Impossibility and Limit

The tragic hero is different: he trembles before the power of death, but as something that is familiar, proper and intended for him. His life develops from death, which is not its end, but its form, for tragic existence only accomplishes itself because limits, both of life in language and of life in the body, have been given to it ab initio and are inherent to it. (Walter Benjamin, The Origin of German Tragic Drama)

Look ye, countrymen and Thebans, this is Oedipus the great, / He who knew the Sphinx's riddle and was mightiest in our state. / Who of all our townsmen gazed not on his fame with envious eyes? / Now, in what a sea of troubles sunk and overwhelmed he lies! / Therefore wait to see life's ending ere thou count one mortal blest; / Wait till free from pain and sorrow he has gained his final rest. (Sophocles, Oedipus Rex)

Art, that sorceress expert in healing; only she can turn those fits of nausea over the horrible or absurd aspects of existence into imaginations with which it is possible to live. (Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy, §7)




Trembling, commotion, likes, dislikes, loss, birth and death, meaning and disorientation – these, while not the most common aesthetic categories, will prove useful for creating a certain metaphysical diagram of reality, the world, life and even human nature. However, there are moments in which a metaphysical diagram for understanding life can be drawn from, around and together with works of art. Nietzsche would have called it “metaphysical consolation”, a kind of soothing of the awareness of mortality and pain, which is apparently always implicit in being alive. In this context, artists appear not only as possessors of the capacity for revealing the nature of things, but also for reconciliation with it. That “healing spell”, which is often mentioned as one of art’s “missions”, is not so much an actual thing as a potentiality, a particular kind of latent energy that lies in the intimate core of each work of art. These are not promises of happiness or of access to some kind of lost paradises: what is at stake is taking possession of the form of things – whatever they are.
Death, seen here as an idea or form of consciousness, is a kind of generator: it creates, recreates, devours, dissolves, envelops and contains a certain atmosphere. It is true that all religious and metaphysical thought has a tendency to base itself on the painful relationship – fear, dread and consequent evasion – men usually entertain with the idea of their own end. Finitude, central to so much thought and artistic production, appears as something more than an inexhaustible subject: it is the source from which constantly flow statements and experiences whose pertinence endures through time. Greek tragedy and the tragic drama are major instances of that, as Nietzsche, Walter Benjamin and the Greek tragedians demonstrate. With them, we learn something not only about these artistic forms, but especially about ourselves when confronted with our limit, which manifests itself not only as awareness of biological death, but also in the limitations of human devices – language, the body, art.
The “Corpo Impossível” [Impossible Body] exhibition does not deal directly with the literary genre of tragedy or tragic drama, focusing instead on the experiences and pieces of information that have deposited themselves on these dramas and figures. No connections with specific texts or characters are established: what is central here is the density of that prophetic, cruel, bloodthirsty, sexual atmosphere, in which these works by four artists (Adriana Molder, Noé Sendas, Rui Chafes and Vasco Araújo) have found their starting-point. The tragic hero incarnates the theoretical, literary and artistic possibility of inverting the status quo. Instead of ignoring their end, tragic heroes elect finitude as their destiny; rather than accepting the sublimation of the limit and the illusion (which might perhaps be called hope or nostalgia) of endlessness as a way of life, they prefer to shape their materials in accordance with enraptured silence and death without lamentation. That is why silence – so crucial in the pieces presented here by these four artists – appears as a thread uniting all these very different works and expressions.
