Carolina Trigueiros, June 2023.

In late 2012 and into early 2013, Vera Mota presented one of her first solo exhibitions in Lisbon, at Appleton Box. Entitled ‘Schema,’ the exhibition was composed of a group of delicate works that echoed the conditions and possibilities inherent in drawing. It was already clear at the time an interest in the qualities of materials, in combination with a performative dimension. The impulse to build patterns, and create rhythmically organised logics and the substance of error, chance or accident, appeared in her artistic practice as possible axes of tension, driven by an awareness of the body, gesture and physicality. In parallel with the resistances and eventualities of the sculptural act, the body thus became a central place and primary reference of action. Like a dance, the creative process revealed itself to be meditative, stemming from that intimacy of bilateral proportions, by means of a broad lexicon that reinvents, recycles and renews itself from then on. Fleetingness and permanence, resistance and vulnerability, organic and inorganic, corporeal shapes and cold surfaces are dichotomies rooted in the artist’s vocabulary and in a perception of the physical and aesthetic properties of the elements that she explores as adjacent potentials, or desired ruptures.

 

After 10 years, and on the occasion of the 16th anniversary of Appleton, the ‘Get Back’ cycle appears in the convergence of favourable conditions for the return of Vera Mota for a new chapter. With no rigorous chronological pretensions, but attentive to the natural transformations of her practice, it is interesting to think about this re- inhabiting of the same space where nothing can be exactly the same. Matter has its own vibration and the bodies inhabited by it, also subject to the patina of time, remind us that everything is in constant movement, inevitably in the fluidity of impermanence. Returning to or staging that same space is perhaps like an old smell that one can recognise. ‘Haze’ thus achieves that state of a suspended spirit, that possible aroma, touch, sensory recognition, a diffused mist that envelops the works and leaves the exhibition space in a limbo. A contemplative atmosphere is forged by steam as an indefinite condition and the elements as concealment or fantasy.

 

While in ‘Schema’ Vera Mota used elements of mineral origin, like graphite, combined with other materials, such as leather, in ‘Haze’ the focus falls on basalt, a volcanic rock she studied during periods of residency and research in the Azores. The fusion between the intrinsic mineral nature of the rock and its transformation into a malleable form by means of technology creates a tension between the natural and the artificial, between rigidity and fluidity, the natural qualities of the fibre and its capacity to be manipulated by hand. Basalt fibre is made using advanced fabrication processes, including the melting of the rock, which contrast with its existence as a geological body in the oceanic crust. As Coccia* reminds us, all forms of matter have a vital dimension and vitality is not exclusive to living beings, but permeates the entire cosmos. Thus, the filaments that rest in silence as a spatial installation find paths among the light and shadow effects, the absorbent tone of the walls and the white and metallic notes of the

supports that broaden sculptural existences. The rough and resistant qualities of basalt fibre, linked to its reduced ecological footprint and resistance to high temperatures, mean that this material is widely used in civil construction and the textile, wind and aerospace industries. A futuristic aspect contrasts with apparently familiar, delicate qualities, like a strand of hair or an animal trace, a scrap of fur. A state of renewal or emancipation, like a reptile shedding its skin and leaving its old body behind. A faint line dissolves between what appears to be and what is, in a world of sculptural animism, where the perspectives of the body and materiality are constantly redefined in a tangle of possibilities between living and inanimate forms.

 

We could say that Vera Mota uses minimal logics of composition to highlight this fascination with materials and to create visual territories that introduce signs and symbols. The scale of the body, man he says, is the measure of all things, of the existence of the things that are and the non-existence of things that are not,** is known and evident, both in the resting heads and in other works where she manipulated elements of her own body in a recognition of the interdependency

and possible transference of functions, like thinking and feeling. But existence has other scales and it is precisely in that collision and simultaneous yearning for other bodies, biological, geological and inorganic, that the artist reclaims new perspectives of substance and form. ‘Haze’ thus seeks to stage processes of transfiguration, declassification and transmutation of these functions. Perhaps those 10 years were needed so that, in retrospect, we can say that the concerns expressed here previously still bear fruit today, in their plural existence between the visible and the invisible, order and chaos, ancestry and the most vital things that may come from the future. The continuous scrutiny of the unspeakable is the most precious antidote to the ‘good’ passing of time.

 

* Emanuel Coccia, “A Vida das Plantas: Uma Metafísica da Mistura”, Documenta, 2019

** Plato, Theaetetus, 152a, in Benjamin Jowett (ed) , The Dialogues of Plato, vol. IV, 1892