The line of the Earth
by J. A. Bragança de Miranda
Everything in the world started with a yes. A molecule said yes to another molecule and life was born. But before prehistory there was the prehistory of prehistory and there was the never and there was the yes. It was ever so. I don’t know why, but I do know that the universe never begun.
Clarice Lispector, The Hour of the Star
In the bottom of the Coa Valley, the rocks and the flowing of the river, engraved in the rocks and reflected in the river – the rock art. The Museum on the top of the mountain, inside drawings on paper by Catarina Patrício, in a series titled Arche-Fóssil. Found in a strange way, as if looking for them. Apparently separated, there must be a reuniting invisible line from stone to paper, from the engravings to the drawings. As if the engravings had set free from the stone and began moving. Unexpectedly, some images from Vale de José Esteves appear in one of the drawings, hallucinating the entire series.
Georges Bataille saw the origin of art in the paintings done in the walls of Lascaux. Seeing the images, Bataille didn’t saw the rock, which forms the primordial image since, as Alberti notes, “nature is amused by painting faces of men in stones” or by making dreamy sculptures. Hence, the rocks must have impressed those who lived together with and around them. The frailty of flesh is highlighted next to the stones, all life dripping around them – dancing and singing, hunting and enchanting, as the Coa flowed, yet more lightly and unstoppable than the life of men. Rocks have also been flowing magma, being Physis that flows and, we know, that ruining of all that is stable or wants stability. But Heraclitus’ river does not flow, it is an image of the unstoppable flow; as an image is standing.
The beginning of art, dissimulated under the myth, the small miracle of humans resides in the invention of stopping, in being able to stop. What is an engraving or a painting in stone other than that? Even if depicting hunting scenes where everything is in motion? For having teaching us that we are in debt to cinema. The question is in the images and in the stone, not in images upon stone. It is because there are different movements, because what flows slower seems standing still regarding what is faster, that stops can be invented. In Not to Forget (1999) Clarice Lispector said about dance: “The dancer passes from one immobility to another, giving me time for stupefaction. Often, its sudden immobility resounds from the previous jump: standing air still contains all tremor of the gesture”. It is because there is matter that pigments, incisions and drawings appear and why small “stops” such as engravings become. These, circulating with matter, dragged by the earth’s movement, are petrified and sent to the future, as if waiting. Whilst humans exist, there will always be someone to receive and forward them.
In the drawing the domain of the distressing mineral alienation, which secretly quotes Italo Calvino, there is a profound meditation regarding the conflict between stone and images. In the case of the writer, the issue was how to spiritualize stone, overcome its indifference towards flesh and desire, abolish its distance. Impossible task, that indifference is unappealable and even images petrify. The magmatic power in rock, the entropy that ruins all and demands permanent labour, leaves bottomless marks in the drawing space, yet a pure reception surface. In it, the earth appears gigantic, where we can envision an infinitesimal Foz Coa, in an image sent from Apollo mission. The disproportionate Earth appears in a space resembling Piranesi’s Carceri, a construction almost impossible to discern if it has been abandoned or is being completed. The only human sign, labouring machines, allies of our cosmic loneliness. Tectonic desire feeds on the will to endure, the story of the strict Law of humans contaminated by replicas of animal engravings from Foz Coa, images randomly placed. Instead of images “concealing” stone, this drawing let’s itself be seen in the ruining of images petrified by history, away from all rites, and from the sacrificial logic that sustains history.
In the drawing, the deer from Vale de José Esteves flys in the landscape. It is how Catarina Patrício confronts contemporaneity and archaic. It is known that the notion of arch-fossil is a proposal by Quentin Meillassoux, aimed at decentring the excessive weight of a certain image of man in history. As it was expected, as if it had a fatal destiny enough to keep. The existence of fossils preceding humans by millions of years displays our immense frailty and responsibility. Through this encounter contemporaneity becomes archaic revealing itself as hasty and indecisive. Having been apparently vindicated, it is verified that the “real” is the effect of the unconscious dominating history. Above all, the way in which flesh and bodies are managed and used; as the earth was taken and retaken in a process recorded by our geopolitical map. The archaic was buried under the attempts of funding an arché, of instituting a becoming, by the absolute need for being. All is inscribed and written on stone, as Victor Hugo in Notre-Dame de Paris. In a way, the fossil rebels against the arché, the beginning of the absolute. These are decisions suddenly unstable, thought demanding...