Impossibility and limit, so present in the construction of this exhibition and this book, concern an awareness – turned, perhaps, into a negative principle of elimination of excess – of the impossibilities each artistic work always presents, whenever it is confronted with the stuff of which things are made. All works of art seem fated to fall short: something in them is always left unsaid, unshown, unrevealed. This crown of thorns and glory of the artistic work is perhaps also its condition of possibility: the idea of incompleteness as the beginning or source of the urge to shape something.
In spite of the fact that this exhibition turns around the notion of limit and impossibility, “of life in language and of life in the body”, in Benjamin’s words, this is not an impossible exhibition, but rather the transformation of the awareness of organic, linguistic, formal and material impossibility into a form, an image, an object. It is like an attempt at answering Joseph Beuys’ appeal: “Make secrets productive”. Here, the secret appears as an unfolding – of what is one’s own into someone else’s, of presence into absence, of nearness into remoteness, of voice into silence – and a heightening of something that is so visible and present as to be continuously forgotten and ignored. The “Corpo Impossível” exhibition is not a lamentation over the powerlessness or weakness of the works of art; it is an aesthetic, poetic and plastic construction, based on the idea of impossibility and limit or, to return to Nietzsche, about the possibility of turning the “horrible or absurd aspects of existence into imaginations with which it is possible to live”. Of course, the underlying premise of this, debatable and constantly on the point of being revised and rethought as it is, is that all art is representative. Here, though, this concept is not approached in its strict sense, being used instead in a plastic way, so as to include the totality of expressive forces, rather than seeing the “representative” character as a mere combination of mimetic forms.
In this context, the Palace of Queluz appears as the ideal setting: its memories, present in its architecture, sculptures and furniture, are further additions to this group of impossibilities – unused beds, forgotten portraits, erased names, lost gardens… In other words, it is also an impossible place for the body to move around and inhabit, except by transmuting into architecture, nature, colour. Its very existence contains a paradox that is the starting-point for the discourse/experiment of this exhibition: all its history tells of the bodies that inhabited it, of living experiences, yet all its present incarnation depends on the absence of the elements that once gave it form and meaning. In opposition to this lack of presences, the gardens are full of reflections of the presence of bodies, life, and people: most of the open-air sculptures are representations of the body. Perhaps that is a way of compensating for all the absences and voids. These heroic and glorious bodies are a kind of simulacrum: they are life stagnated at the moment of its dissolution, that is to say, at the point in which their transformation into images of life takes place. Laura Castro Caldas’ depictions of the palace and its gardens constitute the best presentation of this spirit, as well as of the density time possesses in this place. These photographs, which appear throughout this book, express the qualities of time when there are no people to live it and give it form, by capturing the marks of the passage of time on the stone of the sculptures and the surrounding landscape. Reflections and spectral (mirrored, inverted, disturbed) images are forcefully frozen, thus showing the way they are gradually sculpted, formed, consumed. That is why the photographer sees nature, sculptures and buildings as part of a dominant architectural whole: as if all of them were part of a grand construction, projected by an unknown architect. More than just a simple record – as in an exhaustive inventory –, this is a verification of how the passing of time implies the impossibility of vision, expression, and form.







