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Anfang und Ende des roten Fadens sind eins.
Von der Decke gleitet er geradlinig durch ein Kupferrohr, bohrt sich in den granitartigen Betonblock, aus dem er nach kurzer Strecke wieder herausragt, sich durch ein weiteres kupfernes Rohr zieht und abermals in der Decke verschwindet. Der rote Faden als Loop, als Endlosschleife. Ein unmögliches Maß, mit dem Carla Guagliardi dem Unsichtbaren Sichtbarkeit verleiht und physikalischen Aspekten eine metaphorische Dimension.

Guagliardi schafft mit einfachen, alltäglichen Mitteln und Materialien überraschende Momente von zauberhafter Kraft. Mit geheimnisvollen Werken, die die Physis und die physikalischen Gesetzmäßigkeiten gleichsam hinterfragen und feiern.

Wie halten die Gummibänder die massiven Eisenstangen? Wohin führen die Löcher in der Wand und warum fällt die scheinbar haltlose Glaskugel in der raumgreifenden Installation nicht im nächsten Augenblick zu Boden?

Die Gestaltung der Zeit

“Vergangenheit,Gegenwart und Zukunft sind, wie wir wissen, lediglich an ihrer Erscheinung als kosmische Zeit – an den Vorgang der Sukzession gebunden”, schrieb der Komponist Bernd Alois Zimmermann 1968. “ In unserer geistigen Wirklichkeit existiert diese Sukzession jedoch nicht, was eine realere Wirklichkeit besitzt als die uns wohlvertraute Uhr, die ja im Grunde nichts anderes anzeigt, als dass es keine Gegenwart im strengeren Sinne gibt. Die Zeit biegt sich zu einer Kugelgestalt zusammen.”

In den Skulpturen der brasilianischen Künstlerin nimmt die Zeit diese Kugelgestalt in den Geraden und Winkeln an, im Sichtbaren und im Unsichtbaren oder in einer Wasser umschließenden Glaskugel. Die schwebt inmitten des zweiten Raums der Ausstellung
“where is the time left in this space? in der Galerie kajetan.

Das knapp 30 Zentimeter große, transparente Gefäß ist randvoll gefüllt mit Wasser und bildet mit den sternförmig angeordneten dünnen Schnüren ein heikel wirkendes Gespann. Die Faden verschwinden in drei Öffnungen, die die Künstlerin Münder nennt, und dessen konkrete Befestigungen in der gewichtigen Glaskugel nicht auszumachen sind.

Der Lebensfaden des Menschen

Der Titel “às Parcas e ao Edi (Parcae)” verweist auf das Schicksal, einen verstorbenen Freund und die mythologischen Parzen. So wie die Schicksalsgöttinnen meist als Dreiheit auftreten, so verwendet Guagliardi drei Materialien. Der rostfreie Stahl steht für die Stabilität, das Kupfer hält das Gleichgewicht und die Baumwolle symbolisiert die Fragilität .

Neben diesen technischen Materialien erwähnt Guagliardi als weiteres Element: die Zeit. Analog zu den Schicksalsgöttinnen, die den Lebensfaden des Menschen spinnen, dreht Guagliardi – die in ihrer Geburtsstadt Rio de Janeiro freie Kunst sowie Kunst- und
Architekturgeschichte studierte. – die Seile und Drähte aus Bündeln einzelner Faden zusammen.

Ihr Werk, erzahlt die Kunstlerin, habe sich als kontinuierlicher Prozess aus Erfahrungen und aus ihrem Unterbewusstsein entwickelt. Von blauen Pigmenten zu den mit Wasser gefüllten quadratischen Behältern, über die transparenten Plastikschläuche, in denen sie Eisenstäbe vom Wasser korrodieren ließ, bis zu den Arbeiten mit Luftballons oder den roten Fäden. Durch den physikalischen Druck und die Spannung evozieren sie die Antagonisten Fragilität und Stabilität sowie die Zeit.

Dinge im Dialog

Eine weitere von Carla Guagliardis humorvoll absurden Versuchsanordnungen um
das Raum-Zeit-Kontinuum ist die “Conversation (II)”. Sie spielt sich in Gestalt zweier weißer Luftballons ab, die auf unterschiedlich langen Glasrohren stecken und einmal mehr im Bereich des Unsichtbaren miteinander verbunden sind.

Den Dialog der Dinge macht die Zeit aus. Der Austausch und die Kommunikation zwischen dem Festen und dem Gasförmigen sowie dem Beweglichen der Bänder, zwischen Rot und Grau oder dem Runden der metallenen Röhren und dem Eckigen der Winkel und Betonquader.

Es geht in diesen Zusammenkünften aus industriellen und ephemeren Materialien um den phänomenologischen Zusammenhang, wenn zum Beispiel eine einzige Schnur eine gesamte Wand oder Raumkonstruktion nur durch den physikalischen Druck aufrecht erhält. „Ich möchte den Status quo der Instabilität und den Zweifel provozieren”, sagt die in Berlin und Rio de Janeiro lebende Künstlerin. “Die Betrachtenden müssen meine Arbeiten gar nicht sofort verstehen, sondern können sie in Ruhe auf sich wirken lassen.”

Wie stets bei Guagliardi ist die Ausstellung nicht nur die Summe ihrer Teile, sondern eine Gesamtkomposition, die aufs Feinste auf den Ort und seine Beschaffenheit abgestimmt ist. Denn, so die Künstlerin, die Unendlichkeit des Raums und die Ewigkeit der Zeit sind Schwestern.

The beginning and end of the red thread are one.
From the ceiling it glides in a straight line through a copper pipe, drills itself into the granite-like concrete block, from which it emerges again after a short distance, runs through another copper pipe and disappears again into the ceiling.
The red thread as a loop, an endless loop. An impossible measure with which Carla
Guagliardi gives the invisible and gives physical aspects a metaphorical dimension.

Guagliardi uses simple, everyday means and materials to create surprising moments of magical power. With mysterious works that scrutinise and celebrate physicality and the laws of physics.

How do the rubber bands hold the massive iron bars? Where do the holes in the wall lead to and why does the seemingly unstable glass ball in the space-filling installation not fall to the floor the next moment?

Shaping time

‘Past, present and future are, as we know, only bound to their appearance as cosmic time – to the process of succession’ wrote the composer Bernd Alois Zimmermann in 1968. ‘ In our spiritual reality, however, this succession does not exist, which is a more real reality than the clock we are familiar with, which basically indicates nothing other than that there is no present in the strict sense. Time bends itself into a spherical shape.’

