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Eye-vo-re
Mariana BarroteJan, 25 - Mar, 14 2020
The world never ceases to rewrite its history, to diverge in the fate of each of its inhabitants, humans and non-humans. Being in the world does not mean being inside a closed and faraway horizon: it means, on the contrary, to segregate that horizon from its own body, generate the world and populate, each minute, with new inhabitants. Emanuele Coccia, in The Life of Plants
L ́homme serrait le plus heureux des êtres si du seul besoin qu ́il a dune illusion quelconque ne naissait aussitôt la réalité. Marquis de Sade
Integrated in a continuous body of work, the individual exhibition of Mariana Barrote (Fão, 1986) Eye-Vo-Re (title borrowed from Roger Caillois - in The Myth and The Men), is in itself a secret communication between layers of camouflage. The exhibition is centered in three major gestures, as an incursion into the territory of the intimate and ambivalent. In this maze, the confrontation is initiated through drawing, which unfolds in painting and is born from the devouring gaze of shapes, - gathering sensations perceived by the retina, - and developed through memory, in the gesture of the hand. The vertigo of the drawing is the transformative gesture of the body, which takes all, assuming different characteristics without enclosing in a single anatomy. Continuous to drawing and painting, different objects, - our Ariadne thread, all of them mirror different bodies in the gallery space. We reencounter the whole, in this case the objects, in a single stage, vibrating in the video shots, composed by three acts and involved in an amphibian sound atmosphere. We know that this global poetry is not defeated only with a mythological discourse, but through the experiment of various senses, as a life transe in the relation with the other, in the relation with the I, turned towards itself and to its illusory equals.
The monochromatic rhythms of the drawings take the pulse of a dance between references, where each look finds its own correspondence, in a process of approach. First through a camera lucida, and as we advance over a curtain, - by a strategic transformation we seem to enter into another place, that is, an interior place, as one enters into the belly of a whale. In this new space we gain semantic content, stiff shadows are the drawing offered by a totem. As we approach this divinity of shapes we feel its symbology and the images communicate in secret ad infinitum. In this other space, camera obscura, each drawing is like the panther scent. That scent which seduces and devours us. The gesture of the drawing is martial, as it is the mantis gesture, who in its samurai solitary wait unravels, reveals and wins.
The importance of the name in each piece amplifies the sense of instrumentalization of our imagination and is in itself a learning. We know that this summary of the world is nothing but the ‘translation’ of the gaze and of the hand that make its way, arising gradually, as if new steps and movements in a dance. Pieces such as Olha-boca, Alvo-ventoa, Senhor Bu, Viço-Laço, Cobra-Flor, Sangue- Seiva, ou Supro-Louvor, is the beginning of the discovery of the “I”, only possible when the other is present.
Eye-Vo-Re devours us, and demands the courage of the time for approximation. Appealing to details and moments of encounters and sudden pleasures, in a slow dance, gradually it speeds up, and with it the conceptions of the world. Erotic between camouflaged gestures, the exhibition is the delicious sequence of steps and countersteps, inhabited by different beings who respond to a desire which appeals to us, and deliciously wounds us.
Metamorphosis and repetition in face of different means, are an open narrative to our process of self-knowledge. We begin to feel that those beings reach our utopic imaginary as in a balsamic dream.
Rita Roque
© Filipe Braga