BODY AND REPRESENTATION


The human figure, in literature and art in general, has a different status than in reality, where the body’s isolation, which is often only illusory, presents itself, from the point of view of perception, precisely as the less deceptive expression of man’s moral solitude before God. ‘You shall not make any image’ was not intended only as a prevention of idolatry. With incomparable clarity, the prohibition of representing the body also drives away the illusion that the sphere reproduced would be the one in which man’s moral essence becomes perceptible. The whole moral sphere is connected to life in its extreme sense, namely at that point where, in death, life reveals itself as the ultimate perilous place. And this life, which affects us morally, that is to say, in our singularity, appears, from the standpoint of artistic creation, as something negative – or at least it should be so. Art cannot, indeed, allow anyone in any way to turn it, in his works, into a court of conscience. (Walter Benjamin, Op. Cit.)



This quote from Benjamin summarises some of the most important points in the multiple and complex relationships between art and the human body. This is not the place to detail the history of these relationships: we are concerned, instead, with stressing the relationship between art and morality, that is to say, between artistic creations and moral judgements. Much has been already written and thought about this subject, and there is even a certain kind of art that elects politics and the passing of judgement on the ways of the world and of mankind as its starting-point and central nucleus: a kind of attempt at turning works of art into an unusual court and artists into unexpected judges. In what concerns us here, this is not the case. From our point of view, art is never used here as a tool to gauge the correctness or incorrectness, fairness or unfairness of reality. Instead, it is an instance of understanding, of tracing in delicate lines a certain image of reality, without subscribing to any value judgements on the cognitive and emotional effort that brings it into existence. Should there be a commitment, it is a commitment to art itself. Let us remember Rui Chafes’ words: “I believe in art as the only god”. Here lies the possibility, not of individual salvation, but of a commitment to those energies, ungraspable by logical-rationalistic minds, which shape both the sculptor’s gestures and the sculpted object itself.
In one of the pieces shown at this exhibition, “Tudo é bom quando é excessivo” [Everything is good when it is excessive], the artist seems to oppose a different logic to the dominant morality of restraint and sobriety. This is not a mere exercise of common formal seduction, but rather a refusal of the inhabitable everyday, of the faintly emotional and excessively rational normality in which the current times appear to be submerged. This piece is installed in an ancient cage of the palace, and thus access to it is not free, being hindered by a series of obstacles and impediments. Visibility is filtered through the cage’s bars, as if these were protecting visitors from being attacked by a ferocious animal. The place where once exotic wild beasts lived is now inhabited by a kind of cold, black, winged creature. Its existence – in an equilibrium that, as always, reveals itself as a succession of moments of instability – is due to a set of almost imperceptible steel wires. This conceptual, formal and methodological interplay between the weight of steel and the lightness of the idea, between the gravity of matter and the ascension of the winged bodies, reveals itself as a prophetic, mute anticipation: since its words can only be understood by its equals, the secret it seems intent on revealing – images, perhaps, from a world that can only be perceived by pure intelligence – is lost, since there is no possibility of its being understood. The filter that keeps us from direct contact with this being – who is, perhaps, an angel trying to become a man – also keeps us from what Walter Benjamin calls the vision and recognition of life as the ultimate place of all dangers. That filter, which both hinders and allows our vision, takes the form of a mask used by the incarcerated being as the only means of letting itself be seen: its own expressive possibility.
Clearly, the body appears as the place for experiencing excess, and that, which the artist and his angel call “good”, is not a moral category, but the presentation of a desire: it is as if that “good” was the fulfilment of what the flesh craves, of what the organic body desires as its fate – a release from mundane weight. This body incarcerated inside the architectural body – which acts both as shelter and filter – is also featured in the other pieces by this artist. In “Unsaid”, a collaboration with Irish artist Orla Barry, the body is the central element: yet, its absence is continuously expressed in the sculpture, the voice and the photographed body. This installation, if we may call it so, is almost an emblem of Rui Chafes’ creative process: words and iron unite in an inseparable whole (all of his sculptures have titles), sometimes creating unusual machines, sometimes repeating organic and vegetal forms. This is not exactly a program, but rather a continuous attempt to capture in metal the idea, concept, or word.
“Unsaid” may be described as a machine that takes its user to an unexpected place: inside him/herself, to the place of his/her intimacy; the dialogue it establishes with its user/activator becomes the sound of thought itself (as José Gil’s essay points out). With all the gravity reserved for serious topics, that voice says:

you are inside my head, i can’t get you out..../ I hide you inside of me, no one sees you’re there/ not even you, my heart pounds...

its last words are:

You can’t remember, but I am, and always have been, here with you.

Soon, the dialogue takes the form of a monologue, of words the subject says to him/herself, in the moment he/she feels overwhelmed by the strangeness of having a body, a language, of being alive. The confrontation with language, the material of which thought itself is made, appears as a distinctive lamentation:

I hide behind my fucking words. / The words that cover my words, that cover the last words, / that hide the ones before that while revealing the ones i wanted to hide, / the ones i didn’t want anyone to see, the ones i wanted to remain unseen / like the envelope that covers a letter, keeps the inside from spilling out on / the street. / So my words reveal my thoughts / undone thoughts, never-ending thoughts, and these hide inside my words, my / words are my fucking thoughts … I will never tell you.

