The image and the unrepresentable: mourning as aesthetic dissensuality in the work of Cândido Portinari

Abstract

This paper analyzes the painting Criança Morta (1944), by Cândido Portinari, through the theoretical contributions of Freud, Judith Butler, Jacques Rancière, and Georges Didi-Huberman, aiming to understand mourning as both an aesthetic and political operation. It starts from the hypothesis that the image does not merely represent an individual loss but inscribes historically marginalized bodies into the sensible field, producing a visual dissensus that resists erasure. The painting is read as a memory device that, by refusing consolation or symbolic mediation, activates an ethics of the gaze grounded in the persistence of pain. By articulating psychoanalysis, political philosophy, and image theory, the article argues that mourning—especially that which is denied by the State and institutions—can operate as a gesture of resistance against the hierarchies that determine which lives are deemed grievable. Portinari’s image does not aestheticize pain but denounces it as an effect of a politics of exclusion and death. By straining the limits of the visible, Criança Morta establishes a perceptual rupture and proposes a politics of the image in which mourning does not resolve: it survives as noise, as specter, and as ethical insistence.