In the Brazilian artist’s sculptures, time takes on this spherical form in the straight lines and angles, in the visible and the invisible or in a glass sphere enclosing water. It floats in the centre of the second room of the exhibition “where is the time left in this space?” in the kajetan gallery.

The almost 30 centimetre tall, transparent vessel is filled to the brim with water and forms a delicate-looking team with the thin strings arranged in a star shape. The strings disappear into three openings, which the artist calls mouths and whose specific fastenings in the weighty glass sphere cannot be made out.

The life thread of man

The title ‘às Parcas e ao Edi (Parcae)*’ refers to fate, a deceased friend (Edi) and the mythological Parcae. Just as the goddesses of fate usually appear as a trinity, Guagliardi uses three materials. The stainless steel stands for stability, the copper maintains balance and the cotton symbolises fragility.

In addition to these technical materials, Guagliardi mentions another element: time. Analogous to the goddesses of fate, who spin the threads of human life, Guagliardi (who studied fine arts and the history of art and architecture in her native city of Rio de Janeiro) twists the ropes and wires together from bundles of individual threads.

Her work, the artist explains, has developed as a continuous process from experiences and from her subconsciousness . From blue pigments in squared plastic bags filled with water, to the transparent plastic tubes in which she let the water corrode iron rods, to the works with balloons or the red threads. Through physical pressure and tension, they evoke the antagonists of fragility and stability as well as time.

Things in dialogue

Another of Carla Guagliardi’s humorously absurd experimental arrangements around the space-time continuum is ‘Conversation (II)’. It consists of two white balloons attached to glass tubes of different lengths and, once again, linked to each other in the realm of the invisible.Time constitutes the dialogue of things. The exchange and communication between the solid and the gaseous and the mobile of the ribbons, between red and grey or the roundness of the metal tubes and the angularity of the corners and concrete blocks.
In these assemblies of industrial and ephemeral materials, the focus is on the phenomenological connection, for example when a single cord holds up an entire wall or spatial construction solely through physical pressure. ‘I want to provoke the status quo of instability and doubt,’ says the artist, who lives in Berlin and Rio de Janeiro.
Viewers don’t have to understand my works immediately, but they can let them play out in their own time.’

As always with Guagliardi, the exhibition is not just the sum of its parts, but an overall composition that is finely tuned to the location and its nature. Because, according to the artist, the infinity of space and the eternity of time are sisters.

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Like sound and silence, the visible juxtaposed to the invisible beats the rhythm of life. Pauses enhance the music; disappearance turns appearance into a surprise, into an event with a temporal quality. The visual syncopation of images appearing and disappearing stimulates the brain. It triggers expectations, therefore ignites a mental chain of cause and effect eager to be satisfied. In “zwei dinge und ihr akkord”, which lends its title to the exhibition, a supple string pulls in and out of hard concrete and metal, elastically retreats into and pops out of the rigid wall, like an optic dance it meanders fluidly. Is the string really piercing through the objects or is there a trick? Does the resilience of the elastic band outlast the obstacles posed by the solid objects? Does it make it all the way though? Yes, the loop is completed: concrete blocks, copper pipe and gallery wall are stitched together with nothing more than a string. There is no trick, just beautiful absurdity – like life, not always purposeful but astonishing, composed by contrasting elements that somehow accord with one another. On the opposite side of the wall two copper pipes sprout out from the wall, each holding a balloon filled with air. Again, is there a trick? How do the two balloons hold an equal amount of air in balance? “Conversation” consists in a pipe that connects the two balloons in and out of the wall, piercing though the rigid surface like needlework. The equilibrium is simply the result of chemistry: gas spreads in space evenly, through the pipe into the balloons. The artist has the idea, sets up the tool and natural laws do the rest. An accord is a composite, harmonious sound formed by different chords of a string instrument – ad core – to the heart, in Latin. A musical accord generates peaceful emotions which inspire agreement. So it is that Carla Guagliardi’s sculptures “zwei dinge und ihr akkord” and “Conversation” link up in agreement. Two conjoined things – duas coisas juntas = two conjoint things – result in more than the sum of each . Relating visual pause to visual activity, balance in the face of evanescence, the two sculptures vibrate in a composition like two musical chords.

CARLA GUAGLIARDI, Brazilian artist long resident in Berlin, starts out performing on stage with her father, a renowned pop-musician. Since then she embarked in the visual arts, featured in one-person exhibitions in world class institutions such as the MAM (Musem of Modern Art) in Rio de Janeiro, Haus am Waldsee in Berlin, Museu Paço Imperial in Rio de Janeiro, and took part in group ixhibitions at Haus der Kulturen der Welt in Berlin and ZKM in Karsruhe to mention but a few. Alongside, she has developed teaching skills especially focusing in children and psychiatric patients – and activity that is the natural outcome of a freshly invented artistic form of pedagogy.Music, rhythm and the stage, however, have never abandoned her, just seeped into Carla Guagliardi’s artistic life in subtle ways, as can be sensed in this exhibition. Evanescence, rhythm and balance relate to visual forms.

Carla Guagliardi – zwei dinge und ihr akkord
Nicolaus Schmidt – konkret

Like sound and silence, the visible juxtaposed to the invisible beats the rhythm of life. Pauses enhance the music; disappearance turns appearance into a surprise, into an event with a temporal quality. The visual syncopation of images appearing and disappearing stimulates the brain. It triggers expectations, therefore ignites a mental chain of cause and effect eager to be satisfied. In “zwei dinge und ihr akkord”, which lends its title to the exhibition, a supple string pulls in and out of hard concrete and metal, elastically retreats into and pops out of the rigid wall, like an optic dance it meanders fluidly. Is the string really piercing through the objects or is there a trick? Does the resilience of the elastic band outlast the obstacles posed by the solid objects? Does it make it all the way though? Yes, the loop is completed: concrete blocks, copper pipe and gallery wall are stitched together with nothing more than a string. There is no trick, just beautiful absurdity — like life, not always purposeful but astonishing, composed by contrasting elements that somehow accord with one another. On the opposite side of the wall two copper pipes sprout out from the wall, each holding a balloon filled with air. Again, is there a trick? How do the two balloons hold an equal amount of air in balance? “Conversation” consists in a pipe that connects the two balloons in and out of the wall, piercing though the rigid surface like needlework. The equilibrium is simply the result of chemistry: gas spreads in space evenly, through the pipe into the balloons. The artist has the idea, sets up the tools and natural laws do the rest. An accord is a composite, harmonious sound formed by different chords of a string instrument — ad core — to the heart, in Latin. A musical accord generates peaceful emotions which inspire agreement. So it is that Carla Guagliardi’s sculptures “zwei dinge und ihr akkord” and “Conversation” link up in agreement. Two conjoined things — duas coisas juntas = two conjoint things — result in more than the sum of each. Relating visual pause to visual activity, balance in the face of evanescence, the two sculptures vibrate in a composition like two musical chords.

