little powerful units
germana monte-mór. galeria marília razuk sp 2004
Think of autonomous artistic individuals, isolated elements that can perfectly assert themselves in their plastic generosity; elements which are called drawings due more to a language habit that adheres to the convention too fast, possibly transmitted by paper support, but which are clearly determined by pictorial practice. These drawings or paintings on paper would already be powerful manifestations of an artistic research that seeks to examine internal and external limits of the form: transparency and opacity in simultaneous games over white background, a body that expands in an asymmetrical way, always in curves, an amoeboid that, however, is not contained entirely in the element that contains it: it invades the paper as if part of this larger entity had just left the mark of its passage, later withdrawing, the moment of its existence having already been recorded in the painting.
Now think of another investigation; one that collected these various testimonies of the passage of a greater being, that recognized the autonomy of each of the drawings or paintings and grouped them as the total manifestation of the plastic event in which resulted the various manifestations of materialization of this entity whose existence seems to continue beyond the work. We now have a legitimate use of the word community: individuals – drawings or paintings – together have indeed a common unit, a rare thing to find in groups to which the bastard, vulgarized use of the word in everyday life is applied, and all of them are different, no one is equal to another. We then have the potency to which the set of individuals that manifests itself in the large panel was raised. This is a painting, please, let’s not speak of drawings any more.
In historical terms it is still a way of, consciously or unconsciously – it matters little –, materializing almost a hundred years later a cubist investigation adjusted not only to the experience but also to a new sensitivity generated by contemporary conflicts. Note that Germana Monte-Mór turns inside out not the object of cubism itself, but her question instead. It is clear that the artist is no longer seeking any planar truth, nor the deconstruction of the illusion of depth shown by geometric perspective, a task that consumed the masterful works of artists who, from Cezanne, Picasso and Braque, came to Abstract Expressionism. We do not have the empty space, the ideal limitless extension, continent of things in the world and the dilemma of their representation, not even the constructivist dilemma, in which spatiality is invented by the juxtaposition or superposition of plans and by the tension of chromatic relations – the spatiality generated by the extinction of the vanishing point.
Here, in the panel, since each element acts with its own autonomous strength, each has its own vector – an axis pointing in one direction and simultaneously reacting with equal intensity towards the interior of each unit. The spatiality of the panel is not generated by the deconstruction of perspective, but by the invention of these autonomous forces, all divergent of one another while solidary, thus requiring us to take several stands. These multiple directions, whose conflict is just limited by the plastic unit, have to do with the larger painting that passed and was never fully realized. Its strength lies both in what is present and in what is lacking. If the painting indulged in a false integrity, coherent and cohesive, it would undo its truth. There are no more fragments in an already disillusioned world. There is, rather, the emergence of discreetly powerful units that, put together, assert a contradictory and simultaneously cohesive entireness.