At times in the evenings a face
Looksat us out of the depths of a mirror;
Artshould be like that mirror
Whichreveals to us our own face.‍

Jorge Luis Borges, “Ars Poetica” in SelectedPoems 1923-1967, The Penguin Press (1972)

Looking at a simple stick half immersed in water, Ptolemy or Descartes and other wise men with a sharp eye are assailed by the strangeness of the sight. Stock-still outside-of-it, they think it, crystalized in discursive artificiality. However, they do not throw themselves into it. They do not inhabit it. In doubt, they are-not-with-her-in-the-world¹, wrapped in tremor and amazement.

The issue is the mystery of vision, the imponderable dialectic of the visible. Curiosity without doubt is the mode of seeing woken by the exhibition The noise of dreams, as it delivers to the realm of the sensible — like the dissimilarity of things in the world — the diversity of the works by Miguel Ângelo Rocha, Isabel Madureira Andrade, and Russell Floersch.

Socrates says: the eye drags the body as it tries to escape the cavern, the dungeon of vision where shadows and echoes are jailers, towards the light that reveals the immaterial and immutable Forms.² However, it omits the vision that takes place in the movement of the body. The noise of dreams is a manifestation of Forms alien to metaphysics, without idealism or intangibility.

Faced with these Forms, vision happens without tautology in the thickness of a web of relationships that is weaved between work, space, and body. This web opens a fold; it tears the retinal presence and releases the latency of the invisible. When the mind deposits in the imagination an excess that emanates from the work but is not there, this excess becomes an extension of the body, an incarnate supplement, their own flesh.³ Being-with these Forms, to inhabit according to a principle of negativity, is the dialectic of dismantling the sensible, thought, the self that sees, and sees itself, of raising the overdetermined, incessant recreation.⁴

Miguel Ângelo Rocha is an experimenter of experience,of doing by doing, exploring the interdisciplinarity of materials andctechniques and instigating the experience of the ever-imprecise, of finding by seeking, of the different rhythms in the movements of the eye and the body, of the emptying and the solving of the conscious.

Isabel Madureira Andrade draws and paints using a matrix that she finds or produces, an underlayment with which she probes the emergence of the image in an indexing gesture close to frottage, confronting the possibility of control and the plastic unpredictability of materials.

Russell Floersch explores the tension between memory and disremembering; hers is an experimental practice of construction and painting of sculptural models referring to a place and an extension of their time,insinuating narratives and generating the arbitrary in the concealment throughp aint of the visuality of an absence.

Paintings, sculptures, buildings, objects. Potency and dynamics, eye and hand. Spasms in expansion and contraction, intuition and decision. Proposals without illusion or representation, without autonomy or specificity. They are the fall into the open chasm, the surrendering to the incident. Delusion without fiction.

The question is not what happens; it is, rather, that something happens. A bewilderment. A tremor, a shock, a disturbance. Something unknowable, unspeakable, inexpressible, irrepresentable. An elevation to the threshold where collide and coexist anguish — the deprivation of any rhetoric and poetics referring to what happens — and voluptuousness — relief from some uncertain and ambiguous future, the flame of the possibilities of meaning, recognizable only in the event.⁵

The something that happens is performance, an happening. Phenomenon of the body in action, semantic disturbance without rehearsal or script; the unrepeatable⁶ — fatal paradox of the in-actual. Contingent and precarious, a now as temporal ecstasy. It is dys-chronic, anachronism of the extemporaneous contemporary, mismatch of the now-not-yet.⁷ It is aconstellation of nows in permanent reconfiguration. In a time that is as “too original” as “too new”, the outdated struggles with the linear progression of time.⁸ The heterochronic constructs a counter-space, an opaque mirror. An out-of-space, existing and locatable outside, but that neutralizes and recreates it, a heterotopia of visible spectra.⁹

Being-with in any time and place; a certain inadequacyin the eye's adherence to external light — a cosmogenesis, a company of alterities, simultaneities and promiscuities. The threshold of the between, The noise of dreams is the thin membrane where ‘the sensible’ and ‘the being’ separate.

Ricardo Escarduça

¹ Expression adapted from the term enunciated byMartin Heidegger, Being and Time (tr. Joan Stambaugh), State University New York Press(2010).

² Plato, The Republic, VII, 515b 3–13, 517b2–3, 518c 5–8 (trad. Tom Griffith), The Press Syndicate of the University ofCambridge (2003).

³ MauriceMerleau-Ponty, “Eye and Mind” (tr. Carleton Dallery), in The Primacy of Perception,Northwestern University Press (1964).

⁴ Georges Didi-Huberman, Devant le temps, LesÉditions de Minuit (2000).

⁵ Jean-FrançoisLyotard, “The sublime and the avant-guarde”, em Documents of contemporaryart, Whitechapel Gallery e The MIT Press (2010).

⁶ Allan Kaprow, How to make a happening (1966), vinil 12 polegadas, © 2022 Estate of Allan Kaprow. Consultado em: www.primaryinformation.org/files/allan-kaprow-how-to-make-a-happening.pdf

⁷ Giorgio Agamben, “What is the contemporary?”, em Whatis an apparatus?, and other essays (trads. David Kishik e StefanPedatella), Stanford University Press (2009).

⁸ GeorgesDidi-Huberman, Devant le temps, Les Éditions de Minuit (2000).

⁹ Michel Foucault, “Of other spaces: utopias andheterotopias”, in The Visual Culture Reader, Routledge, Taylor andFrancis Group (1998).