Carla Guagliardi, Brazilian artist long resident in Berlin, starts out young performing on stage with her father, a renowned pop-musician. Since then she embarked on the visual arts, featured in one-person exhibitions in world class institutions such as the MAM (Museum of Modern Art) in Rio de Janeiro, Haus am Waldsee in Berlin, Museu Paço Imperial in Rio de Janeiro, and took part in group exhibitions at Haus der Kulturen der Welt in Berlin and ZKM in Karlsruhe to mention but a few. Alongside, she has developed teaching skills especially focusing on children and psychiatric patients — an activity that is the natural outcome of a freshly invented artistic form of pedagogy. Music, rhythm and the stage, however, have never abandoned her, just seeped into Carla Guagliardi’s artistic life in subtle ways, as can be sensed in this exhibition. Evanescence, rhythm and balance relate to visual forms.

Extracted published for the exhibition zwei dinge und ihr akkord at K52, Berlin /feb.2020

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In Carla Guagliardi’s artworks, what is not revealed to the eye is just as important as that which is seen. This principle is revealed as transgressive and bearing an unsuspected political content, in our time marked by the excess of images and by the economy of competition for attention. Altogether, these characteristics of our current context give rise to a gaze that is intoxicated by the accumulation of stimuli and simultaneously anxious and restive to perceive the content between the lines of the visible.

Since the early 1990s the artist has been constructing a cohesive poetic program with a single body of questions, evoking the relations between mobility and immobility, fullness and void, weight and lightness, temporality and a-temporality, balance and vulnerability. In Sem título (P.I.) [Untitled (P.I.)] (1990) it was possible to note this way of proceeding, typical of her work, in which opposites are assimilated and go hand in hand. There we witnessed a series of polyethylene tubes leaning against the wall, containing water and an iron rod. Essentially what we see is a minimalist gesture, guided by a totalising essence. But it was precisely within this aseptic visuality that the artist went on to instate the unforeseen, the organic. Guagliardi introduces time as an active element, making it a co-author of the artwork. The slow rusting of each of the tubes differentiates and singularizes them. The serial gesture normally involving equals in a static situation is here commingled with an unsuspected organicity that inserts difference, change and randomness.

This emphasis given to the process, to duration, is likewise found 25 years later, in Opera II (ou Onde está o tempo que eu deixei nesse espaço?) [Opera II (or Where is the time that I left in this space?)] (2015). This installation consists of a 300-kilo block of ice, set atop a wooden structure suspended from the four corners of the ceiling by elastic cords, but resting on the floor. As the ice melts the structure rises into the air. It allows the viewer to “see” time; this is what the artist does in her Opera. It recalls Saint Augustine’s characterisation of time, when he said, “If no one asks me, I know what it is; but if I am asked and I want to explain it, I no longer know.” The slow melting of the ice and the gradual rise of the wooden structure materialize this simultaneously familiar and very abstract quality. Guagliardi’s work is formed between the solid and liquid state. From the heavier to the lighter, from the more voluminous to what, finally, disappears. A comedy takes place here, which privileges the process, subtraction and slowness – aspects that run opposite to a contemporary experience marked by the yearning for a result through addition and acceleration.

This sort of patient gaze that the artwork requires is also seen in Fuga II [Escape II] (2017), made on the occasion of the exhibition of PIPA Prize finalists. A site-specific work, it consists of a sort of sculptural drawing installed in the exhibition space at the Museu de Arte Moderna of Rio de Janeiro. Seven solid cement blocks of various sizes serve as basis for copper tubes of different heights, connected by a single red elastic cord stretched between their ends. For its part, this cord extends through a tube embedded in the wall, disappearing from visual perception, just as it does in its path through the blocks. Standing before a continuous line, which is nonetheless discontinuous to our eyes, we are thus invited to mentally form the whole.

As in countless other works by the artist, the striking thing about Fuga II is the interdependence of the parts that underline, at one and the same time, its particularities. The cement blocks possess a precise opacity, weight and volume that allows us to better perceive the metalized texture of the tubes and, moreover, the lightness of the very fine line of the elastic cord that cuts through the air. The singularity of each part is made powerful not by isolation, but by proximity – a lesson that could be extrapolated, once again, to the experience of our present, indicating that the artwork runs against the grain of a contemporaneity in which one of our biggest challenges is to live together with others who are different from us.

The hurried visitor tends to see not a single cord, but rather spans of different cords. It is only with patience that we perceive the sense of continuity residing in the fragments. That it is a continuous line lends our gaze a sensation of looping, making us incorporate the air as a structural element of the work. Through simple procedures, the artist invites everything in the surroundings to become part of the work: the walls in which the cords are tensioned, the floor and the “void” of the air cut by the red cord. What previously went unperceived is illuminated by Guagliardi’s subtle yet sharp gestures.

For its part, the title Fuga [Escape] refers to simultaneously to the word’s spatial sense in the Portuguese phrase ponto de fuga [the vanishing point of perspective drawings], a random line of escape determined by circumstances, and the musical fugue, a style of composition where a theme is repeated by countless voices that enter successively, interlinking with one another. It is thus a sound that can determine the space of simultaneity at different moments. This relation of the artist’s work with the vocabulary of sound is not a new development; previous examples of this dialogue are found in Verso [Verse] (2007), Partitura [Musical Score] (2012) and Os Cantos do Canto [The Corners of Song] (2012). It is likewise not a new development that the air is incorporated not as a representation of nothing, but as something that exists and affects the work.

In Verso (2007), for example, there is a delicate balance between gravity, geometry and air. Heavy wooden boards are delicately balanced on rubber balloons. With time, the air slowly leaves the balloons, modifying the geometry – which is initially secure and stable. The tension between what we are seeing and what we suppose will happen is the gap in which the meaning of the work resides. Air and time, both invisible, are active instances of the work. The most interesting aspect is not so much the final result of the process, the deflation of the balloons and the possible fall of the sculpture, but rather the constant promise of change contained in the piece and the relentless dimension of time. In the various versions of O Lugar do Ar [The Place of Air] (the first version is from 1993) we see grids of iron bars connected by rubber bands that weave a subtle relation between geometry, gravity and air. Here we find works that are rhythmic – once again in the musical sense – in which the weight of the bars articulated by the malleable material produces constant but nearly imperceptible transformations.