This power of language becomes visible as resistance, as if it were a force of repulsion, and not of attraction. The co-naturalness of thought and language is seen here as something that comes from the inside of another thing: the body of the machine’s user, the “unsaid”, is also a foreign body regarding the metal, and can only sit there comfortably for a moment. Representation appears here as the Wittgenstein-like opposition of saying and showing, and it seems this territory will never allow itself to be captured by any kind of word; should it ever reveal itself, it will do so by an unexpected, magical, redeeming gesture.
This body within the body, these words within words that reveal thought, which is always and already language, this interplay of successive references find in “Comer o Coração” [Eating your Heart Out] their natural prolongation. This sculpture (with the collaboration of dancer/choreographer Vera Mantero) represents another focal point of Chafes’ work: its relationship with nature. While in other pieces by this sculptor the presence of the organic, physical body appears only as a suggestion, here it becomes a dominant, almost omnipresent subject. Yet, this monumental presence reveals itself as a nostalgic cry for something that has been lost – oneself, one’s contact with nature, the recognition of one’s own interiority. Vera Mantero uses her voice in what seems an attempt to recover a lost language, but words with meaning are not the only irremediably lost elements here: the body itself appears as a destitute, ripped, torn entity. Only one of the two chairs that hang at a height of six meters is occupied: the other represents emptiness and absence, a symbol of the incompleteness that characterises every human being. To return to Benjamin, it seems that only absence can convey that imperceptible and indescribable aspect that is a body: its singularity and individuality always seem to evade all attempts at systematisation and formalisation. Yet, in this appearance at Queluz, “Comer o Coração” creates a strong relationship with the outside, by sharing the same space as the tree-tops and using the building’s front and the winter skies as a background, thus bringing to this exhibition the notion of an outside that shares the fate of men. It seems that the maxim according to which everything is contained in everything is taken to its limit here: the body in the sculpture, the sculpture turned into body, the body as sculpture, the word as art. And nature thus evoked appears as the category of something that is permanently absent, irretrievably lost. The topic of limits and impossibilities is present in this artist’s attempt to continuously eliminate excess, doing away with what is not essential. Perhaps he is trying to find a kind of essential, non-accessory quality. Yet, this form of artistic thought and creation also finds limits of its own, when matter stakes a claim to its rights through metal, which affirms its presence, refusing to be turned into invisibility.
Even though there are no formal connections to be drawn between the artistic work of Rui Chafes and Noé Sendas, within the context of “Corpo Impossível” the developments and extensions reflected in their pieces create affinities between the two artists. Sendas’ anthropomorphic sculptures evoke a certain excess: their tremor-inducing proximity to a real body inscribes them in a sphere that is not easily classifiable. On the one hand, their look surprises us: they seem like real bodies, subject to the same conditions as any other body on Earth; on the other, the fact of their construction reveals these forms, otherwise so similar to ourselves, as sculptures. If in Chafes the presence of the body shares the nature of a presentiment, in Sendas that presence is almost a manifesto. His characters, often inspired in characters and figures from literature and painting, can be seen as points in which a certain range of experience may coalesce. His “men”, who have about the same size as the artist himself and, like him, dress casually, display moments of self-centred experience. Unlike “Unsaid”, what is at stake here is not the awkwardness of someone who is confronted, for the first time, with an image of his/her own intimacy, but the exploration of the limits, forms and languages apparently contained in the human body.
In the present context, “Axis” plays the part of an entry, an access, a threshold. Not only it is the first piece of the exhibition, but it also acts as a special motto for it: the figure of a man levitates, its stiff body hanging from the ceiling by means of thin cables and pieces of wood, as if to keep its unity from dissolving. This unstable stability allows us to study its silhouette, its outline, its design. Indecision as to the fate of this being, between ascension and fall, levitation and sinking, turns it into a strange zone, but it is precisely on that strangeness that our attention must focus. The fantastic, improbable situation of the figure inscribes it, first, in the same dimension where fantastic fictional beings live, but it soon appears as the materialisation of the indecision that is shared by all living bodies. Being alive is, thus, not only the place of all dangers, but also of supreme indecision, procrastination, irresolution. Only the end, that is to say, death, can bring about a definition of the quality of one’s life and allow for the qualification of the occupation of a given moment of time and place in space. This is really an “axis” that reflects that “between” space which all bodies, even in their non-representable dimensions, occupy.
This portrait, drawn by Noé Sendas, who has perhaps taken inspiration from Beckett’s dramas or the characters in Friedrich’s paintings, is the way the artist has found to speak to us about the multiple dimensions of the human. “Backbone” is an installation based on the experience of the individual with himself, his own memories and his own image. The artist offers us an experience that takes place in an area somewhere between dream, memory and hallucination. The decisive element for the comprehension of this piece is accessible to anyone: it is the anticipation of experience, also known as déjà-vu. The room in the gallery at Queluz Palace becomes a place for apparitions, shadows and hallucinations. The separation between reality and illusion becomes blurred, and the internal devices to which we resort to digest reality no longer work properly. Everyday logic is given up, and rather than attempting to dominate perceptions by turning them into abstract concepts, we opt for contacting with the nameless, the irrational, the unsaid. It is as if we were being coaxed into momentarily abandoning the censoring mechanisms which the awakened consciousness always keeps triggered. Here, inscience holds sway; we are dealing with the moments that come before we are aware of where we are, when the body is pure, nameless experience, a kind of abandonment to oneself, to one’s internal rhythms and dynamics.
The images projected on the wall are mediated by another body: a body that protects another body, body within another body, room within the room. The images, previously filmed in the rooms where they are now being projected, make up a process of duplication, unfolding and prolongation. It is a matter of confronting the image of another, which is turned into a double: the feeling of otherness that follows the news of the existence of the stranger is reduced here to the closed sphere of identity, of one’s own. Ultimately, it concerns the metamorphosis of the visitor into stroller: a transformation that synthesises the experience of one who wanders around nature and the city, somehow combining Romantic isolation with the experience of the modern city flâneur.





