TENDA
Marta Jourdan, Marcia Thompson and Enrica Bernardelli
We're dealing with three exhibitions. Of course, dialogues can be made between the works of these artists, but I would say that there is an autonomy in each of these poetics. Beyond friendship and a generational issue that could weakly connect them, what is important is how each of them deals with objecthood and how the form or, in short, the plastic choice of each of the three artists points to a dilution of matter and time.
How can you make a painting out of its own destruction? This seems to me to be a question that converges in the direction of Marcia Thompson's painting-objects. Challenging the planarity that is supposedly expected of painting, the artist manually constructs tridimensional objects that are produced from the action of fraying what would conceptually support the painting: linen, thread or rope. In other words, a material that could be mistaken for the canvas or the surface that reveals the act of painting is torn apart or broken to become the painting itself. The ‘chassis without the canvas’, represented in one of these objects, is the synthesis and origin, albeit metaphorical, of this process that unfolds in a tense relationship between material and work. But it's not just the act of undoing that is at issue, because the artist is interested in the way in which these objectual paintings gain tangibility: the material is tangled, the knots are crossed, we perceive the gestures employed, the painting becomes something compact, but these actions are not the result of a purely aggressive attitude but, on the contrary, are of the dimension of affection and renew the very state of invention of the painting. They occupy the space between object and painting, but they are in the realm of the pictorial. Their volumetry and density, impregnated in the material, make us aware of different perspectives, textures and malleability that flat painting doesn't always offer us. These cubic structures are pure concentration of pigment and density of weaves. Their scale, to a certain extent diminutive or the size of the artist's gesture, makes us focus on their weave, their peculiarities and textures. They are soft and smooth structures that somehow create a relationship closer to touch. These 'pictorial objects' demand our presence because they are also of the order of similarity, of recognising that these materials are part of our everyday lives. And this reflection on the nature of materials extends to other media. In Untitled (Border), a video made this year, the artist, while walking along the edge of the beach and braving the elements of nature, first unrolls a skein of wool, which, as the title suggests, forms a trail or border on the rocks, and then performs the reverse procedure: Thompson collects what has demarcated a territory, again provisionally, in order to materially demonstrate not only the temporality of this action, but also the very transience in which we are immersed. The thread functions both as a guide for reflection and as a formal foundation in the construction of this tensioned space, a problematic place in this contradictory network, within which the viewer is forced to take part.
Her most recent project is a book (Untitled, Biographies) made up of different pages articulated with each other as if in a system of folds, each of which contains the print of guidelines that allude to different cultures and their modes or systems of literacy/writing. It's another of Thompson's allusions not only to (architectural) form, but also to craftsmanship and the action of simultaneously constructing and suppressing, building and collapsing. Modules, open cubes, provisional architectures are made and dismantled at the same speed, with graphic lines on their walls, like musical scores, that identify a variety of languages and cultures. The feeling is that everything is still to be done: both in the act of manipulating the pages that become spatial structures and in the calligraphic records that are waiting for the next author.
Marta Jourdan's wanderings are a major factor in the construction of her works. Attentive to her surroundings, the artist often builds her works from the items she collects. Her objects are based on the intrinsic relationship between wood, stones and other materials, preferably organic ones that can be used as raw materials at the time or in the near future. But not only that, other materials that make up her works belong to the universe of ceramics, produced by the artist but still close to forms that are part of our daily lives. Without abandoning the choice of colour or geometric composition, even if they are made up of arrangements that remind us of the gambiarras so common in Latin culture, the works are based on chance encounters between Jourdan and the materials. In the midst of fragility - thin wood that represents a living but decaying landscape or small objects created by the artist and often shared and incomplete or in the appearance of dissolving - what emerges is the power of a unity, of a force field that is constituted from this system made up of parts. This logic also applies to her drawings. Using packaging from industrialised products (like sweets, for example) or newspaper pages, which are given an intervention of colour, the artist creates monochrome surfaces that have, as in the case of the drawing on display, an intrinsic relationship with constructive plots. Jourdan combines cut-outs with industrialised, ready-made material, creating a regime of emptiness that is juxtaposed with the interval space of the surface on which these cut-outs are glued. They are camouflaged shapes, because their origin is erased, that gain another functionality and adhere to that constructive fact (staggering but without losing its ingenious and affectionate character) that is very peculiar to the artist's work.
