The Familiar Stranger

 

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Some of the series of works created by Thereza Salazar contain something that resembles a German term, “Das Unheimliche” which means a stranger who is familiar, something unsettling that dialogues with the Freudian concept that refers to something (or a person, an impression or a situation) that is not exactly mysterious, but “strangely familiar”. Freud already commented on the term in 1919, in an essay in which he affirmed that anguish is catalyzed by the return of something familiar that was repressed, drinking from the source of the work of the German ETA Hoffmann (1776 - 1822), and focused on evil -being that stems from this rupture in the reassuring rationality of everyday life. Unheimlich comes from Heim, a word which means 'home', and which introduces a notion of familiarity, but which is also the root of the word Geheimnis, translated as 'secret', in the sense of something that is familiar or that must remain hidden. This term that, 40 years after Freud's essay, in 1959, Lacan took up again when he created the word extimité ('extimidade'), which gives the idea of ​​something interior, something belonging to the subject, but which is at the same time strange, not recognized as such.

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The Minas Gerais-based artist who has lived in São Paulo for decades has a production that gathers drawings, collages, serigraphs, fabric works and objects that make this seductive and imaginative strangeness that runs through her work familiar. Using different techniques and materials such as paper, glass, fabric and pins, Thereza creates a very particular visual repertoire and on different supports that become complementary in her visual process in which she uses drawing as the main axis, which also unfolds in collages, prints , serigraphs, photogravures, objects and artist books. His graphic work houses a visual narrative that creates an imaginary, fabulous, fabulous cartography. The artist drinks from sources such as the one created by Borges, and I remember an excerpt from a fable by the Argentine writer contained in the book Universal History of Infamy (1935), which he speaks of an empire in which “the art of cartography achieved such perfection that the map of a single province occupied an entire city, and the map of the empire an entire province ”. In some works, Thereza creates, represents - as in one of her artist books - this visual cartography that in a way ceases to be just a representation and that goes beyond Borgean speaking, in which the map would become “perfect”, seen that he would be “the very thing in the world”. In this simulacrum that establishes the real, it no longer has origin or reality, as stated by Jean Braudillard when he comments on a text by the Argentine writer.

 

Thereza creates in a series of works a poetics of animality that points to other [ir] realities and [ir] rationalities, [re] building other representations. In the article “The opening: human, animal and animality in the philosophy of Hans Jonas”, Jelson R. De Oliveira comments that “when describing the print on the last pages of a Hebrew Bible found in the Ambrosian library in Milan, Giorgio Agamben highlights the fact that the drawing contained therein expresses a kind of final reconciliation of man with his animal nature: the image represents the vision of the prophet Ezekiel, in which in the final eschatological banquet, humanity appears with the faces of animals, transfigured (reconciled) in your animality ”. Agamben speaks of teromorphy, a word used to describe the similarity between men and animals. This “animality”, whether human, animal or mineral that runs through the artist's work also reminds me of the images of satyrs and silenes. Both were in the popular representation of hybrid demons, half animals, half humans, who formed the procession of Dionysus, a god associated with fun, vitality and ecstatic states. And this analogy between the human and the animal is not only found in the production of Thereza, very visible in the “Filhos da Noite” series, but it has been running through art history ever since. It is worth remembering that in the Middle Ages there were bestiaries, which were a type of descriptive literature on the animal world, very common in monastic classes, which gathered information about real and fantastic animals. Or the fables of Aesop and La Fontaine with characters that are anthropomorphic animals, having human parts or characteristics. This animality is also present in the artist's works such as “Memento Mori” and in her serigraphs.

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When I see, for example, his works almost wall hangings, “Cascos”; the series of drawings and collages “Bless The Beasts”, or even the series of drawings “Cárceres”, I remember when the French editor and writer Maurice Heine, biographer of the Marquis de Sade, wrote in his diary about the moment when he met Georges Bataille, who would have said to you “you are wrong to put yourself in a moral point of view. I put myself from the animal's point of view ”. When Bataille comments on the reason for the “diversion” to talk about modern art, he describes it as if this “transposition” was “those tapestries that hide what would be needed at any price not to see”. In a way, Thereza [des] hides in her production - be it two-dimensional or three-dimensional - this transposition creating an intersemiotic dialogue, a “linguistic” system that, for the philosopher Georges Didi-Huberman “means the articulation of signs in visual signifiers and implicit verbal and discursive signifiers that, ultimately, constitute the meaning of the image ”, as if it wanted to make the“ speaking image ”, a visual lexicon, a signature of its own, which is perfectly represented on its three-meter scroll on which it houses various symbols, signs, visual images of its graphic and visual process.

 

There is something strange, veiled, a certain atopy in his work. The French philosopher, historian and philologist Pierre Hadot says when he writes about a text by Plato, that the importance of the figure of Socrates occurs above all as the subject who mobilizes the notion of atopy associated with "strangeness" (étrangeté). In “Teeteto”, a Platonic dialogue on the nature of knowledge, Socrates himself will say about himself: “I am totally weird (atpos) and I create nothing but aporia” (an impasse, a doubt, a paradox). The term atopy also means “eccentricity”, denoting the figure of Socrates as someone who [deviates] from the center. Which can mean something that is out of place, strange and absurd, unusual and extravagant. Unwise, what “does not fit”. In her production, the artist creates, in a certain way, this "separation", this "gap". It is not for nothing that one of his series of drawings is called “Skis”, which comes from the Greek word schisis, slit.

 

Thereza Salazar's visual production also houses the playful, that which refers to games or toys, that is “fun”, and that which is related or refers to dreams, fantasies, to what does not belong to the so-called "real world" . As in the series “Caixa de Joias” made with hundreds of golden pins that, depending on the light and the observer's point of view, take on playful forms that when seen up close, become, in their own way, the chimeras, fictions, illusions and imaginations that their work houses. In her graphic production, Thereza creates these “fantasies” that, recalling the French word, ghosts, echoes Walter Benjamin's words when he said that “those who are able to capture the fleeting moment in which the ghosts of the past cross the present”, reverberating even more - decades later - in what Georges Didi-Huberman tells us. "What we see is worth - lives - only for what looks at us". And in this new time that gradually establishes a “new normal” in the world, nothing better than fantasy to capture the fleeting moment in which art takes us from the present.

 

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Jurandy Valença, September 2020