SILENCE

Only one language is fully appropriate to the tragic hero: the language of silence, precisely. It has been so since the beginning. That is why the tragic sphere chose the artistic form of the drama, so as to be able to represent silence … By remaining silent, the hero destroys the bridges that connect him to the god and the world, rising above the realm of personality, which defines and individualises itself in dialogue between individuals, and entering the freezing solitude of the Oneself, which knows nothing outside itself, being pure loneliness. How can he express that loneliness, except by remaining quiet? (Franz Rosenzweig, “The Star of Redemption”, quoted by W. Benjamin, Op. Cit.)




Homer guides us through Vasco Araújo’s “Jardim” [Garden]. Taking verses from the Iliad and the Odyssey as his starting-point, Araújo creates, not a tragic drama, but a special perspective on the relationship between face, expression, language and nature. The latter does not appear as a subject, but as a mediation between passing time and the marks that inscribe themselves on the face and, consequently, the facial expression. Language is not used by this artist as a descriptive device, but as an instrument for exploring the different spheres of sensibility and perception. It is the element that makes visible something that, otherwise, would remain concealed in an invisibility zone. These characters, which speak as if they were silent – supreme irony and paradox – impose on the viewer a special kind of enigma. Physiognomic silence – impassive, immobile, petrified faces sculpted in black stone – is accompanied by an intensification of the power of the word as a possibility of experience. In one of the verses, the character says:

