I

A poem was born within me. 

I wanted to silence it, but the images created by Mariana and Francisco clung to my body and I had no way of letting go of them, other than metamorphosing them into words. Being a passenger and a vehicle for something that we take into ourselves, into our body, are pre-human characteristics specific to birds and vegetable matter. Plant seeds, spores and pollen travel with the wind and with certain animals, such as butterflies and bees, germinating in places far from their origin and sometimes creating, in these free associations, new species. Philosopher Michael Marder (whose voice we hear in the artists' film Palomacia) associates the idea of ​​passage and of a body-carrier (or body-which-receives) to the principle of the genesis of life, which he explains by using the concept of fold and the example of the plants. These welcome, generate and disseminate very different forms of life, contributing to the creation of inter-species communities, which become possible precisely due to the continuous movements carried out by the folds, which fold and unfold, allowing passage and transportation of certain properties from one side to the other, from one being to another being which is born of this junction.

The fold is the principle of compossibility, as Leibniz thought. This principle extends to any expression of pre-human or human experience, as life only illusively follows a straight line, originating at birth and ending at death. On the contrary, we are living witnesses that life weaves successive folds in us. Time itself is a fold (against the illusion of the line drawn by Chronos), as we can see in memory (the actualisation of a pure memory - recalling Bergson - produces a fold in which past and present are simultaneous). Compossibility can be translated as the ambivalence of heterogeneity, which in itself creates disparate forms of life. The works of the artists gave birth to a poem in me, words blossomed from the images in the body that carries them, echoing, over and over and over, in those who see the works and in those who read the words. Art is also a form of reception (“a reception that is not a retention”, yet again recalling Marder), which will be characteristic of some works more than others. Those that welcome will perhaps be the same that carry out successive folds themselves.

The fold always exposes one plane while hiding the other which, when folded, can be unfolded into a new plane, different from the first, successively. What is revealed in the unfolding no longer refers to any original unity, but to another, sometimes distant: the beginning of the universe or of life. The petals of flowers, the leaves of plants bend in the darkness and open, unfold, to welcome light, heat and water. The sun unfolds onto flowers, it unfolds into us, it bends the entire earth's surface and it bends the moon. It bends the light that unfolds into shadows. Shadows unfold into strange, wondrous beings. Ethereal, transitory, like ourselves, folds of a poem.

II

In Dobra Sol, only two moments are distinguished by their spatial sequence (which we can understand as an intensive journey from light to shadow or darkness, in which light is reborn in the form of a bird or hands, and we return, again, to the sun), because we also produce a fold in ourselves, in our thinking. Light - of which the sun is the primary source - always unfolds into shadow. The artists' most recent pieces work on this constant duplicity between light and shadow in the continuity of their work on image-movement and image-time. Both movement and time are measured, in their works, by this indiscernible unity of light and shadow. In the shadows, we perceive forms that awaken our memory, which is another form of time that the artists have worked on. And they rarely work with symbology. This is generally replaced by the use of geometry and its respective abstract language (although in these times, the desire for peace is an inseparable expression of what binds us to life). In this case, the fold describes (as in the Baroque model of concept) complex geometric relationships, which find in the flight of the white doves some of the possible compositions raised, in turn, to infinity (which is characteristic of the fold, as well) by the reflection in the mirrors. The relationship between ethereal beings and doves follows the principle of compossibility contained in the fold, in which the spark of life runs through all matter and - like seeds, spores and pollen in the wind - creates distinct worlds, where animal, vegetal and human unfold in subtle metamorphoses (of which the hands are indications, or even, traits or gestures). In these, it will be possible (as the title of the film Palomacia also reveals) to transform empathy (especially that which arises from inter-species encounters) into real communities.

III

Sun fold

double shadow

In the flower fold

color unfolds.

White dove

in the mirror, 

time bends

in the movement

it unfolds.

On the wings, 

two hands

or half moons

And a sun.

Sun folds

in me

After the wind 

A flower I will be 

Susana Ventura. Exhibition text for Dobra Sol, de Mariana Caló and Francisco Queimadela


MARIANA CALÓ + FRANCISCO QUEIMADELA
Dobra Sol
07.04 — 28.05.2022
_
Exhibition Text : Susana Ventura
Photography : Bruno Lopes
Exhibition Video : João Silva
Text and voice-over / "Palomacia" : Michael Marder
Set-up : Maria Torrada
Special thanks to : Rui Soares Costa, Kunsthalle Lissabon