The artist’s poetic program involves a counterpoint in relation to a contemporaneity marked by the regime of the spectacle and hyper visibility. In accelerated times, in which our experience seems to be a “frenetic immobility,” in which the overwhelming pulsing of images instates a progressive blindness in each of us, Guagliardi’s work arises as an experience that reminds us of the importance of a patient gaze, an emphasis on the process, and the chance for opposites to go hand-in-hand. Without being regimented by a deliberate intention, all of these choices arise with a high political charge of resistance. Amidst the generalised cacophony in which we are immersed, Carla Guagliardi’s work, in its convergence between delicateness and power, guides us to the chance of another way of being in the world, in which the murmur is heard as loudly as a shout, reminding us that it is there, in the blank space between one line of a poem and the next, that we find the meaning of what is being said. For this, we need to listen to silence and to look at the void.

The materials listed for Carla Guagliardi’s Opera II”( or Where is the time I have let in this space?) are: elastic cord, wood, ice and time. Her piece for die raum is a continuation of of a series of works dealing with the impact of time on organic materials and our perception of space.

Opera II is a sculptural thermodynamic operation – hence the title referring to the latin origins of the word “opera” as “work” or “labour”. The installation consists a monolithic human-scale ice block placed on a wood structure, suspended by elastic cords which are attached to the four cornes of the ceiling. As a balanced system submitted to the inexorable forces of gravity and thermodynamism the installation will commence “operation” as the ice begins to slowly melt.

Guagliardi’s installation are carefully composed, highly aesthetic, dynamic systems governed by visible as well as invisible processes performing a poetic measure of time. She often works with simple but precise gestures. Opera II ( or Where is the time I have let in this space?) turns die raum into a lyrical “Gesamtkunstwerk” of thermodynamic forces striving to reach a state of equilibrium, and as such reflecting the constant flow of life and perceptual flux.

This Brazilian aphorism reflects optimism and captures perfectly the vantage point Carla Guagliardi chooses to take over daily life and the art she makes. Liquids and gases expand until they find resistance or dissipate; pressure diminishes while dilation augments. Their nature poses no physical limits and only barriers given by external bodies can contain them. With changes in temperature liquids become gaseous and gases liquefy; both water and air contain oxygen. Where fluids give way air fills in. A glass is always full of something, even though its content is invisible. For over a century physicists have been looking for the vacuum yet keep finding more subatomic particles. Nothingness is at present not available. Carla Guagliardi’s view is more than an attitude: she observes and accepts facts, at the same time ponders on the wondrous ways in which chemical bonds generate a universe of inorganic and organic matter that sparks life. Primo Levi, the chemist turned writer, once stated that ‚periodical systems are like poetry, they even rhyme…in the most commonly used graphic form of the periodical table, every line ends with the same ‘syllable’, which is always composed by a halogen plus a rare gas: fluoride + neon, chlorine + argon…’. Carla Guagliardi captures the poetry of chemistry by means of the optical and tactile language of visual art similarly to the way Primo Levi did with literature.

With fresh eyes, persistence and unprejudiced curiosity she observes natural phenomena; art is for her an area of suspension of disbelief where she can devote herself to trying out new connections and see where they lead. Many of her sculptures and installations are born out of the consideration that the distribution of fluids and gas pressure constitutes the building blocks of form. Uns águas (A Waters, 2005)—the title itself stands for fluidity as it transforms the Portuguese feminine substantive into masculine and the uncountable singular noun into
a countable plural—is a series of sculptures that consist of transparent glass vessels, spherical in shape, connected with each other through their long adjoining bottlenecks which contain water and air. Each sculpture is unique in that the water level varies from one work to another, as also do the number of vessels linked together (from 2 to 4), their capacity (5, 2 or 1 liters) and the length of the bottleneck (40, 20 and 10 cm). Water is poured into the sculpture from a vertical position, the vessels are then sealed together and placed horizontally. Apart from the artist’s intervention which controls the amount of water in proportion to air and consequently their distribution within the work’s volume, density and gravity represent the main agents that bring the sculpture into existence because pressure, dilation and resistance simply follow the laws of nature. All the materials used are transparent and only differ in state: solid, liquid, gaseous. Beauty is generated by the difference in texture, reflection and absorption of light captured by our eyes.

Es atmet mich (The Place That I Breathe, 2006) utilizes inflatable latex balloons interconnected by a continuous line of copper pipes filled with air. The installation comes to life through the fine-tuning of the air content which is distributed within the several meters- long duct and balloons so that the pressure is sufficient for the balloons to remain turgid and spherical. Balance, suspension, dynamics and transformation are physical and chemical states situated within a time framework that Carla Guagliardi peruses in her work—time is often listed as a medium, as it is through time that materials oxidize, pressure reduces, fibers slack and it is time that the artist employs in order to make a sculpture.They are all qualities which recall grace rather than friction and are metaphors for conditions of life and philosophical considerations.

Fuga (2014)—an installation conceived for Diehl Cube—displayed in the exhibition together with the sculptures Partitura (2012) and Os cantos do canto (2012) relate to “Es atmet mich” because
they all pivot on the principles of connection and tension, distribution and balance, as they also use lines or spheres like punctuation of a language conceived with the purpose of visualizing space.
Fuga (escape, fugue) employs copper pipes as were they needles piercing the gallery walls to let through a taut rubber elastic band in a loop that stitches together
the exhibition space, optically linking the outside with the inside by means of subtle lines that designate an otherwise invisible expanse. The graphic pun brings to mind the Parcae’s metaphorical
thread of life and Ariadne’s logical method of selecting amongst multiple ways of proceeding in the labyrinth of existence.

