Floating Bones, Miguel Mesquita, October 2020

“A body is not defined by the form that determines it, neither as a determined substance or subject, nor by the organs it has or the functions it performs. In the consistency plan, a body is only defined by a longitude and a latitude; that is, the set of material elements that belong to it under such relationships of movement and rest, of speed and slowness (longitude); the set of intensive affections that it is capable under power or degree of power (latitude). Nothing but affections and local movements, differential speeds”.

The human body has always been the object of representation or inspiration in artistic expressions. However, the body as described by Deleuze and Guattari, a body as an action, has only integrated the artistic vocabulary from the avant-garde of the 20 ^th century, reaching artistic autonomy from the 1970s with the recognition of performance. This body – the one that is static due to action and not representation – has been a key element in Vera Mota’s reasoning. Wandering between drawing, sculpture, painting and performance, the practice of Vera Mota, which result is rooted in a tenuous coexistence between order (or the intentional) and unpredictability (or the accidental), trusts the body as the executing agent of a method that promotes the development of this unpredictability.

By promoting the participation of the body as an artistic creation methodology, Vera Mota discusses the relationship between action and event, systematized by Donald Davidson in “Essays on Actions and Events” (1980), since the actions she performs are not intended to build a final image, but rather the creation of conditions so that the events generated by her action can produce that result.

Floating Bones, the exhibition presented here, may inadvertently recover an anatomical language, but it does suggest the presence of the body, which is translated into the image and also the process. The works that make up the exhibition – two untitled drawings and an installation with the same title as the exhibition – are images that by suggesting bone structures suspended in a liquid or even an aura, consist of an entanglement, more or less untouchable, of records that materialize pendular oscillations of the hand which has shredded these lines. However, the created images are the result of the gesture of placing a thread with oil and an uncontrollable and unpredictable process of absorption and the chemical processes that lead to its transformation from translucent to a cloudy yellow. Thus, the “skeleton” in the drawing is the trace that the thread prints, and its musculature is the stain that slowly grows and expands from the ribbing, as described by Vera Mota:

The drawings that constitute the installation “Floating Bones” present in its undulating composition translucent bone structures, which sometimes flow or ascend, mirroring trembling or intermittent nerves. Within the limits of the sheet, the thread spreads, running through the paper. The time of these drawings does not crystalize in what we can observe now, continuing to leave its print in a slow process of oxidation, and the already yellow transparency of these stains will become more cloudy, darkening against the surrounding white.
The line leading to the stains fulfills a function that is both supporting and controlling. Although unstable, discontinuous, diluted, the lines articulate the stains that impregnate the paper and swallow its opacity. The spots are not loose, they allow themselves to be anchored by the lines as if they amplify the humming of their curves, imitating their undulation.

Inserted in the exhibition cycle O Desenho como Pensamento (The Drawing as Thought), the works presented in the exhibition question Drawing as an autonomous discipline of artistic expression. If, from a procedural point of view, the works refer to the drawing methodology, both by the linear character of the gesture and by the print made through the pressure of the material, from a formal point of view, there are sculptural characteristics in the set of drawings that compose the Floating Bones installation. Although one can strictly classify the elements that compose the installation as drawings on self-supportive concave surfaces, by highlighting the translucency of the paper as a fundamental factor of the composition, we privilege the work as an object in which the drawing is complementary. These images can be seen not only in its two-dimensionality, but also in the relationship system established between matters and materials, which add thickness to the image and flows from the light emanated from the interior of those structures. These vertical elements thus claim a wandering observation that requires the confrontation of scale with the observer through the movement in the space around these elements, and the habituation of the eyes to the luminosity variations, which allow to reveal the different intensities of the materials’ reaction.