Catarina Patrício’s drawings convey the pulse of that archaic force penetrating contemporaneity, disassembling the circle attempting, hopelessly, to close and lock us inside. We thus understand that the fossil is not dead but, as the photo, sign of life, of an awaiting presence. As Giuseppe Penone states: “To fossilize secure gestures or probably made in a certain location reduces the possible use of space but marks space itself. [...] To create a sculpture is a vegetal gesture; it is the vestige, the occurred, the adherence in potency, the fossil made of gesture, the standing still action, the wait [...] – point of life and point of death”. But it is necessary to excavate to detect it, cross every layer, image by image. You excavate to find, but the excavation gesture is the gesture itself of what was buried returning.
To draw as if excavating, that is the lesson of the drawing Arche-Fóssil, 2014. It’s about digging in history, in the meridian crossing it. Catarina Patrício attends Kubrick’s movies, and explores some of its more fantastic tales, such as the one at the beginning of 2001: A Space Odyssey where Kubrick synthesizes humankind history in the throw of a bone, used to kill, which metamorphoses in to a spaceship, in a still self-determining exultation. Contrary to Meillassoux thesis, in this drawing it is the moon that is excavated, with Earth, now quite small, in the distance. In the distance, but engaged and engaging us. We do not excavate in the earth but outside it, to better reencounter it. It is an excavation in the future and from the future to illuminate the present. This drawing narrates the necessity of “brushing history in reverse” as Walter Benjamin said somewhere. It’s about retracing it, excavate the crystallized layers to set it free, not as much as a beginning, but as the power to initiate. In a powerful image, the drawing displays a Muybridge cronophotographic sequence depicting a banal jump in reverse, coming back to the beginning from its conclusion.
A series of lines crosses each drawing, creating a permanent confabulation. The method presiding to these effects is difficult to apprehend. Catarina Patrício’s interest comes from a contained kinematic mechanism, about to explode in each image, almost all “diverted” from carefully selected films by filmmakers such as Kubrick, Dreyer, Tarkovsky, Muybridge. But the inner logic of the drawing dispenses installation, even if it is subterraneously present; also the collage, to which bears some similarities, becomes abolished by the superposition of drawings of drawings, where images leave transformed by scale differences, unexpected increases and decreases, by the range of black and grisaille tones, etc. Perhaps the most important affinity is with Rauschenberg’s combines, although Catarina Patrício remits to Burroughs and Gysin cut-up method, which fragments and remounts texts (and sounds) to “cut the association lines” where control is based on repetition. Being evidently present in the dividing, separating, juxtaposing operation, the Arche-Fóssil series expands another strategy. In fact, to cut the association lines that create the repetitive and sad stories characterizing history implies, first and foremost, the revelation of the line itself, to account for its necessity. Moreover, it is evident that as long as you draw something, that you add whatever, you are recomposing the line, or discovering that the line is working, inexorably.
There is a short story by Rilke titled Ur-Geräusch (original sound, 1919). A boy, later the poet, narrates his astonishment when seeing sound coming out from the waxed board of a gramophone he built as a child. More than the sound, it was the line broken by the vibration of the needle over wax. Already grow-up, student of painting, he comes to realize in an anatomy class that the cranial coronary suture has a strange resemblance with that of the recorder. As if those two sinuous lines prolonged each other, the poet hints that they are a single line, present in all things, in nature and in history, as though a primitive voice had been engraved everywhere, creating all things. The story does not reveal who’s voice was it, nor if it translates the dictated command, since only the line has reached us, coming from the “pre-history of pre-history”, as Clarice states, all sequencing, subject to meandering development until arriving to the present. A line started working, connected generations, stories and images and gave itself to the poet who will devote his life to prolong and draw it, until being absorbed by that same line. All is lost in the line, or so we realize from the lines of Rilke’s text, it is absolutely contemporary of itself, in it present, past and future are undistinguishable.