Coming from performance—Carla Guagliardi used to sing onstage with her pop-star father, then went into mime and acting in social theatre— her orchestrating interactions with people has given
way to arousing relations between natural elements and materials. Like a song or lyric, Partitura and Os cantos do canto naturally hold together by means of a sequence of balancing pressure
between foam balls of different sizes and wood partitions. Partitura (music score) hangs from the wall by means of hinges fixed on one side of the edge of the boards; the spheres, displayed
like notes in a music score, are placed under and between the partitions, remaining suspended only because they are gently squeezed between the wood and the wall. Os cantos do canto,
as suggested by the rhyme of the title, is a star-shaped unit kept together by a circular chain of mild pressure in which each element is equally necessary. “Canto” means in Portuguese both chant and corner. The multiple-choice generated by the double meaning of the word spins between “chants of the chant”, “corners of the corner”, “chants of the corner”, or “corners of the chant” — the foam rubber balls are indeed cornered between the wooden boards. Rhythm, a definition normally used in music and poetry, can be applied to the visual flow generated by repetition, variations and harmony encapsulated in these sculptures.

Gaspar, a pun between the German first name Kaspar, its Brazilian equivalent Gaspar who is also a popular ghost-character, and the gas contained in the balloons, is a spirited sculpture that floats in mid air defying gravity. Such state of grace is only possible because the upper balloon filled with helium is anchored to a lower counterpart inflated with air balancing its volatility. Susceptible to currents, temperature changes and electric fields, Gaspar may move towards the observer following him or her with “participation”, as if engaged in a dance, or else wanders around the room, sometimes trying to find its way out of doors or windows. Moving about with serendipity, the sculpture seems to have a life of its own. Curiously, the public relates to it as if it ware an animated object and life could inhabit inorganic matter.

Attentive and reflective, rather than forceful and provocative, Carla Guagliardi brings into visual art wisdom and tranquility, connectedness and care—qualities that underlie an existential
attitude of acceptance of the transformation processes linked to our existence. Hers is an art of broad perspectives and elation that opens up mental doors, rather than closing in on compartimentalised views. It shows how, on the other side of the threshold, new dimensions expand.

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For those who fly to rest

One way of reading Carla Guagliardi’s work is to see it as consisting of two moments: a first, autonomous and structuring, related to what is given to consciousness as a pure physical phenomenon; and a second, superimposed on the first, which concerns a poetic discourse that is born in the wake of the possibilities opened up by the first, and which tries to fill in what it left open. This second moment rests on the first as if it were resting.
The dimension that articulates the most essential coordinates of the work is eminently descriptive, it emerges at that point where matter makes the artistic form speak as a pure spatial relationship. This is a point where the physical world, the world of things ‘not made by man’, is presented to the eye through the arrangement in space of different relational situations linked to the properties of matter, where the artist’s research seeks to match these properties – balance, density, materiality, capillarity – with their spatial and temporal forms of appearance, without at the end of this process resulting in any difference, or minimal remainder, capable of overloading the work with an aestheticisation not justified by strict constructive reason.
This dimension of the work, a phenomenologist would say, ‘does not interpret or clarify, but tries to describe what the phenomena are and show for themselves’, which is why, if we can talk about the occurrence of a poetic activity here, we would do well to interpret it as an activity delimited by a firm and reflective formal will, which does not capitulate to anything that is not a requirement of the logic of the work itself. In the face of this constructive order, which is alien to the world of men, since nothing here depends on our will to continue existing – and which Carla’s work only makes available in a way that is suitable for our observation – everything breathes silence and celebration, and it’s not for nothing that a recent review published in Artforum magazine detected ‘a serene presence’ in the artist’s work.
In the second moment, the strategy based on exposing the physical fact undergoes a turning point. It is now a question of inscribing the world of matter – the world of blind causalities – in the order of human passions, or rather, in the human symbolic order, an operation that is carried out through poetic discourse, which here assumes the function of structuring fields of meaning for experiences that are in fact entirely alien to it. In the vacuum of the experience with form, the light of meaning must enter, and this is how, while in the first moment the formal experience is realised through the spectator’s encounter with the concrete sculptural element – an encounter where the consciousness, free from any distraction with meanings that are not strictly aesthetic, can observe in rigorous introspection the internal order of its phenomena – the second is realised through the constitution of a place to welcome and signify what this first order insists on denying us humans. We are then returned to the order of interests and purposes, of time and memory, with everything we desire there. Physical time, objectified by spatial relations at first, now becomes sensible time, the contracted and dilated time of the passions. It is with this key that we approach the work For those who fly to rest.

Furthering his research into the formal properties of gaseous materials, this work intertwines the two registers mentioned above through the construction of a structure made of copper tubes, air and latex balloons, inviting ‘those who fly’ to rest. From the place where the work will be built, it can be deduced that the main recipient of this invitation will be birds – a whole poetics of flight, inspired by Bachelard, could be evoked here. In fact, it doesn’t matter if it’s this or any other, because the dimension of the physical event leaves the poetic territory to be established free. What matters is this in-completeness that artistic work is condemned to endure, since the work is realised in a dimension outside that projected by its maker. This is the case with this work. If a bird were to accidentally (!) peck one of the latex balloons, the whole fragile dynamic of the work would break down, further emphasising the complex material/formal relationships set in motion by this structure, and bringing us back to that joy Marcel Duchamp said he felt when he saw his Large Glass broken while it was being transported to the gallery. Only then, the French artist realised, had the work been completed.

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Há uma série de fotografias de Carla Guagliardi, de 2006, que me parecem resumir alguns aspectos de sua poética. Diante de uma paisagem árida e austera da Sardenha, onde sobressaem a pedra e o silêncio, ela espalhou alguns balões azuis iluminando o ar. É como se diante do tempo imobilizado da paisagem surgisse um sopro precário de cor. A delicadeza bruta de sua poética está sempre buscando os pontos de encontro entre a imobilidade e a mobilidade, o temporal e o a-temporal, o peso e a leveza. Os balões azuis, na iminência do desaparecimento, na sua precariedade constitutiva, avivam na pedra uma materialidade inabalável. O contraste entre materiais explicita a propriedade de cada coisa, uma singularidade que nasce da própria co-existência entre eles produzida pela escultura.

Quiçá seja esta capacidade de propor relações surpreendentes um aspecto fundamental de sua obra. Tábuas de madeira pesam sobre balões brancos que as sustentam no limite da sua própria resistência. O preciso e diferenciado volume de ar em cada um dos balões é fundamental. Se completamente cheios inviabilizariam o precário equilíbrio e a tensão das tábuas; se mais esvaziados perderiam a dignidade formal requerida para a escultura funcionar. É um momento de forma que tonifica a fragilidade dos balões, mantendo na madeira seu peso e sua gravidade. Na construção dos seus trabalhos, cada elemento individual depende dos demais, constitui-se e se afirma a partir da interdependência entre eles.

