Gravura Brasileira

The transparencies of  Margot

Margot Delgado journeys nimbly across her universe of transparencies. It seems that she absent-mindedly crosses an infinite labyrinth with walls made up with veils and very thin papers. This subtle experience of space and freedom is touched, however, by the rigid limits of Time.  Her artwork is marked by a pendulum movement -- on one hand the lightness of spirit and on the other the presence of History. A visit to her studio brings about the feeling of a suspended world due to its inapprehensible impalpable atmosphere. It is in the nature of her works to be evanescent, to escape from any kind of prison, not to have any staying power. As if they had a life of their own, they seem to slide from the table to the working desk, from the drawers to the ground and then fly to the printing press. Everything starts with a flower, on the table, almost faded. Its body as a half open shell, its fleshy petals starting to yellow. In her notebook the flower installs itself on thin paper. On a base of white casein the flower is choreographed in soft lines drawn with charcoal, the rounded shapes pulled into themselves. In the third page of the notebook the flower has already become an embrace. Legs and arms open like petals in the interlacing of bodies; in the next drawings, they are on the way of going back to being flowers again. From these drawings she chooses the prevailing lines and transferred this synthesis to the copper plate. The prints are made on very thin and rugged textured Japanese paper, which reminds us of skin. Sometimes, the copper plate is printed more than once, only this time it is inverted and printed on the same support. Other times, two different plates transfer these soft calligraphies to a sole printing on both sides of another paper-skin. The "velatura" transparencies and overlapping resources used in drawings and printings demand the eye to concentrate so as to traverse this intriguing haziness and achieve the inscriptions left on these virtual planes. Another work in a three-phased rhythm starts from a small watercolor whose bough of violet little flowers seems to have been blown by a light wind. In the first page of this triptych you see the blue fine threads Margot spread on the acetate. It seems as if the little water-colored flowers had released themselves from the paper and had migrated there. In the second and third phases of the work she painted, using tempera on casein, the blue flowers, rarefied or concentrated, semi-glazed by the overlapping layers of the support. Another work shows a poem by the artist printed from a copper plate - "when the paper/ is a skin, the flower / fades faded, / circumflexes/over itself".  While she was trying to withdraw the inverted words of the poetry from the inked plate,feeling the resistance of the paper, she realized at this very momenr  that the poem had taken place and interrupted her gesture. The result is a circumflex object, a witness to the process and the power of words. Margot`s images are not young; they are neither fresh nor new and have had an earlier life, as the flower. They are diffuse, invertebrate intuitions, small windows of light and memory, migrations that surprise us because, when traveling, they reflect areas that can only be touched by the music of silence, by the perplexity that only inner time and poetry can reach. Even the images that were made yesterday have an emotional lifetime and seem to have sprung from pages of an antique journal that was opened hazardously.
 
Vera d`Horta
July, 2006
 
 
 The nexus of  Maria
The manufacturing of existence and its limits has always interested Maria Villares. She has observed the inner metabolism of shapes seeking to understand the marginal processes. The skeleton of natural beings, visible in radiographs, the drawing of driftwoods found in the beach, the radiated structure of the spider`s net, all these observations have been paving ways to be explored. When she dissected the apple into thin layers her purpose was to observe its death from close by, watching the loss of fluid, examining the residue of the skin, the dry skin becoming pieces of armor. Then she became aware that its halves had evident embryonic meanings, that it was life presenting itself again. Seeds, cocoons, fetuses are of the same uterine nature that already has inhabited her work for quite some time. In the piece of ceramics shown in this exhibition the stone amidst water adds to the mimesis of gestation a delicate suggestion of ikebana. In her more recent work she has continued to examine these constructions of meanings. The process is like the route run by people who have the words before the ideas come about. And the words interlace so as to construct a meaning of which we cannot trace its origin. The feminine gesture, antique and eternal, of weaving, involving ,protecting and entangling, appears enlarged in these works. Big needles and the repeated movement of hands weaving constructed, with transparent nylon threads,  meshes that are not for wearing. When the work gained volume, its weight on her belly made her shed tears. A meaning was born. She went through the inner feelings of this process paying attention to the rhythmic cadence of her fingers, as Penelope did, the woman who made an ally from the infinite time of waiting. It was not by chance that she entitled her work Nexus and the genealogy of the words is revealing. In Latin nexus means knots, interlacing. From there comes the meaning of joining, bonding, union. The ensemble of knots constructs the web that presents itself as an exhausted body that is at the same time a coat of mail and an armor which does breathe.Solitary and rarified structures emerge, showing imperfections in their construction and exhibit all the manufacturing accidents. Half knitting, half webbing, the emptied bodies irradiate shadows in space and these projections are as mobile prints. It seems natural that these wefts direct themselves to the surface of the paper, first like drawings, later as engravings. The lines of ink rewrite, with contained drama, the plot of these silent agonies and the fluctuation of the knots lead to a kind of mirror reflection of writings. The apparently visible rough lines of the drawings tear the thread; create swirls and space for light. In the printings, positive and negative mirror themselves again, unfolding their images. And in these enlarged sequences,what draws our interest  mostly is the mapping of feelings , rather than perfection. It reminds me Aristotle when he said that craftsmanship completes what nature has not finished.
 
Vera d`Horta
July, 2006