A heart hovers at the centre of a transparent crucifix brimming with liquid, suspended like a clinical altarpiece. Entubed to medical apparatus, as though tethered to a life-support system, it seems to pulse. “Sagrado corazón activo” (1991) anchored “I will fear no evil”, an exhibition by José Antonio Hernández-Díez curated by Latitudes, which opened at the MACBA Museu d’Art Contemporani de Barcelona ten years ago this month.

José Antonio’s art of the 1990s favoured the grammar of devotion and the patina of technology: these works resemble artefacts unearthed from some kitsch electro-spiritual infirmary, positivist science-fiction prototypes for a coming Catholic-Gothic creed, or stage effects salvaged from a conjuror’s cabinet. In “Sagrado corazón activo”, the well-worn horror trope of the brain in a jar – immortality achieved at an absurdly high price – is disquietingly inverted. Instead of a disembodied intellect condemned to sterile cognition, he conjures a self-sustaining eternal engine of pure love, passion and truth, one that folds theology into biomedicine. By centring on the cardiac organ, the device alludes to the seemingly miraculous development of human organ transplantation, a procedure that reprises specifically Christian archetypes of sacrifice on the part of the donor and a discreet cheating of death for the receiver. Neither ironic nor profane, this macabre work hinges on death, consciousness, resurrection, and the particularly baroque brand of Latin-American Catholicism.