É notável sua capacidade de resgatar nos materiais uma pulsação vital. O que me parece importante apontar é a insinuação de que de dentro das relações propostas por suas esculturas, resgata-se uma diferença esquecida entre matéria viva e matéria morta (ou como se diz normalmente, matéria prima). Da mesma maneira que há em algumas línguas – penso aqui no inglês – duas palavras para distinguir um corpo vivo (body) de um corpo morto (corpse), é como se sua obra estivesse trazendo à tona uma vitalidade para a matéria inanimada. Esta vitalidade é a força assumida como tônus, como especificidade reveladora de uma intensidade não quantificável, porém perceptível, na presença singular dos materiais no momento de sintonia fina entre o olho e a obra.

Esta vitalidade remete para a presença da água e do ar como elementos estruturais em suas esculturas. A informalidade rigorosa, tão cara à sua poética, tão própria de sua delicadeza bruta, decorre justamente disso. Trata-se de uma espécie de sustentável leveza do ser, da capacidade das obras se manterem no limite da sua dissolução. Suas peças estão constantemente se transformando, vivendo processos internos a partir dos materiais que vão se alterando – seja a quantidade de ar e a forma dos balões, seja a oxidação visível do ferro no interior dos colchões de plástico e água, seja ainda o cobre que respira no contato com a água no interior das bolas de vidro.

Esta é a razão para a artista insistir em incluir o tempo como um dos materiais a serem descritos nas etiquetas. Tempo é processo e pulsação. A matéria respira e vai em busca de sua natureza própria. A respiração tem uma ligação ancestral com o princípio vital dos organismos. Através dela mantém-se a energia dos corpos pela fluência de oxigênio e circulação dos elementos vitais. A tonificação vem com a pulsação, o movimento e o equilíbrio.

A processualidade se revela com nitidez nos trabalhos com gelo, nos quais a forma se desmaterializa e se desfaz ao longo das exposições. Em um trabalho notável realizado na Áustria, ela põe uma enorme barra de gelo sobre uma mesa para mantê-la no chão, uma vez que tensores elásticos a puxam para o teto. Com o passar do tempo, derretendo o gelo e escorrendo a água, a mesa sobe e se expande no espaço. A passagem do sólido ao líquido traz à percepção a diferença entre peso e volume, concentração e expansão.

“O Lugar do ar” talvez seja a peça que, em ambas as suas versões, melhor exemplifique a informalidade rigorosa que rege sua poética. Uma malha de barras de ferro e elásticos cresce pela parede ou se expande no espaço. A forma é uma equação sutil de gravidade, geometria e ar. O peso das barras dá o ritmo do desenho. Sua articulação é ao mesmo tempo orgânica e construída. É um trabalha que dialoga com as “Malhas da Liberdade” do Cildo Meireles, com os “Frutos do espaço” do Antonio Manuel, com a sutileza dos desenhos de Mira Schendel e algumas instalações de Gego. Outra artista com quem ela mantém um diálogo mais processual do que formal é a americana Eva Hess, para não falar de Lygia Clark. Todas estas remissões não diminuem a originalidade da obra, pelo contrário, a potencializam.

Retomar este diálogo com artistas que a antecedem acaba por nos levar ao próprio contexto geracional no qual surgiu a obra de Carla Guagliardi. Tratou-se de um momento singular da arte brasileira, mais especificamente da cena carioca do final dos anos oitenta e começo dos noventa. Junto a ela, poderia mencionar, para citar alguns artistas próximos, João Modé, Eduardo Coimbra, Carlos Bevilaqua, Ernesto Neto, José Damasceno, Tatiana Grinberg, Brígida Baltar, Ricardo Basbaum, Fernanda Gomes, Marcos Chaves, entre outros. O que interessava era retomar o fio experimental pós-neoconcreto, resgatando rigor formal aliado à organicidade dos materiais, à leveza visual, à fragilidade estrutural e, acima de tudo, a uma noção de experiência poética marcada por uma temporalidade intensiva. Não obstante o fato de a artista morar em Berlim desde meados da década de noventa, o diálogo com seus pares de geração tem se mantido vivo.

Percebida esta filiação, há que se pontuar as diferenças no que tange ao modo pelo qual a experimentação pode e deve produzir efeitos na atualidade. A geração experimental dos anos 60 e 70 foi a última a assumir uma vontade de arte que se confundia com um desejo de transformação social, com uma ruptura marcada pela violência revolucionária. A queda do muro de Berlim pode ser vista dentro de um novo modelo de mudanças não violentas – revoluções reformistas como as designa o historiador inglês Thimoty Garton Ash. Somam-se a isso os processos de redemocratização na América do Sul que, aos trancos e barrancos, incluem atores políticos historicamente deixados à margem. Surgia, a partir daquele momento, um devir inesperado, um tipo novo de exercício experimental de liberdade construído dentro do sistema hegemônico e redefinindo suas formas de poder e de sociabilidade. Seriam possíveis mudanças sem ruptura? Bifurcações sem cortes? Mantenham-se abertas as perguntas!

A melhor arte produzida a partir deste novo contexto recuperou um fio experimental pautado no risco de dissolução e na crença no aparecimento do novo sem, todavia, repetir o modelo das vanguardas e suas determinações ideológicas. Parte do risco mencionado vem da rápida institucionalização da arte contemporânea, da apropriação banalizante do mercado. Na passagem da adversidade conflituosa de outrora para a diversidade anestesiante do presente, há que se buscar elementos de resistência que dêem às obras uma capacidade de diferir no meio da indiferença, extraindo da multiplicidade sinais de singularização.

A fluidez, a co-existência na diferença, a processualidade e a precariedade material, são traços destas poéticas experimentais – e Carla Guagliardi é um exemplo notável aqui – que nos ajudam a enfrentar e reinventar o presente. Acima de tudo, remetem aos processos de transformação negociada e de redefinição democrática em um mundo mergulhado na crise, mas que, mesmo assim, querem poder acreditar na “audácia da esperança” e na capacidade de se constituírem novas formas de vida, de arte e de comunidade.