The rusticity of the materials brings a natural regime of colour to the works, but it is the sponge that often provides an extra dose of pictorial effect due to its chromatic extravagance. More than that, this same material emphasises a central characteristic of Jourdan's work, which is its comicality. The sponge sometimes appears squeezed between the ceramics; sometimes it serves as a bulkhead; or even, through an effect of proximity, it seems to give an affectionate characteristic to an element that is larger and heavier than it. What deserves to be stressed is that in none of these examples an atmosphere of pain or gloom is created; on the contrary, what is celebrated is a chain of laughter, tenderness (the materials like to be together even if in some cases they seem to be colliding) and jocosity, as if we were watching a cartoon. And injecting humour, through an aesthetic that intersects with the mundane, in the high seriousness of the art world is no small thing.
As much as a structure of correlation or juxtaposition between materials can reveal a sense of movement, what paradoxically arises is the suspension of acceleration. It is at this moment that the works come closest to a still life, to a relationship that is both close (in silence) to painting and to the artist's daily life; to the inaugural gesture of converting a discarded object - something that is unique since it is often a piece of nature or a device of no apparent use made by Jourdan - into art. This encounter of affections that I'm pointing out is a direct result of the artist's choice not of mass-produced industrialised objects, but of remnants of nature or handmade pieces that create an atmosphere of empathy with the public.
Enrica Bernardelli's works are part of Film U, an imagined cinema, not always projected, which has therefore been represented in different ways. Like a project in progress, with no record of a beginning, let alone an end, or a Möbius tape where we can't distinguish what is outside or inside, genesis or end because the reason is on hold, Film U also allows itself to be made outside the audiovisual environment, although it never ceases to be a projection or a device linked to cinema. Film U is a sequence of provisional units, because it is always waiting for a new realisation ahead. In other words, I would say that Film U is the result of a single line, the end of which meets the beginning, we don't know where.
The two photographic doubles chosen for the exhibition are frames/parts of Film U while maintaining their autonomy as an aesthetic operation. In Objeto de Cena/Filme U, we see, on the left, in a domestic environment, a man lying down, between a state of vigil and sleep, reading a book. The space of the room is taken up by geometric-shaped flags - curiously almost all of them with a cut announcing the incompleteness of their structure and therefore ready for the exercise of the event, of chance - suspended by strings. An atmosphere of mystery engulfs the scene. On the right is an image of a beach surrounded on one side by the sea and on the other by a sandbank, with coconut palms in the background. But this image - fictitious or real, it doesn't matter - is superimposed by the figure of one of the flags in the room in a diluted, transparent, somewhat ghostly apparition, on the path between fantasy and reality. I would say that it announces itself as a mirage, in the order of uncertainty. And more than that, a painting of the same flag, on a larger scale than the photographic double, is next to the images. Could it be a chimera? Had the man fallen asleep and dreamed? But the flag as a painting, a real, imposing object, displaying its extravagant grandeur, conveys the possibility of certainty. On the other hand, Scene Character/Film U is a poetic possibility. Here is the paradox of the invisible artist, of the performance that is happening without our knowing it, or of the event that takes place in the belief that it exists. The presence of the object/clothing with the inscription of its function is an irony that questions the very nature of the art object. The artist is interested in the permeable nature of things, in a crack that calls into question the very conviction about what we see. Untitled/Film U [Scene] is the indelible certainty that the work moves through the terrain of theatricality. The word scene inscribed on an oval object resting on a base evokes a stage atmosphere, but it can also be sculpture, which in turn can materialise in the frame of a film.
Bernardelli's works aim to provoke a state of indistinction between dream and reality. It is in this spiral of doubt and intricate reasoning that the artist's work is made, always by transmuting continuity and discontinuity. Bernardelli's work is not limited to a single determination; its tendency is always to overflow into other associations, affinities, relationships; to go beyond the borders; to trans-border or out-border, in other words, to go further than the borders. And, of course, the experience of time is included in this process of metabolic contamination. It is not determined in a rational or linear way, but is continually shortened and hurried, it takes place between intervals, in pauses that institute doubt. This constitution of asymmetrical time is in line with the very sliding nature of the artist's work.
The three poetics found a place that is built from the unfinished. The works seem to represent a displacement, as they transform what we recognise into a different form from the one we are used to relating to. Thompson's paintings are the negative state of their own matrix, as she is interested in destroying and then remaking in its own way, based on tactility; the objects found or even built by Jourdan have a form that is still incomplete, as they don't seem to be totally ready and are located precisely in this exercise of finding a place for support and affection between their gaps and faults; and the rift between delirium and reality, fiction and veracity in Bernardelli's work builds, in its spiralling and resolutely continuous structure, a sense of incompleteness for those who expect indubitability.
Felipe Scovino
Rio de Janeiro,2024.