We understand, more aptly, the allure exercised by Kubrick, he reinvents the line, as all artists do, as we all do. By approaching an image of the Palaeolithic – the bone – to an image of the future – the spaceship -, he creates a line that contrasts the crystallized lines of historians or geographers or economists, making it diverge and break. Such a line may be destroyed, but it cannot be annulled.
Not by chance, in the drawing I’m what is forced to overcome itself until infinity, we are faced with the same association procedure. Crossing the vertical line of the drawing, a gutted carcass with bowels on display; on the horizontal line, the interior of Tarkovsky’s Solaris Space Station, featuring a human contour inside. And suddenly a story about the interior bursts, that of the machine and the body; the enormous violence that we feel when skin is broken, because it failed, originating an extrusion of what should be protected, but that ever present flaw, for instance in illness or aging, pours out over the interior of the machine, with countless buttons and controls, showing the frailty of all involving and of all envelope. The gutting only hastens something that corrodes from inside, unfolds the guts compact line resulting from the initial biological “ribbon”, and, such as the row of buttons and machines, all “human”. Trough this line images converge telling a story on the debility of history, the weaker the more absolute and inevitable it is thought to be. The space of the drawing where that can be seen is outside Earth, and the wars surrounding it.
But it is Earth that demands another history and other tales. In this series by Catarina Patrício, Earth is always seen from afar, but all images and sounds, money and power, war and lust drift around it. The originated line seems chaotic. But it is not art that is responsible to keep on drawing the line and save it? Isn’t that the task of the drawing?
José Bragança de Miranda
translated by António Batarda
by J. A. Bragança de Miranda
Everything in the world started with a yes. A molecule said yes to another molecule and life was born. But before prehistory there was the prehistory of prehistory and there was the never and there was the yes. It was ever so. I don’t know why, but I do know that the universe never begun.
Clarice Lispector, The Hour of the Star
In the bottom of the Coa Valley, the rocks and the flowing of the river, engraved in the rocks and reflected in the river – the rock art. The Museum on the top of the mountain, inside drawings on paper by Catarina Patrício, in a series titled Arche-Fóssil. Found in a strange way, as if looking for them. Apparently separated, there must be a reuniting invisible line from stone to paper, from the engravings to the drawings. As if the engravings had set free from the stone and began moving. Unexpectedly, some images from Vale de José Esteves appear in one of the drawings, hallucinating the entire series.
Georges Bataille saw the origin of art in the paintings done in the walls of Lascaux. Seeing the images, Bataille didn’t saw the rock, which forms the primordial image since, as Alberti notes, “nature is amused by painting faces of men in stones” or by making dreamy sculptures. Hence, the rocks must have impressed those who lived together with and around them. The frailty of flesh is highlighted next to the stones, all life dripping around them – dancing and singing, hunting and enchanting, as the Coa flowed, yet more lightly and unstoppable than the life of men. Rocks have also been flowing magma, being Physis that flows and, we know, that ruining of all that is stable or wants stability. But Heraclitus’ river does not flow, it is an image of the unstoppable flow; as an image is standing.
The beginning of art, dissimulated under the myth, the small miracle of humans resides in the invention of stopping, in being able to stop. What is an engraving or a painting in stone other than that? Even if depicting hunting scenes where everything is in motion? For having teaching us that we are in debt to cinema. The question is in the images and in the stone, not in images upon stone. It is because there are different movements, because what flows slower seems standing still regarding what is faster, that stops can be invented. In Not to Forget (1999) Clarice Lispector said about dance: “The dancer passes from one immobility to another, giving me time for stupefaction. Often, its sudden immobility resounds from the previous jump: standing air still contains all tremor of the gesture”. It is because there is matter that pigments, incisions and drawings appear and why small “stops” such as engravings become. These, circulating with matter, dragged by the earth’s movement, are petrified and sent to the future, as if waiting. Whilst humans exist, there will always be someone to receive and forward them.
