THE UNQUIETNESS OF THE GROTESQUE

Notes on the “Jus Sanguinis” exhibition


“The river that everything drags is known as violent, but nobody calls violent the margins that arrest him.”― Bertolt Brecht


“If you can look, see. If you can see, notice.” The words of the writer José Saramago echo before the works of the exhibition “Jus sanguinis“.  The result is of those who see but above all of those who feel in their body and soul what they notice. Unable to ignore the world that she is part of, the poet Aline Yasmin lives in her skin the restlessness of the grotesque acts of humanity.

From words, lines and textures emerges a set of 11 works, to reflect this legal concept called “Jus sanguinis“, the result of the artistic residence of the poet Aline Yasmin in collaboration with Renzo Dalvi, artistic producer. Through these artworks, the poet launches an invitation to revisit the right through blood, in a re-reading of the meaning of this legal figure that defines the right to a certain citizenship. The context is the violation of human rights, with special attention to immigrants. On the margins, because of their status as refugees, ethnic minorities, people displaced from war, and economic and environmental migrants, they are all facing a legal wall.

Not all walls are made from concrete or barbed wire and not all blood flows in the same direction. In each piece, each word, and each concept behind the works, grows the asphyxia of the insoluble. Full of signs and symbols, the works derive from words as an object of reflection and return to them at every moment before emerging in colour, shadow and lines, in an attempt to recover the blood flow and reclaim deferred humanity.

From the joint creation between Aline Yasmin and Renzo Dalvi, poetic installations, concrete words that blossom from images of war and imprisonment, hunger and despair, suspended dreams and deportation, racism, and death, invoke humanity’s own right to blood. “Borders should not break our bonds as human beings, simply.”, says the poet, Aline Yasmin.


Text for the exhibition. To see the works follow the link

Text: Monica Musoni

06/2022


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THE REVERSE

In the disorder of a planned order, the line intertwines the torn leaf in an aligned direction. Point by point, it weaves the irregular space, where the cotton thread gains texture in its madness. In this place, the poetry of the drawing hides the fear of iron. The barbed wire, in the metamorphosis of power, gains brilliance in the tangled pain of the stitched wound. In its persistence, oil feelings take on the colour of agony, the pencil becomes a mine of terror. A blood point on the linen of the thread paints the persistence of being. And at the end of the day, it is in the dot and the line that the fantasy of another place is constructed.

When I chose this artwork, this wasn't the text, it was another one. That's the freedom that art gives us, that's how Sónia Aniceto constructs her works. Even though it has a guiding thread within, it offers the viewer a gradation of possibilities. It was with this premise in mind that I revisited the artwork and found in it a metaphor for the moment.

About Sónia Aniceto work follow the link
Text: Monica Musoni

03/2022


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The Instant Doesn't Exist

"In 'The Instant Doesn't Exist,' we observe the world through the lens of Sidnei Tendler. Everything takes place between the artist and the lived moment, where photography is not itself determinant but rather the means that captures the invisible, the sensitive, and the states of the soul. It is these sensory elements that he carries with him, not the instant closed upon an aesthetic-formal rigidity. Photography for Sidnei Tendler is nothing more than a notepad, a visual note of a poetics that only its author can extract, transforming them into another act or condition. The gesture is as free as his painting or watercolour.

“Invention cannot be confronted with reality, thus it is more likely to be accurate. Reality is untranslatable because it is plastic and dynamic. And dialectical as well. (...) Right now, the world is transforming outside. No image can capture it: the instant doesn't exist.”* Sidnei's relationship with photography is precisely that, images that thrive on a time-image-memory relationship, suggesting a state of mind that extends beyond the image. Perhaps that is why his works are untranslatable, just like the dialectic between them, eluding the gaze and understanding of the observer, in a clear provocation to their own subjectivity. What remains are chromatic perceptions, landscapes, architecture, and the urban in conflict with the natural, ideas, where nothing is intentional and everything is free, everything is pure intuition.

Inspired by the universe of words by writer José Saramago, which gives the title to the exhibition, and by the conversations I had with Sidnei Tendler over weeks of analysis and editing of his personal archive, I selected a set of images from the trips Sidnei made between 2005 and 2015, which gave shape to painting and watercolour works: The six cities, the six religions, and the six monuments. 'The Instant Doesn't Exist' follows a criterion as free as the capture of his records, through 21 images that do not follow a chronological order but rather an intuitive and sensitive one. And these are the images that we present here in a clear exercise of abstractionism.

Curated by Monica Musoni

*Excerpt from the book 'Manual of Painting and Calligraphy' by José Saramago."

Text: Monica Musoni

03/2021