain in contemporary culture: one that draws from an ethic approach of memory (as in Anselm Kiefer and Claude Lanzmann), one that radicalises the aesthetic gaze inaugurated in the Eighteenth century (as Francis Bacon), and one that takes abject art to its ultimate consequences (as does Andres Serrano). The author also point out the importance of concepts such as the sublime and (indexal) body writing to understand this new modality of the art of pain, as well as its structural relation to photography.
abject; art and ethics; body art; limits of representation; sublime