Translation- PALIMPSEST
PALIMPSEST And that’s it. I have nothing more to say, I believe we are coming close to the end because the rain has slowed down and there is no sound on roof tiles, rare drops maybe, clouds though insignificant, high, posing no threat, everything transforms around me and I am not referring to the house only, to my past where new memories with no connection to old ones linger for a moment and vanish, a lady laughing and arms full of double chins, so much pleasure in that huge body and me happily clapping, pieces of memories that the brain rekindles, losing them without me being able to say goodbye, am I a real creature or an invention of the writer, a puppet, he pondered.1
What Horses Are Those That Shade the Sea? is a complex novel by António Lobo Antunes (born in 1942) that tells the story of a family disguised in deviance, vice, perjury and unhappiness, by the appearance given by wealth and property. Overwhelming and wise, the writer manipulates the reader who, for 375 pages, is unaware of what the truth or the lie is, much less which side to take in regards to these characters who hide, in actions and lies, from the terrible confrontation of their true selves. Where did we come from? What are we? Where are we going? (D'où Venons Nous / Que Sommes Nous / Où Allons Nous) were the questions already asked by Paul Gaugin (1848-1903), in 1987, in his 139x375cm oil on canvas, maybe because that was and still is, in general, the interior path missing from the species, within the painful exercise of always being more than what we appear. As Rosa Montero (born in 1951) wrote: “Culture is a palimpsest and we all write about what others have already written.” 2 What power has Art over the truth? Rosa Montero continues: “The process of socialization, which we call educating, or maturing, or growing, consists precisely in trimming blossoming fantasies, in closing doors to delirium, in amputating our ability to daydream; and unfortunate is the one who cannot seal that fissure for he will probably be considered a poor fool. ”3 I return: does Art find the truth? Perhaps. On the contrary, as Gaston Bachelard (1884-1962) wrote, the imposed bustle, the imposed competition, the imposed consumerism and other social impositions of the postmodernity, namely those concerning the ethic and good morals of a persistent and resistant feudal oligarchy disguised as tolerance and democracy, prevent us from taking free thought as the first existential premise.
On the contrary, active life, the life sparkled by reality, is a fragmented life, both outside and inside us. It projects us outside all things. Hence, we are always elsewhere. Always in the face of things, in the face of the world, in the face of men of variegated humanity. Except in the great days of true love, except in the hours of the Novalisian4 Umarmung5 , man is a surface to man. Man conceals his depth.”6
Palimpsest comes from the original ancient Greek and it means rewriting, scraping and writing over a parchment or a papyrus that, between the seventh and twelfth centuries, had already been scraped with pumice stone to be reused. Justified by the high cost of support, such practice led to the loss of a considerable portion of Greco-Roman texts, while inscribing a new layer of information into natural matter, camouflaging the previous one, even though it could not be completely eliminated. The rewrite was a new truth that ignored previous pre-Christian thinking, seeking to institute a new order, made up of a new class within the realm of power. In the 21st century, and in a (mis) alignment of the path traced by humanity, everything is a mask: the information conveyed by the media and social networks is, for example, manipulated to alarm or lighten reality. Everyone wants to reveal their best on the assumption that error is highly reprehensible, almost criminal, at a time when, despite new conquered freedoms, there is still social pressure to be perfect, even if unhappy.
However hard one tries to the contrary, life is lived in the company of uncertainty. Each decision is bound to remain arbitrary; none will be free of risks and insured against failure and belated regrets. For every argument in favour of a choice, a counter-argument, no less weighty, can be found. However bright the light of the nebula might be, it will not insure us against the eventuality of being forced, or the desire to return to the starting point. Tracing a new path to a decent, dignified, satisfying, worthy (and, yes, happy!) life, we try to avoid errors and escape uncertainty by trusting upon a star, chosen for its reassuring brightness, to guide us. All that, however, only soon to find out that our choice of the guiding star was after all, full of risks as all choices are made at our own risk until the end…7
Zygmunt Bauman (1925-2017) warns us but regardless of how much we draw from sociology, we are not allowed uncertainty, restlessness or doubt, even if sacrificing happiness and, as Marcel Proust (1871-1922) wrote, somewhere in In Search of Lost Time (1914-27), “We become moral when we are unhappy.” PALIMPSESTS, as a curatorial exercise, is first and foremost a fight against false morals and moralists.
PALIMPSEST is a process of aesthetic organization of layered experiences and (un) truths that the postmodern daily invites us to see. Nothing is what it seems, and what it really is can only be seen underneath the surface of the superficial selection of images that the city feeds our eager eyes. Sara Maia (born in 1974), Jorge Abade (born in 1974), Hélio Luís (born in 1980), Patrícia Oliveira (born in 1983), Ricardo Campos (born in 1977) and Mónica Mindelis (born in 1972) introduce us to plastic layers of processual dilettantism between painting, drawing, sculpture, installation, video and performance, which address motherhood, work, sexuality, postcolonialism and a different outlook, nature and the dream, in a tangent and an illusion that challenges us to contemplate, interact and react. The expographic speech, not only allows and promotes new connections among protagonists but it also proposes cross-reflections on macro philosophical and existential issues, that seem micro to us due to our tendency to see the world from our own perspective, thus forgetting that we are only a very small part of a plural and brutal whole.