In the drawing the domain of the distressing mineral alienation, which secretly quotes Italo Calvino, there is a profound meditation regarding the conflict between stone and images. In the case of the writer, the issue was how to spiritualize stone, overcome its indifference towards flesh and desire, abolish its distance. Impossible task, that indifference is unappealable and even images petrify. The magmatic power in rock, the entropy that ruins all and demands permanent labour, leaves bottomless marks in the drawing space, yet a pure reception surface. In it, the earth appears gigantic, where we can envision an infinitesimal Foz Coa, in an image sent from Apollo mission. The disproportionate Earth appears in a space resembling Piranesi’s Carceri, a construction almost impossible to discern if it has been abandoned or is being completed. The only human sign, labouring machines, allies of our cosmic loneliness. Tectonic desire feeds on the will to endure, the story of the strict Law of humans contaminated by replicas of animal engravings from Foz Coa, images randomly placed. Instead of images “concealing” stone, this drawing let’s itself be seen in the ruining of images petrified by history, away from all rites, and from the sacrificial logic that sustains history.
In the drawing, the deer from Vale de José Esteves flys in the landscape. It is how Catarina Patrício confronts contemporaneity and archaic. It is known that the notion of arch-fossil is a proposal by Quentin Meillassoux, aimed at decentring the excessive weight of a certain image of man in history. As it was expected, as if it had a fatal destiny enough to keep. The existence of fossils preceding humans by millions of years displays our immense frailty and responsibility. Through this encounter contemporaneity becomes archaic revealing itself as hasty and indecisive. Having been apparently vindicated, it is verified that the “real” is the effect of the unconscious dominating history. Above all, the way in which flesh and bodies are managed and used; as the earth was taken and retaken in a process recorded by our geopolitical map. The archaic was buried under the attempts of funding an arché, of instituting a becoming, by the absolute need for being. All is inscribed and written on stone, as Victor Hugo in Notre-Dame de Paris. In a way, the fossil rebels against the arché, the beginning of the absolute. These are decisions suddenly unstable, thought demanding...
Catarina Patrício’s drawings convey the pulse of that archaic force penetrating contemporaneity, disassembling the circle attempting, hopelessly, to close and lock us inside. We thus understand that the fossil is not dead but, as the photo, sign of life, of an awaiting presence. As Giuseppe Penone states: “To fossilize secure gestures or probably made in a certain location reduces the possible use of space but marks space itself. [...] To create a sculpture is a vegetal gesture; it is the vestige, the occurred, the adherence in potency, the fossil made of gesture, the standing still action, the wait [...] – point of life and point of death”. But it is necessary to excavate to detect it, cross every layer, image by image. You excavate to find, but the excavation gesture is the gesture itself of what was buried returning.
To draw as if excavating, that is the lesson of the drawing Arche-Fóssil, 2014. It’s about digging in history, in the meridian crossing it. Catarina Patrício attends Kubrick’s movies, and explores some of its more fantastic tales, such as the one at the beginning of 2001: A Space Odyssey where Kubrick synthesizes humankind history in the throw of a bone, used to kill, which metamorphoses in to a spaceship, in a still self-determining exultation. Contrary to Meillassoux thesis, in this drawing it is the moon that is excavated, with Earth, now quite small, in the distance. In the distance, but engaged and engaging us. We do not excavate in the earth but outside it, to better reencounter it. It is an excavation in the future and from the future to illuminate the present. This drawing narrates the necessity of “brushing history in reverse” as Walter Benjamin said somewhere. It’s about retracing it, excavate the crystallized layers to set it free, not as much as a beginning, but as the power to initiate. In a powerful image, the drawing displays a Muybridge cronophotographic sequence depicting a banal jump in reverse, coming back to the beginning from its conclusion.
