Exhibition "Filling Images"

One of the most important genres of medieval Islamic literature dealt with the wonders of creation, or mirabilia. Such manuscripts brought together, like western medieval literature, narratives about countless supernatural beings, but they also described the immensity and diversity of nature: the seas, the rivers, the mountains. They discussed the animal, vegetable and mineral kingdoms while expressing amazement at the inexplicable, mysterious and fantastic. There were brought together, in a single work, treatises on natural sciences, magic and, why not, poetry. Its most popular exponent was written by Zakariyya al-Qazwini (1203-1283), Wonders of Things and Miraculous Aspects of Existing Things.

In his first solo exhibition at Luis Maluf Gallery, in São Paulo, the artist Desiree Feldmann presents a set of new works entitled “Filling Images". In the artist's words, the title “is the name given to the set of drawings that I have been working on since 2021, and which essentially contain codes of symbols and colors that form, in an abstract and unconventional way, insignia of protection.” The exhibition brings together works that result from the artist's process of pictorial and material investigation through the spatial developments originating from the homonymous series of drawings of these “amulet-images”.

This production originates from his inquiries into the field of painting and the remote relationships established over time between humans and the mysteries of nature that made them imagine and represent. Faced with sculptures and objects made of fabric, soft volumes and a chromatic palette carefully articulated by the organic composition of shapes that emerge one from within the other, the exhibition invites us to access some senses present in our first experiences of things in the world. By primordial experiences we can understand everything from those first memories we have to remarkable experiences capable of producing amazement, enchantment and/or completely giving new meaning to previous memories.

The works also invite us to perceive them visually in a gradual way: the pieces are constituted by the superposition of multiple hollow planes. Layers of colorful fabric and upholstery modular structures produce concavities and sinuous volumes through accumulation and overlap. Each form seems to be born from within another, and another. A color is born after another has repeated itself a few times within itself, creating its own vibrational field. Colorful layers multiply and settle in space, like a pictorial gesture on a flat surface or how in nature the different stratigraphic layers of a mountain are produced, designating the different ages of the Earth.

Slowly, Filler images proposes to us the possibility of entering a cosmic dialogue operated in the contact of living bodies with matter, with the mystery of beginnings, ends and the infinite memory of time. We could then, according to this exercise of imagination, enter a space without a defined time, however, filled with all imaginable temporal layers. These sediments produce their own rhythms and temporalities, while the names that designate each work suggest varied images of existing or imaginary beings, bodily sensations, landscapes, cosmic objects, guidance tools, offerings, objects made for protection, objects of devotion.

We come across this concern about the present time of things in a text written by the artist in 2022 in which she describes a walk climbing a mountain. Her text also tells us about the geological process that determines the creation of these formations: mountains are born in cracks, at the meeting between one tectonic plate and another. In other words, mountains would be born, according to this image, from the void between two plates.

Imagining the mountain as a living, pulsating entity, or as part (or relative) of an even larger organism would resonate with everything that rests on it. A mountain that was once submerged in a large ocean holds shells inside that today seem foreign to the arid and cold landscape they inhabit. The shell carries with it the fossil memory of an aquatic age, although it is now a long way from that ancient marine home. Our ability to touch these other temporal, spatial and symbolic dimensions for a moment shows us that fables cross us in the form of questions often addressed to the invisible. Because “every form holds a life”, would say Gaston Bachelard. And every life needs a magical breath that fills its form, enchanting it, otherwise it wouldn't be life.

If for Jorge Luis Borges writing and reading separate us from the world through the possibility of producing parallel fantastic universes by imagining what does not exist or that we do not yet know, we can think that an inverse movement is also carried out by the experience of art by connecting us directly to the vital core of the most prosaic things that inhabit everyday life, relationships and the world. Think about such Wonders of Things and Miraculous Aspects of Existing Things It is also making yourself available to understand and be involved in some way with this inevitable, sometimes terrible and also fruitful interdependence that delimits our material and soul existence, intertwining all beings.

Desirée Feldmann thus summons an enchanted and fertile memory of things, of wonders hidden by the despair of the times, bringing them together in soft, resonant and dispersed forms: a diving goggle, a watch, a shell, a flower as an offering, a A lookout on the mountain, a lighthouse, a totem, a Venus and a moon take us on a long journey through words, their worlds and the vibrant matter outside them, close to us. Filler Images claims the possibility of activating the magical senses present in a primordial production of poetry that shapes the human experience. —Yana Tamayo.

Service
Exhibition | Filler images
From the 10th of August to the 09th of October
Monday to Friday, 10am to 19pm, Saturdays, 11am to 16pm