Small Acrobatic Inventory

 

The writer Caio Fernando Abreu, in his unsettling quest to see beauty and happiness in a life that seemed distressing, wrote that he hated circuses: “In fact, I hate everything that enchants me and then he leaves”. This sensation, which is so familiar to us, is perhaps due to the fact that it is hard for us to understand that the circus is where it is and where it is going. Its address is the provisional and mutant. Such a nomadic and traveling condition seems healthy

respectful public. Imagine if we could live closely with everything that integrates the fabulous atmosphere of a circus: walking around the city with the contortionists, meeting the magician and his tricks, discussing the fear and courage of the suicide bomber, caressing the ferocious lion, knowing in depth how the globe of death works, having coffee with the ballerina who flies supported by her teeth, realizing what the bearded woman suffers and “what she dreams of ...

 

Everything and everyone under the canvas has an aura of strangeness, mystery and, at the same time, enchantment. Would knowing your truths (if any) demystify the spectacle and would we fall into a complete abyss of obviousness? As in many instances and fictions in life, the circus is, perhaps, one of those places that one does not need to know in depth, it is not necessary to go behind the scenes and break the curtain's limits . Since some of the fascination that we feel, not only as a child, for its characters, oddities and almost impossible deeds, resides a lot in our cracks of the unknown, where there are undivided and incomprehensible things, where there is affection for abnormalities, even if life it would be much more interesting without all the conventions.

 

This is Thereza Salazar's micro / macrocosm: the circus, its characters and the strangeness of the events that only happen there - between the exclamation and a kind of poetic annoyance. The artist collects, edits and assembles circus scenes and scenes from an immense archive of images that she accumulates. In his research, he focuses on the power of collage and on agglomerations of characters who perform theatrical actions. Thereza shows her gestures and the plasticity of the bodies from a drawing of silhouettes. “I'm interested in the synthesis and not the figuration, the copy, the accuracy”, says the artist.

 

Thus, there seems to be pores in his drawings, formal incompletions purposely calculated, so that we can enter such an environment and in this path we reinvent the spectacle, the sequence of the scenes, the sensation that the circus artist goes through in the arena. Such resources of the artist are present in works such as “Malabarista” (2012) - a kind of mythological being with four legs, which balances animals, creatures, men, anthropomorphic animals - and as the drawings of the “Série sortilégios” (2012) - characters of the circus whose postures are associated with the anatomies of animals (seahorse, dragon, porcupine).

 

Collage and the enjoyment of descriptive, almost elementary images gain a conceptual and fictional density when the artist constitutes visual approximations in a narrative that reminds us of a film negative tape. In the “Polytheama” mural, all the characters are there vividly incarnating their tasks and oddities, all at the same time: mixing, contaminating, hybridizing, without beginning or end. This image has removed everything that has any obligation to reality. They are things seen and recontextualized in mixtures of scales, plans, volumetries and possibilities of living together.

 

But, now, anything is possible. In “Small acrobatic inventory”, form, as a drawing, is a moldable, articulable process and is thus presented both in the work of Thereza Salazar and for those who see her projects in space. From this, we can see that such an inventory in his narrative as a place and spatialization of drawing occurs as what Deleuze presents us as “Fabulation”: an ambivalent condition, without an opposite between truth and fiction, reality and imagination. These poles are not requirements for Thereza Salazar. Well, “Little acrobatic inventory” seems to tell us to get rid of the prisons of the real and to reinvent ourselves in our fabulous possibilities .

 

 

Galciani Neves

October / 2014.