Could it be I am near speech-endowed men? I’ll be brave, and see for myself…

This connection between speech-endowed being and the use of sight as an instrument to verify the existence of language stresses the special, decisive attention paid by the individual to the outside, to the visible sphere. A particularly Wittgensteinian subject becomes a philosophical method, its constitutive principle subsumed in the exhortation “Don’t think, look!”, as if thought were a deviation, a withdrawal from what constitutes the centre, the foundation, the source. But the paradox in “Jardim” is even more intriguing than that, since sight is accompanied by immobility, the moving images of his video being characterised by the suspension of each and every gesture: these “speech-endowed” beings seem suspended between breathing in and breathing out. It is not a matter of suspension of time – time goes on: the cobwebs and the eroding of the sculpted faces testify to that – but of suspension of movement, of the backward and forward motion towards and away from a living face. But, as Benjamin reminds us, the status of the human figure in art is distinct from its status in organic life. It is not a matter of creating some kind of hierarchy between “more real” and “less real”: both the living and the sculpted body are parts of the same reality, even though they occupy different points in the broad spectrum of daily life. The extensions and consequences of life in art and art in life must inevitably be taken into consideration whenever the existential metaphors for the understanding artistic productions and contacting with them are invoked, as is the case here. The metaphysical consolation, examined by Nietzsche in The Birth of Tragedy, is certainly part of this extension of art into life and life into art.
Life, the ever-present subject of creative actions, is the place where all creative gestures feed and find their form, but for this artist the main point is the way we look at life after art. His “winged words” serve a double purpose: first, they create a sphere of sense, and then reconstruct aesthetic areas for the sensitivity.
The movement of leaves reminds us of transition, transformation, mobility. Human frailty, usually hidden and masked, reveals itself as the very splendour of mankind:

Earth feeds nothing frailer than man, of all things that breathe and crawl upon the ground

within this frame, the hero appears less as an affirmation of the will to live than as a gesture that reconciles man with his own fate, with his original solitude and with all that is most familiar to him. This awareness, of which Nietzsche is the main spokesman, finds its best illustration in the story of King Midas:

An old legend has it that King Midas hunted a long time in the woods for the wise Silenus, companion of Dionysus, without being able to catch him. When he had finally caught him the king asked him what he considered man's greatest good. The daemon remained sullen and uncommunicative until finally, forced by the king, he broke into a shrill laugh and spoke: “Ephemeral wretch, begotten by accident and toil, why do you force me to tell you what it would be your greatest boon not to hear? What would be best for you is quite beyond your reach: not to have been born, not to be, to be nothing. But the second best is to die soon.” (Nietzsche, Op. Cit., §3)

The notion that the greatest of sins is birth itself shapes the awareness of the characters created by Vasco Araújo. But this awareness does not turn them into beings darkened by the nearness of death. The topography of the Oneself is turned into a feeling of conciliation with the world and the hazards and toils which are the lot of all living beings:

so, let not man ever be unjust! May he keep in silence whatever lot the gods granted him…

Silence, as the only possible language of one who has looked at life as tragic feeling, undergoes an expressive change here: Vasco Araújo does not resort to tragic drama to present it, but to humanity itself, as the symbol of that same reality. While in other works the artist transfers that awareness to operatic characters – as in his “Sabine/Brunilde” – here the very notion of life as drama and drama as life is softened by pleasant pictures, while the representational and scenic urge is replaced by the expression of the brutal character of interiority at the moment of its constitution. Yet, this artist turns Benjamin’s freezing solitude into the touchstone for the constitution of a possible human community:

For I am not like the immortals, who hold the vast sky, either in body or in nature, but like mortal men, whose breasts hold the indestructible strength of courage.