Patrícia Oliveira (born in 1983) derives from sculpture, from the place of belonging and from the relation of the body with the natural agents of that same place. In her work, the journey is more important than the destination and what she presents to us integrates the (bio) complexity of nature and the mastery of materials and technologies. In a study that begins with performance and ends with video, the lamprey, emblem of the Alto Minho, where it spawns, is the object of study and contemplation. Patrícia Oliveira works on the borders of confrontation with the end of the animal’s life once it reaches its course. She studies them, discovers them, sculpts them. In PALIMPSESTS the artist combines the fullness of the animal's body shapes, sometimes in plaster, ceramics, soap or wool, with the emptiness of blown glass. The hidden is revealed by the video and is amplified by the performance, losing the synesthetic of the discovery of possibilities and their confrontation with the female ergonomic condition. The work is then returned to the animal's habitat and photography adds the layer of altered perception between reality and appearance.
Hélio Luís (born in 1980) widens views to large-scale canvases where he explores, through the use of oil, postcolonial themes and other people’s outlooks that have spread throughout Portugal today and make us consider a certain and erroneous superiority. Each canvas, of expressive dimensions, is confined by the dissatisfaction of the unfinished work, supporting the weight of matter over matter until, as noticeable in the series SELVA presented here, the environments invite us to immerse in the scenario. Lavish painting, influenced by the evolution of the cinema and, simultaneously by the most classical learnings of savoir-faire, the palette has temperature and the human figuration blends in with nature, becoming light and shadow all at once.
The set of paintings and mixed techniques on canvas, that Ricardo de Campos (born in 1977) exhibits in zet gallery are the result of his work’s social expression over the last years that hold its essence in the woman and her challenges. Side by side, the sexual and the domestic being tease the viewer. There is both desire and work; pleasure and labor. In the neoexpressionist and experimental vigor that characterizes his work, Ricardo de Campos is also an aggregator of textile remnants and an uncomplicated inciter. There are slogans and assumed designs in increasingly refined proposals without fear of error. The narrative is interrupted by the sacralization of the fall or loss of the once totalitarian power, a theme of deep relevance when the country prepares for the musealization of man's legacy behind the time of fear.
Starting off with painting, Jorge Abade (born in 1974) presents in PALIMPSESTS an almost saturated installation of paintings and objects in which hyper-reality is fictionalized in combinations of elements that evoke the body, sex and work that are a mockery of a conditioned view we accept without questioning. In a multiple and technically exemplary symbiosis between reality and the ready made, the hand is the predominant and symbolic element that places the artist as the creator of beauty and the manipulator of history and narratives. Something else to note in Jorge Abade's participation in this collective exercise of thought, called exhibition, is the relationship established with the peculiarities of the place's architecture, in a game of conceptual almost hide and seek that forces the viewer to multiply in capacity for apprehension. Among the circular canvases, in which the poetic and magical universe of his painting is evident, and the (almost) overflow of objects that expand through the walls and floor, which mix with the site specific intervention with ink and slogans, the artist presents an almost synthesis of his production, in many situations revised and reconfigured but that mark the depth of his thought and the extreme poetry of his gestures.
When contemplating the painting by Sara Maia (Born in 1974) it is hard not to reference Paula Rego (born in 1935), in the same manner that we must acknowledge her intense mastery of drawing and her power of an imagination that combines, in layers of storytelling, the urgency of motherhood, conviviality and metaphors of animal life, in paper or canvas acrylics which are a beautiful journey to our innermost selves. Sara Maia’s work touches upon the pagan, nearly obscene, of tales and legends which are almost biblical and whose message always expresses a moral statement. In her densest compositions as in those where the drawing is predominant and allow the support to breathe, the artist works a palette of light and allows us to foresee her gesture and her corporality. Her images disturb us and penetrate the unknown and unseen; they are subterfuges of the obligation for beauty and they are anti-immaculate objects.
Brazilian Mónica Mindelis (born in 1978) is, among the six protagonists of PALIMPESTS, the one who moves the furthest away from figuration, even though her work, profusely experimental and philosophical, derives from real references and establishes a clear connection with the dimensions of her own body, as in the example of the cocoon object which is centrally positioned in the display. We stem from it towards the exploration of lines and threads of different materials which then serve as basis to the drawing and definition of the set that wanders between the “air and dreams” of Bachelard’s metapoetics and Dante Alighier’s (1265-1321) purgatory. In PALIMPSESTS the artist presents a set of unique masterpieces which interact namely with Sara Maia’s work and which bring together conceptual reminiscences of times and spaces shared by other protagonists.
Hence, this is an exhibition that reveals and conceals, from a selection of artists that wander through the paths of figuration and that depart from both philosophical and conceptually antipodal universes. It must be read as a whole made up of various parts and, above all, as a cry for the emancipation of the inverted truth which we all unknowingly help to proliferate. Or as Guy Debord (1931-1994) once wrote: “Emancipating oneself from the material basis of the inverted truth is ultimately what self-emancipation of our time is all about.”8
1 ANTUNES, António Lobo – Que Cavalos São Aqueles Que Fazem Sombra No Mar? Alfragide: Publicações Dom Quixote, 2009. Página 251.
2 MONTERO, Rosa – A Louca da Casa. Lisboa: Livros do Brasil, 2016. Páginas 14 e 15
3 MONTERO, Rosa – A Louca da Casa. Lisboa: Livros do Brasil, 2016. Página 15
4 Novalis, pseudónimo de Georg Friedrich Philipp Freiherr von Hardenberg (1772 – 1801), foi um poeta, teólogo, filósofo e escritor alemão.
5 Palavra em alemão para “abraço”.
6 BACHELARD, Gaston – A Poética do Devaneio. São Paulo: Martins Fontes, 2009.
8 DEBORD, Guy – A sociedade do espectáculo. Lisboa: Antígona, 2012. Página 136