CARLA GUAGLIARDI: the bearable lightness of being

There is a 2006 series of Carla Guagliardi’s photographs that seems to summarize an essential aspect of her poetics. Before an austere and arid Sardegna landscape, characterized by stone and silence, she spread a few little blue balloons, almost coloring the air,. It is as if, before the immobilized time of the landscape, there emerged a precarious breath of color. The raw delicateness of her poetics always looks for the meeting point, between immobility and mobility, the temporal and the atemporal, weight and lightness. The blue balloons, on the verge of disappearing, in their very precariousness, enliven an unshakable materiality in the stone. The contrast between materials makes explicit the uniqueness of each thing, a singularity that is born of their coexistence within the sculpture.
Perhaps the ability to propose surprising juxtapositions is the most fundamental aspect of her work. Wood planks rest on white balloons that sustain them at the limit of their own resistance. The precise and diversified volume of air in each balloon is fundamental. If fuller, they would spoil the precarious balance and the tension of the planks; if emptier, they would lose the formal dignity necessary for the sculpture to work. It is a formal moment that on the one hand pumps up the frailty of the balloons, yet on the other sustains the wood’s weight and gravity. In the construction of her works, each individual element depends on the other, and is constituted and affirmed by their interdependence.
The artist’s ability to give her materials the pulse of life is remarkable. What seems to me to be important to notice is the suggestion that, from within the juxtapositions proposed by her sculptures, a forgotten difference between living material and dead material is rescued. In the same way that some languages – I’m thinking of English – have two words to distinguish between a living body (body) and a dead one (corpse), her work seems to give vitality to inanimate matter. It is a sort of strength that reveals itself at the moment of a fine alignment between eye and work.
Such vitality is related to the presence of water and air as structuring elements of her sculptures. The rigorous informality, so dear to her poetics, so characteristic of her raw delicateness, comes from that. It’s a kind of bearable lightness of being, the works’ capacity to keep themselves at the very limit of their dissolution. Her pieces are constantly in transformation, undergoing inner processes as the materials are adjusted – whether the quantity of air and the shape of the balloons, the visible oxidation of iron inside plastic mattresses filled with water, or the copper that breathes in the contact with water inside glass balls.
This is the reason why the artist insists in including time as one of the materials to be listed in the labels. Time is process and pulsation. Matter breathes and goes in search of its own nature. Breathing keeps an ancestral connection with the vital principle of organisms, through it, the energy of the body, is kept by the flow of oxygen and the circulation of vital elements. Tonus (not really a common word in English not sure what to suggest “the toned body” or muscle) comes with pulsation, movement and balance.
The emphasis on process is clearly revealed in the works with ice, in which the form is dematerialized and dissolved throughout the exhibition. In a remarkable work done in Austria, she places a huge bar of ice on a table in order to keep it on the ground , since elastic rods pull it toward the ceiling . In time, the ice melts and the water flows, and the table rises up into space. The passage from solid to liquid raises the awareness of the difference between weight and volume, concentration and expansion.
The place of air, in both its versions, is perhaps the piece that best exemplifies the rigorous informality that rules her poetics. A mesh of iron bars and elastic bands grows through the wall or expands through space. The form is a subtle equation of gravity, geometry and air. The weight of the bars grants rhythm to the drawing. At the same time, its articulation is organic and built. It is a work that dialogues with Cildo Meireles’ Meshes of freedom, with Antonio Manuel’s Fruits of space, with the subtleness of Mira Schendel’s drawings and with some installations by Gego. Another artist with whom she keeps a more process-based than formal dialogue is the American artist Eva Hesse, not to mention Lygia Clark. All these references do not detract from the work’s originality; on the contrary, they make it even more potent.

Furthering the dialogue with artistic precedents takes us to the generational context in which the work of Carla Guagliardi emerged. It was a singular moment in Brazilian art, more specifically in Rio de Janeiro’s art scene at the end of the 1980s and beginning of the 1990s. Besides her, to mention a few are the artists: João Modé, Eduardo Coimbra, Carlos Bevilacqua, Ernesto Neto, José Damasceno, Tatiana Grinberg, Brígida Baltar, Ricardo Basbaum, Fernanda Gomes and Marcos Chaves, among others. The focus of interest was to take up the post-neoconcrete experimental thread, restoring formal rigor allied to an interest in the organic nature of materials, to visual lightness, to structural frailty and, above all, to a notion of poetic experience marked by an intensive temporality. In spite of the fact that the artist moved to Berlin in mid-1990s, she has kept the dialogue with her generational peers alive.
Once this filiation is established, one must point to the differences concerning the way through which experimentation can and must produce present-day effects. The experimental generation of the 1960s and 1970s was the last one to assume the desire of an art mixed with the desire of social transformation, with a rupture marked by revolutionary violence. The fall of the Berlin wall can be seen within a new model of non-violent changes – reform revolutions, as the British historian Timoty Garton Ash puts it. We add to this the redemocratization processes in South America that, by fits and starts, include historically marginalized political agents. From that moment on, an unexpected possibility came up, a new kind of experimental exercise of freedom built within the hegemonic system and redefining its forms of power and sociability. Is change possible without rupture? Bifurcations without violence? Let’s keep these questions open.
The best art produced within this new context took up an experimental thread guided by the risk of dissolution and the belief in the emergence of the new, without, nevertheless, repeating the model of the vanguards and their ideological determinations. Part of the risk mentioned comes from the swift institutionalization of contemporary art, the banalizing appropriation of the market. In the passage from yesterday’s conflicting adversity to the overwhelming diversity of the present, one must search for elements of resistance that grant to the work a capacity to differ amidst indifference, extracting from multiplicity, signs of uniqueness.
Fluidity, coexistence in difference, emphasis on process and material precariousness are traces of these experimental poetics – and here Carla Guagliardi is an outstanding example – that helps us to face and reinvent the present. Above all, they recall the processes of negotiated transformation and democratic redefinition in a world deep in crisis, but that, in spite of this, wants to be able to believe in the “audacity of hope” and in its ability to constitute new forms of life, of art and of community.

Luiz Camillo Osorio
Rio/Berlin, February 2009.

Time’s Arrow

A number of platforms are suspended in the space at different distances from one another and at different levels. On these platforms are glass vessels. Some of the vessels pass partly through the surface of a platform so they are held tightly in place between one plane and another. Connecting certain glass containers to others are capillary tubes forming a circulation system passing through the space with its own logic independent of the system of planes. In this whole configuration of differently shaped vessels at different heights, water naturally finds its common level.

This seems a fair description of Carla Guagliardi’s work entitled Nothing that was not before (first shown at the Künstlerhaus Bethanien in Berlin in 1999), until one thinks further. Why didn’t I start my description with the water, rather than leaving it to last? Is it still so difficult to accept that a fluid can be the primary element of a sculpture? Or that the quiet, elusive process of the water’s search for equilibrium could be the subject of the piece? Or even that the water is a metaphor for the passing of time, rather like the dripping water that used to measure time in certain early clocks – except that this water does not run away into oblivion but circulates: “Nothing that was not before” ?