The shadows dissipate, and unrecognition and solitude are replaced by equality and the sense of belonging to a common ground, as potentially human elements. These are not tragic heroes, but they share with them the certainty of a common fate. The word, which in Rui Chafes appeared as the rhythm of thought struggling with itself, is here the element that allows for a relationship with another, a place not for a folding in upon oneself, but for opening oneself to the outside, to the dissimilar, to the other. The political implications of this work by Vasco Araújo, openly stated from the beginning, are mostly related to the categories of belonging and difference: the Tropical Garden, originally called Colonial Garden, is a remnant of a past Portugal has tried to silence, of historical moments we have tried to forget. Originally built in 1906 and later used for the Portuguese World exhibition in 1940, this garden has become a symbol for the incapacity to integrate cultural, temporal, racial and social difference. Homer’s foreigner is equally an image that expresses the condition of those who always feel estranged and marginalised, unable to find a place in which they may belong.
The idea of death as an insurmountable limit and familiar human fate holds a very important position in this context. And sculpture is the most expressive rendering of the aporia of a body made in the image of its end.
Vasco Araújo’s photographic series, entitled “Caixão” [Coffin], is more than just a simple group of pictures: their interest lies mainly in the sculptural qualities that are transcribed to paper. The focus, here, is on the coffin as object, with all its formal and material qualities: these coffins seem ready to receive the immobile faces in his video; they are the place that waits for all those who are endowed with speech, their unavoidable fate. Here, we witness the process of endowing that fate with a substance, a form and a colour.




























THE IRRATIONAL AND EXCESSIVE

From now on, it will be on his [the hero’s] silence, instead of on his speech, that all his irony shall fall […] Tragic is that lapse in speech, which unconsciously touches on the truth of heroic life, the Oneself, so deeply closed in upon itself it will not wake, even when, in dreams, it calls to itself by its own name. The philosopher’s ironic, rough and mimic silence is self-aware. Socrates has replaced the hero’s sacrificial death with the example of the pedagogue. (W. Benjamin, Op. Cit.)


Disproportion, irrationality, rupture are all actions for which a proper place is hard to find. They are moments in which intelligence is transmuted into musical power, relinquishing its projective activity: it is as if the mind had been briefly inhibited from projecting onto the visible sphere its concepts and connections, concentrating instead on simply being affected and touched by things. The world is seen as something beyond rationality and the phenomenal, while abstract distancing and conceptual mediation are replaced by aesthetic involvement with what is at hand. Reason, in the Nietzschean manner, becomes rhythm and things are seen as possibilities of energetic intensification. These features can also apply to the creative act, seen here as the supreme intensification of energy, in which formalisation is abandoned in the name of achieving intensities, transformations, mutations, musicalities.
In her work “Noite sem fim” [Endless night], Adriana Molder takes on these aspects, bringing them into the relationship of an individual with him/herself: a narcissistic and contemplative gaze that turns upon itself, in an attempt to solve the enigma into which most common and familiar elements may turn. It is the moment in which the individual becomes strange and distant in his/her own eyes. Molder’s video and photographs heighten and take to the limit this experiment in strangeness: repulsion, a category indispensable for the comprehension of this work, is the name of that limit, in face of which the structures that allow one to recognise oneself become dissolved. The action that creates a familiar atmosphere around itself is divested of its usual qualities, and these, which made it a territory in which finding one’s bearings was easy, turn into aspects that call for the remaking of the most elementary structures and foundations.
A woman undresses herself, puts her clothes on again, shakes herself, combs her hair, expresses disgust, loses herself: all these actions are performed repeatedly, sometimes accompanied by the ticking of a clock. Their obsessive and paranoid succession is not aimed at constructing any kind of narration: reality, here, is fragmented and the gathering together of all these elements creates a means of access. Even though the body is the protagonist of these various voyages, what is really at stake here is the relationship consciousness wants to create with a supposed outside. It is all about that moment in which an enormous chasm opens between the material of the soul and the material of the body: it is as if the character is pointing at herself and saying “this is not me”. The inside/outside duality is stressed as something insurmountable, and this leads to manifold constructions and deconstructions of individuality and identity.
What leads to this situation is the almost caricatural exaggeration of the most common and basic human actions, which know no restraint here. This logic of excess allows the artist to subtly alter the usual way of seeing. All of the protagonist’s actions are as banal as possible: yet our outlook on these configurations of the body in space is changed via subtle interventions: editing, soundtrack, movement, etc. Between this altered state and so-called normality a continuous series of comings and goings takes place: a succession of back-and-forth movements that increases and intensifies the strangeness, while deepening the feeling of bewilderment in front of oneself.
In the beginning of her detective novel Endless Night, Agatha Christie quotes from William Blake’s poem “Auguries of Innocence”; Adriana Molder approaches that quotation as if it expressed a perplexity of her own:

