Text without words
Looking at emptiness. Do you know what I mean? A friend of mine speaks about those moments as her little nothing box. Once in a while, I get up from my writing and come here, to this window, only to find myself in between brackets. It rains today, and there’s a small, funny shadow hopping on the yard pebbles.
One of these Saturdays, I went to the Arpad Szenes/Vieira da Silva Museum, in Lisbon, to see the exhibition “331 Amoreiras em Metamorfose” (curated by Nuno Faria). In the second to last room, I stopped in front of “Texto sem palavras, 5”, by Fernanda Fragateiro. The thing, that seemed to levitate, kept me pinned to the ground. I’m going, I would say to myself, I must go and see the next room. But my body wouldn’t move. What was it? What, exactly, held me in place, on that spot, facing that “Text without words”?
In the story “Tangerine-Girl”, by the Brazilian writer Rachel de Queiroz, the narrator, considering the moment a girl sees a Zeppelin, says (and, please, pardon my rough translation) “it’s really one of the virtues of beauty, that renunciation of ourselves it imposes on us, in exchange for its pure and simple contemplation” — that was it. That’s what happened to me in that Jardim das Amoreiras house.
Is it painting? Drawing? Installation? Sculpture? Is it a poem?
It’s a textile rectangle vertically placed, suspended by invisible wires, near the wall but detached from it just enough to project its shadow (but not enough for one to see it from the other side). The raw white cloth is undone, showing long loose threads; to the right, there’s a single black line, solitary, vertical. The label next to it informs the material is “raw silk textile; Gutermann 100% silk sewing thread”.
I guess one can say Fernanda Fragateiro is an artist working in the territory of sculpture, though her work often attempts to mess up that place of departure, playing with architecture, using the possibilities of installation, opening up spaces in between categories so that everything becomes a question mark.
As an art form, sculpture feels a bit off in this epoch of ours — the time of screens and their bidimensionality, of images and their superficiality, of the normalized distance between people, of the world’s voracity — and it’s exactly from this, I think, that its rediscovered energy comes. From the ability sculpture has of being against the Zeitgeist: it’s the domain of tridimensionality, of the body; the place for depth and surprise; for presence and intimacy; for slowness or finding a no-hours-no-minutes-no-seconds time. This very thin, extremely delicate “Texto sem palavras”, I see it like that: it’s a sculpture.
A raw page, a white that is more idea than color. It has the power of blank spaces in poems, as if it was made with the grout of all those luminous gaps that support verses. The white that poetry links to lime houses or to snow roofs. The white from which depends, in good measure, the effect of written poetry. This “Texto sem palavras” has that very uncommon intensity. It provokes the sensation you have at the end of a great poem: as if, let go by the words, you would fall into the void. As if, in the exact moment you’re returning to the world, you’re struck by this mysterious glare.
It’s no exaggeration. Go there, if you can, and see it for yourself. This thin sheet of raw silk has an immense power. It unbalances you through the ways of wonder and invites you to look at it with all your body. “Without words”, this frayed sheet teaches us to see as if for the first time. Maybe that’s what all art is about, but it’s not a miracle that happens every day.
Sure, art is not useful for anything and it cannot save the world. (This, as the poet has sung, everybody knows.) But, sometimes, a thing of beauty such as this one brings back our ability to see for the first time. To shake off the fear of looking at everything with that innocent daring we were born with.
It rains in the world, and I’m just here, inside the sound of water falling, in my little nothing box. Suddenly, the funny shadow takes flight and disappears becoming a blackbird.