VIGIL
Vigil: the state of remaining awake; the act of watching over something or someone; a collective gathering organized around reflection or protest. Although polysemous, in all the meanings of this word, the action of remaining watchful is the one that recurs most. Vigil, as a continuous action, manifests itself in the body as an insistent attempt not to allow the exercise of attention to fail. This myriad of meanings and nuances also appears in the group of works brought together in the first solo exhibition in Brazil by Paraguayan artist Jorge Enciso.
Vigil, as both a word and a synthetic concept, is present in Enciso’s practice in both material and conceptual ways. The making of ceramics demands attentive care throughout the process of working with clay, a task that requires both muscular tension in handling the mass that forms the three-dimensional surfaces and delicacy in dealing with a malleable material that must be built millimeter by millimeter, with attention to form, detail, and finish. This entire procedure calls for long-term dedication, in which there is a constant negotiation between the clay and the artist’s own body, between the form envisioned by the creative act and the natural, elastic dynamics of the sculpted material itself.
The use of sgraffito, a central feature in Enciso’s recent works, also demands an attentive procedure of vigilance. As he engraves forms into the body of the pieces, the artist meticulously weaves patterns, creates lines of tension or escape, and establishes a visual vocabulary that eludes an easy confinement of his written vernacular. At times, these engravings recall beehives—establishing an imagetic relation to collective making, a fundamental quality in ceramic practices of Guarani descent, in which everything is taught orally across different generations; at other times, they bring lines positioned side by side, which, with the sinuosity of the pieces’ surfaces, create kinds of visual zones of convergence. Thus, within the artist’s universe, the sculpture itself is sustained as a kind of body, while writing is converted into skin, where events and marks of individualization and differentiation are inscribed.
In this sense, Enciso leads us to perceive writing and geometry against the grain through his sculpture. The artist’s proposal challenges the logical order of a merely mental, objective, and aseptic geometric practice, giving way to another space that, although also grounded in strong structural thought, turns to gestures and returns to cultural practices shaped by orality and ancestral making. By building line by line with fine metal rods, by agglutinating clay grain by grain with the warmth of his hands, the artist forges a kind of mestizo geometry—one that establishes aesthetic exchanges between the more hegemonic History of Art and the centuries-old practices of pre-Hispanic societies.
In works such as “Cabezas exiliadas I,” the artist goes even further in this investigation. Enciso engraves onto the body of the sculpture written passages that narrate Guarani cosmologies about the creation of the world, of language, and of the bond between humanity, nature, and the divine. What lies beneath this, however, is the fact that Guarani is not a language that follows Western standards of writing, making a translation into what is called “Paraguayan Guarani” necessary. This passage from an oral tradition to a written record, supported by an alphabet foreign to that tradition, constitutes an exercise of comings and goings between preserving a culture through writing and, precisely because of that, a process of acculturation. By transposing these passages onto the body of the sculpture, the artist juxtaposes, on the one hand, the strength of orality present in these myths and also in the ceramic knowledge to which he is devoted, with the desire for record and archive so highly praised within a more Westernized historiographic practice.
In a sophisticated way through his sculptural compositions, the vigil carried out by Jorge Enciso is far more than the attentive hours spent handling his works. It transcends the exercise of waiting for the pieces to reach the ideal temperature inside the kiln and, immediately afterward, the expectation of their cooling. Enciso’s vigil points to a state of remaining awake to the exercises of memory and, above all, to the cultural processes that promote asymmetries and cultural erasures. The artist’s sculptural practice brings to mind a Yoruba proverb that says: “While you pray, keep working.”
Tiago Sant’Ana
Visual artist, curator, and PhD in Culture and Society …