Every Night & every Morn
Some to Misery are Born.
Every Morn & every Night
Some are Born to sweet delight.
Some are Born to sweet delight,
Some are Born to Endless Night.

Bewilderment at one’s fate – so strong in Vasco Araújo’s work – becomes a decisive moment here: the succession of days and nights is taken out of its normality and seen as a juxtaposition of moments that decide the configuration of a life, of a humour, of awareness. At the limit – just as Agatha Christie thought – it means seeing life – the supreme place of all dangers – as the constant presentation of an ethical/moral dilemma. Regardless of having been born to “endless night” or “sweet delight”, the main point here is that we must be able to recognise/see the temporal and spatial point we claim as our own: here, we could return to the tragic hero, and to the way he silently faces what the gods have in store for him. It is not a matter of resignation, but rather of passive acceptation of whatever lot has been given to us. This is not the place for discussing individual moral freedom or the possibility of free will; what truly matters is how strong the possibility of madness is: gaining access to that realm of “endless night” – a place of darkness, a frightening dawn where the gloomiest events may occur – appears as a purely inevitable event, something that falls upon us and from which we will never be able to free ourselves. The body is its expressive and symbolic testimonial, as if madness, by tearing up the fabric of what is usual and inhabitable, would leave traces on the body and its expression, as in the linguistic disturbances of the so-called insane.
Each gesture of this character becomes a powerful symbol, while her discourse lacks the usual conceptual dimension: the access to her mysteries is direct, aesthetic, and sensitive. The character’s fall is one of the most important moments, as it accumulates and condenses all the experiments and misgivings of the whole video. The photographs, by bringing interruption and pause to this character’s life, allow us to recognise the sexual, bloodthirsty nature of this fake Deneuve (Molder found inspiration for her in “Repulsion”, the Roman Polanski film with Catherine Deneuve), which introduces another important feature in this artist’s work: the notion of copy, of fake, of substituting one reality with another. While her black-and-white drawings are based on photographs, here photography itself takes the place of drawing; the picture, while losing nothing in terms of texture and depth, gains colour and deepens the physiognomy of its characters, which at the same time contain its mystery. The silence that accompanies this character’s discoveries is extended by means of colour and of pictures as reflections. Diptych and quadriptych are the forms in which these qualities are presented: a time turned into a symbol of the inner nature of this being.
Once again, and as it has happened in many moments of “Corpo Impossível”, we face an expressive limit and a perceptive near-impossibility. Adriana Molder’s “fake Deneuve” acts as an instrument for the recognition of those places where sight, perception and expression become confused and disoriented. This is one further thread uniting all the artists and pieces presented here. It is not a matter of testing or verifying, as if by a scientific or rational process, the possibilities or impossibilities of works of art when confronted with the physical or psychic structures of humans, but of developing a careful gaze with which to study that place, within each one of us, where secrets are kept and angels and devils make their home.

published in the book The Impossible Body, ed. Assírio & Alvim, Lisboa, 2006
with José Gil, Adriana Molder, Noé Sendas, Rui Chafes e Vasco Araújo
http://www.assirio.com/livro.php?codigo=160056