A series of lines crosses each drawing, creating a permanent confabulation. The method presiding to these effects is difficult to apprehend. Catarina Patrício’s interest comes from a contained kinematic mechanism, about to explode in each image, almost all “diverted” from carefully selected films by filmmakers such as Kubrick, Dreyer, Tarkovsky, Muybridge. But the inner logic of the drawing dispenses installation, even if it is subterraneously present; also the collage, to which bears some similarities, becomes abolished by the superposition of drawings of drawings, where images leave transformed by scale differences, unexpected increases and decreases, by the range of black and grisaille tones, etc. Perhaps the most important affinity is with Rauschenberg’s combines, although Catarina Patrício remits to Burroughs and Gysin cut-up method, which fragments and remounts texts (and sounds) to “cut the association lines” where control is based on repetition. Being evidently present in the dividing, separating, juxtaposing operation, the Arche-Fóssil series expands another strategy. In fact, to cut the association lines that create the repetitive and sad stories characterizing history implies, first and foremost, the revelation of the line itself, to account for its necessity. Moreover, it is evident that as long as you draw something, that you add whatever, you are recomposing the line, or discovering that the line is working, inexorably.
There is a short story by Rilke titled Ur-Geräusch (original sound, 1919). A boy, later the poet, narrates his astonishment when seeing sound coming out from the waxed board of a gramophone he built as a child. More than the sound, it was the line broken by the vibration of the needle over wax. Already grow-up, student of painting, he comes to realize in an anatomy class that the cranial coronary suture has a strange resemblance with that of the recorder. As if those two sinuous lines prolonged each other, the poet hints that they are a single line, present in all things, in nature and in history, as though a primitive voice had been engraved everywhere, creating all things. The story does not reveal who’s voice was it, nor if it translates the dictated command, since only the line has reached us, coming from the “pre-history of pre-history”, as Clarice states, all sequencing, subject to meandering development until arriving to the present. A line started working, connected generations, stories and images and gave itself to the poet who will devote his life to prolong and draw it, until being absorbed by that same line. All is lost in the line, or so we realize from the lines of Rilke’s text, it is absolutely contemporary of itself, in it present, past and future are undistinguishable.
We understand, more aptly, the allure exercised by Kubrick, he reinvents the line, as all artists do, as we all do. By approaching an image of the Palaeolithic – the bone – to an image of the future – the spaceship -, he creates a line that contrasts the crystallized lines of historians or geographers or economists, making it diverge and break. Such a line may be destroyed, but it cannot be annulled.
Not by chance, in the drawing I’m what is forced to overcome itself until infinity, we are faced with the same association procedure. Crossing the vertical line of the drawing, a gutted carcass with bowels on display; on the horizontal line, the interior of Tarkovsky’s Solaris Space Station, featuring a human contour inside. And suddenly a story about the interior bursts, that of the machine and the body; the enormous violence that we feel when skin is broken, because it failed, originating an extrusion of what should be protected, but that ever present flaw, for instance in illness or aging, pours out over the interior of the machine, with countless buttons and controls, showing the frailty of all involving and of all envelope. The gutting only hastens something that corrodes from inside, unfolds the guts compact line resulting from the initial biological “ribbon”, and, such as the row of buttons and machines, all “human”. Trough this line images converge telling a story on the debility of history, the weaker the more absolute and inevitable it is thought to be. The space of the drawing where that can be seen is outside Earth, and the wars surrounding it.
But it is Earth that demands another history and other tales. In this series by Catarina Patrício, Earth is always seen from afar, but all images and sounds, money and power, war and lust drift around it. The originated line seems chaotic. But it is not art that is responsible to keep on drawing the line and save it? Isn’t that the task of the drawing?
José Bragança de Miranda
translated by António Batarda