The vergito of writing one’s body into the abyss of the world | Bianca Coutinho Dias | 2021
“A Terceira” [The Third] explores issues related to the fields of art and psychoanalysis, centering around the instinctual body, or the body of drives: teeth, breasts, leaves, spines, tree trunks and so on – vibrations and disruptive features leap from their original environments, only to re-emerge visually in the artist’s works. Through her drawings, the artist is able to embrace and give shape to the overflow of body and mind: emptiness and excess, that which is radically hers and that which is pure alterity.
In one of his lectures, also called “The Third” [La troisième], Jacques Lacan addresses a point that lies at the very heart of psychoanalysis, namely the singular manner by which a given individual writes or represents his or her body.
“Who knows what goes on in one’s body?”, Lacan inquires, and adds: “Anxiety is precisely something which is located elsewhere in our body, a feeling that arises as a result of this suspicion that comes to us, the suspicion of being reduced to our body”. With Lacan, we return to Freud’s novel concepts of corporality. In psychoanalysis, the body is not relegated to the sphere of biology. Rather, it is shaped by language itself.
Marcia de Moraes shows us that there are indeed ways in which the body can be unraveled and explored, processes which allow us to fictionalize all that occurs within and without it. In contemplating the artist’s work, a personal and made-up lexicon gradually takes shape before us; her drawings, begun with no conscious plan, seem to thrive in the soil of unexpectedness and uncanniness. The questions implicit in her drawings and collages permeate the viscera, the interior and the exterior, the surface and the breadth of things: What are the limits of the body? How does one write or represent one’s body? What are we ultimately made of?
The artist’s gestures are revealed in the explosive and vital quality of her strokes, strokes which embrace empty spaces – betraying the interval between the image’s conception and its actualization. Different fragments of reality come together to arouse desires and to produce myriad effects – she has sought a topological, discursive and visual device which, in a sense, constitutes a profanation; she has also sought a language that can emancipate itself from its figurative ends and be used in novel ways, ultimately engendering a new and refreshing experience of the gaze.
In “Ce que nous voyons, ce qui nous regarde” (“What We See Looks Back at Us”), Georges Didi-Huberman invites us to alter or dislocate our gaze when contemplating a work of art in order that we may experience that which is not visible. In a work of art, we might perceive something that draws our gaze, something that causes the depletion of everything we hold true about the object, something that may allow us to access a space wherein invention and creation thrive.
The lines and strokes that comprise the basic shapes assimilate empty space. The intervals which are revealed by the pencil strokes and the colored shadings lead to the disfiguration of the figurative, causing the shapes to merge and overlap and, ultimately, to lose their contours entirely. The difference between her drawings and her collages may be likened to the diastolic and systolic phases undergone by the heart. Whereas her drawings convey a sense of amplitude and expansion, her collages convey altogether different and more constricted gestures and times.
Her work can’t be easily pinned down: it occupies a hybrid and unclassifiable dimension. The colors that fill the empty spaces lend her pieces a rather pictorial quality. Her use of living or pulsating materials (colored pencils) allows the artist – by creating a welter of sensuousness – to establish the rudiments of an aesthetics and an ethics, observed in drawings like “Blue Sultry Weather” [O mormaço e o azul]: an opening in the spaces created by the dialectical interaction between colors and natural phenomena. Whereas in other pieces, such as “Unbounded Wave” [Onda solta], which borrows its title from a passage in play written by Chico Buarque, the artist attempts to evoke the sinuous movements of certain ghostly apparitions.
Marcia de Moraes draws on a diversity of references: the natural environment, a song, a poem, or works by other artists, e.g. in “Highs and Lows after Louise” [Altos e baixos after Louise], a tribute to Louise Bourgeois. Her works fold and unfold upon themselves, they duplicate themselves and they combine distinct discourses into a labyrinthine construct which gives a voice to that which is inanimate. A continuous irradiation pervades her collages, composed of drawing cutouts, combining uncanniness and refined irony, which are also present in the titles of works such as “Octopus”, “It was full, it spilled” [Tava cheio, vazou], “Up and downs”, “Tropical Hoops” [Argolas Tropicais], “Snooker” [Sinuca]. The names themselves serve to undermine language, they play around with the ambiguities and circularities of life: in some of her works, the “Hoops”, the “Carrousels”, the “Strips”, which are alluded to in the titles and are represented in the pieces themselves, impart a sense of uncertainty to the very act of naming, revealing a somewhat delirious process by which she seeks to capture the unsayable, the unnamable, the real, the single and final point into which all meaning flows or drains.
With her profanations, Marcia de Moraes boldly exhausts every layer of meaning down to the very bones of things, creating a corporeal geography of her own – merging nature and culture, botany and poetry – a corporeal geography whose furrows and grooves sketch out improbable horizons.
A hurricane or a storm can lead to convulsive derivations of affection, such as in “Rain-tears” [Chuva choro], a piece in which form, color and content interact seamlessly, creating layers of actions and reflections between the vertigo of the sensible and the liquid resonance of nature. Certain elements recur throughout the pieces, giving rise to a personal cartography of sorts: an open-ended map with no definite locations, an answer to a reality which contains the uncanniness required for the creation of something, anything, and in which the irrepresentable and the unthinkable might somehow manifest themselves visually.
“Ecstasy” [Êxtase]– a work whose elements are at once connective and separative – is composed of images that adumbrate the birth of things: they reflect a vertiginous experience; they give us a sense of interpretative bafflement. These shapes, however, are steeped in meaning, and yet they remain, to some extent, inaccessible or unassimilable. Based on the “Ecstasy of Saint Teresa” by Bernini, which depicts the impulse-driven body inscribed by language, the work attempts to communicate the convulsions of femininity. Furthermore, Moraes’s inherently penetrative works are also pervaded by a certain edgy, serpentine and dance-like flow – reminiscent of the works of Loie Fuller (an actress and dancer who visually renders movements and gestures by using long, flowing silk costumes) – with its decomposed curves and its foldings and unfoldings, thus forging a direct connection between image and thought and drawing on a particular understanding of things which allows her to articulate the visible with the invisible.
The works featured in this intimate exhibition – displayed in what used to be a bank vault – allows us, in a sense, to experience the living cadence so characteristic of femininity, much like a Hilda Hilst poem:
Why can’t I sprinkle a little innocence and poetry
on bones, blood, flesh, now
and all that lies within us which will one day
become ugly and deformed
To touch a body – its architecture, its landscapes: excerpts from a life written in the abyss.