Uma geografia do inanimado[A geography of the inanimate]

We make history in both temporal directions, past and present.
What we do, or not do, creates the present.
What we know, or do not know constructs the past.

Susan Buck-Morss

Isaura Pena’s work unveils itself with the help (but also with the relapse) of the standardization and conformism of the holder. The aesthetic function (that infinitesimal in-between space between the beautiful and the ugly, harmony and uneasiness, prototype and stereotype) is dismantled in its monopoly relationship with the singular (the unique, rare, irreversible: the unique conditions that make the vulgar turn into the precious, and the precious into the ordinary). However, it is also dismantled with the multiple (with the numerous times Isaura copiously rehearses the same gesture, the same brushstroke, the same overlap). This dismantling serves to ensure that the shape is not just the activation of matter (the promise of an art cleaning, of an art «sabedoria» [knowledge]), but rather it is what it cannot comprehend in itself (i.e. how art is and attends its own negotiation). The artist and writer Pedro Pousada found the relationship Agamben establishes between contemporary subjectivity and time, simultaneously adhesive and detaching, «a disjunction and an anachronism»1, to be in the spatial extension of Isaura’s drawing (and of the drawing of others she poetically appropriates), as well as in her installation operations, where utilitarian structures (tables, flooring, chairs, pressed cardboard boxes) are exiled from their destiny and experience the tension and fatigue of the incomprehensible, the airtight while surviving the boredom of their uselessness.

The plastic-performative situations (in which drawing, due to its size, tonal markings and sequences, plays a part in the appropriation of tectonic space and of the chiaroscuro of the CAPC Sede), express another type of paper-based vitality (it is not a receiver or a portion, there is no inclusion; there are no dialectics between figure and background — if that accidentally happens, it must be ignored, since Isaura’s drawings did not seek to be a collection of effects). The holder (hundreds of either A3 or enormous sheets of paper) digs in its accumulation, in its density, another space, fictional but also interstitial and daily life-like, where numbering, rhythm, sequence, and multiplication rest in the form of a stain, gesture, marking.

One of the contradictory (and inventive) aspects of this practice is that Isaura Pena’s creative clarity, the pictorial and sensorial duration of that clarity, is an unforeseen guest of material culture fabricated by the standardization of the necessity (to do, to solve, to use) and of the desire (of being beyond finiteness, of the expiry of I-always-I). Isaura works with formats, disassembles and links them, and establishes interruptions in their internal logic and the graphic-expressive crystallization of their contents.

Her subjectivity is hard since its laconic nature (neither the rhetoric nor the theatrical deviation of narcissistic expertise) is closer to the stalemate of tragedy (the problem does not have a solution) than to the (artificial) agony of drama (given to a happy ending — given to the ornamental drift, to the danger of the irrelevance of the work/operation).

The work developed by Isaura in the built space then calibrates itself between the meta-image (the ontological return to grammar — to the abstract signs — from representation, not for the deferred exercise of absence, of what is ghost-like, but to speak of its negative form) and the hyper-image (the politic-colloquial image almost manic-depressive of the less is more, of the serialization, succession, and analogy). By observing Isaura’s work, particularly her remissive tonal accumulations, almost as if staffs from a song without a performer, Pedro Pousada wonders if drawing is a state of the soul irremediably lost, the moment of mortality: that of the experience of a force divided between «a posse do mundo» [the ownership of the world] (the representation that the anthropocentrism and the anthropomorphism are founding elements) and the immersion in the world (in which the naming — the many names of worldly things — and the disorientation — the alienation of space, not only by time but also by the subjectivities that inhabit it — only accentuate the disorganization of the experience). When speaking of drawing, does one speak of a thought of images that cannot reach someone? Does one speak of an inane neighborhood between «a mão do macaco» [the monkey’s hand] (domesticated, refined hand, always pulsating and organic, brutal even in the softness and determination of its own purpose) and the reflexivity of the eye that makes them (as consciousness) touch the skin of the world, even if greenish, empty, stillborn?

Pedro Pousada
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¹Agamben, G. (2009). “What Is an Apparatus?” and Other Essays. Stanford University Press.