I think it is significant that Carla Guagliardi’s work has come out of sculpture, and has altered the orientation of sculpture. It is a sculpture which exhibits the behaviour of materials, and its meaning arises from that. Its associations with science are obvious and Carla Guagliardi says she “subjectively transports science into my art project”. One might describe her installation as half-way between the ‘controlled experiment’ of science and the visual uniformity of the minimalist aesthetic. Both schemas in a way provide the support and the foil for the organic behaviour of nature which is the heart of each work.

Thus, in considering Big white (2007) one could start with the immaterial air rather than the solid parts of the sculpture which communicate immediately with our visual sense. We can’t see the air in the balloon but it is the agent of the material tautness that gives the aesthetic sculptural pleasure of the work, strung like a bow. We can’t see it but we can feel the air’s presence intensely. Yet the air, by gradually escaping its confines and dispersing into the surrounding space, is also the agent of the gradual entropy that the material object and its visual impact is subject to. Its beautiful tautness, its figure of energy, is sadly diminished and eventually nullified by the passage of time. This duration is deliberately strung out in Carla Guagliardi’s work: we know, or we feel, that if the balloon burst the sculpture would be instantly reduced to a few insignificant relics.

Although Carla Guagliardi states that her experiments begin in “purely physical and material conditions”, she admits that “no artistic activity is completely free from the artist’s subjective intentions”. Certainly one feels that the material tension in Big white translates to an emotional tension. A tension is set up between opposites for which many verbal terms suggest themselves: between certainty and apprehension perhaps. In another work which follows the same principle, Verso, also 2007, there’s a strong feeling of collision between tenderness and discomfort. Three pristine wood planks, one slotted between the other two, rest heavily on three white balloons of different sizes. Despite the purity and generality of the work’s abstraction, enhanced by the gallery’s immaculate parquet floor and white walls, a sense of threat and corporeal vulnerability is palpable, as if the balloons were human heads, a family almost, caught in the collapse of a building (whether by accident or malice).

Is there a war in these works between the structural aspect, with its cerebral and rigid associations, and the more fluid and yielding components of the piece? Perhaps. Such a confrontation was neatly demonstrated in an earlier work Guagliardi made (Untitled, 1994). Taking up an entire room, iron bars are suspended horizontally, supported one above another only by latex elastic bands of different widths, the weight of iron gradually pulling the structure out of regularity. An extremely complex process of stretching – since all the components are linked in a single interdependent structure but the linking bands are of different degrees of elasticity – alters the structure over time. It is a beautiful insinuation of the ‘body’ into the codes of minimalist art.

In fact, if there is a conflict involved here it has been explored by a number of Brazilian artists over the last decades with such philosophical precision and sensory awareness as to achieve a near equilibrium between these opposite sides of the human psyche. Lygia Clark was a great initiator of this process. At the beginning of the 1960s Lygia Clark spoke of the “death of the plane”. She thought that the plane, as a mental construct by which humans orientate themselves in the cosmos, would be replaced by “the immanence of the act”. It was first announced in her Bichos (1960), hinged metal constructions based on clear geometrical figures that took on the integrity and vitality of an organism when manipulated by the spectator. She then left the geometric language, moving closer to the body and organic rhythms. The tension of a stone paradoxically buoyed up on a bag of air, felt between the hands as much as seen with the eyes, characterises her brilliant Air and stone (1966). Considerably transmuted, the same exploration can I believe be felt in Guagliardi’s sculpture using balloons.

There is another ‘moment’ in the history of the Brazilian avant-garde which is perhaps recalled in Guagliardi’s work: Hélio Oiticica’s critique of the image. Oiticica made this critique after observing the public reaction to his ‘Penetrable’, Tropicalia, in 1967. He decided that many people had taken his work only at the level of imagery, easily and quickly consumed and repeated, and had missed what to him was the more important experience: the subjective, temporal, experience of going inside it. Therefore, he came out with his notion of the “Supra-sensorial”.

I feel something similar about Carla Guagliardi’s work. It is not to be quickly and easily consumed at the level of imagery. Its essence is not in its immediate appearance but in the material transformation it is going through, something that slows time down from the point of view of the subjective tempo of the contemporary spectator. I feel this is tremendously valuable. In her work there is a reassessment of sculptural history and a change in the traditional relationship between space and time. Time was in a sense denied in traditional sculpture. Space was developed, but in the use of materials like bronze and marble, time, that transforms everything eventually, is held at bay as much as humans know how. Guargliardi challenges this but does not sweep it away completely.

The anxiety and uncertainty prompted by the dissolution of fixed structures is compensated by the discovery, in their interstices, so to speak, of a new elasticity and fluidity. In the three-part metaphor of Nothing that was not before – laboratory / sculpture / state of mind – the shapeless and endless water seeks out its precarious equilibrium.

Guy Brett
(This text is a slightly enlarged version of an article first written for the yearbook of the Künstlerhaus Bethanien, Berlin, no. 6, September 2000).

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Estamos ali, diante da história. Um corpo vivo com pele transparente. Células que processam em seu interior o acúmulo da passagem do tempo. Nos falam aos sentidos de uma qualidade tátil e visual do tempo, para além de uma cronometragem exata, de um registro métrico.

O organismo se expande horizontalmente no espaço e verticalmente no tempo. As faixas horizontais, „campos temporais“, trazem em si a soma e a diferença, o momento e o lapso, o contínuo e a suspensão. As células estendidas verticalmente atravessam o instante, expressam individualmente sua temporalidade, trazem em si a divisão e o múltiplo, e nessa geometria orgânica a serialidade se faz um todo na unicidade do tempo. Um corpo único, que vive e cria seus sinais. Uma escultura onde a matéria permanece em contínua transformação. Reações entre sólido e líquido, escuro e claro, pesado e leve, presente e ausente, antes e depois. Um trabalho que se realiza unicamente naquele espaço e naquele tempo. Uma pintura onde o suporte (a água) é o elemento ativo que traz para o plano o tempo físico, que atualiza a cada olhar uma experiência real e única, que dilui a matéria e se impregna de sua ausência. Uma paisagem que se aprofunda na extensão do tempo.

Estamos ali, diante da obra. Sentimo-nos no mundo. Num mundo como aquele delimitado pela fina película transparente. Contamos o tempo presente, imersos em seus abismos e sobressaltos. Nesse processo silencioso e irreversível comungamos de uma inevitável cumplicidade: a existência.