Ghosts - Contemporary Allegories

 

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“I find it useless and tedious to represent what is, because none of what exists satisfies me. Nature is made, and I prefer the monsters of my fantasy to concrete triviality. ”*

 

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Some notes on the exhibition Fantasmas de Thereza Salazar. The dominant images (figures) are originally from a pre-scientific imaginary (time of a pre-abstract science contaminated with folklore, animisms, automata, mechanisms ...). Which become even more eccentric in games, meetings and combinations where they update and acquire autonomy from their origins. Arbitrary encounters controlled as much as controlled the configuration as they present themselves: clean, sharp, careful ... Where we have a formally predefined procedure but that in fact does not domesticate or saturate meanings or limits them to being just scenic creatures in the clash between such machines, animals and exotic and anachronistic plants. In a first approach we can find them comical, childlike ... as a provocation ... of the contradiction of a descriptive crudity (typical of manuals, treaties, compendiums, etc.) and of an unusual delicacy in their pantagruelian pelicans, mesmerized snakes, dysfunctional engines, alchemical trachitans, volatile polyhedra ... from “Beautiful as the fortuitous encounter, on a dissection table, of a sewing machine and an umbrella!” de Lautréamont. There is, in my view, less than an experience of rearticulation of meanings between images of different origins and intentions, something from Aby Warburg's research, than a more gratuitous exercise (game) of seduction of something that motivates us to redefine meanings in their lives. meetings (compositions) and at the same time frustrates us in that momentum. Even more interesting because it cushions our dependence on giving meaning to everything so that we can enjoy our machine for producing meaning with an avalanche of references. We are here in a challenge where the possible fables fail, unworkable. Appropriating the term “valise word” which refers to the fusion of words by agglutination forming another that would not necessarily have a closed meaning where part of its original forms is lost (I think here about its use in Lewis Carroll and also in Chimera too) a hybrid formation of different animals) and the term “esoteric word” which is a word without a specific meaning that serves to fulfill a lack, a void, that we find in our speeches (as examples: this, business, stuff, thing, section , train, type, etc. where your senses are whatever you want). Both terms refer to the satisfaction of a lack of language, or (what I think is important in this context) the possibility of overflowing and an excess of possibilities for possible combinations, which paradoxically would be fulfilled in words that are their own meaning and nonsense words (absurd ). Now I would dare to think about these possibilities of games of construction (or destruction) of senses and apply them to the works of Thereza Salazar, thinking of something like “esoteric allegories”, which would not take us on a path where we would speculate about latent meanings, what “ Can be"; but we would only stroll free through its virtualities ... Like a non-linear and irresoluble rebus, the game in which figures come together in sequence and that from the sum or relation of the sounds of their names form words, phrases ... But when At the same time, they are also constructed from the collection of decomposable elements, individually determinable, for example: a plicometer, a pelican, a polyhedron ... constructions, compositions based on autonomous figures (although they carry an anachronism, a similar texture between them , an origin in a common past ...). When I thought of the famous quote by Lautréamont, what I think is the most important part of the excerpt is exactly: fortuitous encounter. Since the instigating point in Thereza's work is that they are unpredictable encounters, however, from elements of a similar plastic universe, which intensifies the anxiety that they mean in a common narrative. Making him distance himself from the surrealist constructions whose interest was that from the game with disparate elements ... distant ... games with disjunctions where chance would end in another discourse, somehow understandable, at least analyzable. The exhibited works form a section of his production that deals with encounters and mismatches in a strategy that disturbs the construction of meaning; where we are forced into the confused exercise of contemplating something that at first does not refer to this type of approach. They keep something enigmatic that makes us feel and wish that they can be solved in this way. That to the detriment of formations by agglutination or composition ... they would really be a kind of "esoteric allegories" ... things, stretches, this ... fascinating because they only mean themselves ...

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Tiago Santinho, August 2018

 

* BAUDELAIRE, Charles: Charles Baudelaire. Poetry and Prose, organized by Ivo Barroso, several translators. New Aguilar. Rio de Janeiro. 1995.