O senso comum e a percepção de alguns notórios pensadores insistem em reconhecer o visível como algo incrustado no tangível. Ao tratarem o mundo da arte ainda como mundo dos volumes e, portanto, confundindo imagem e coisa, pecam pela redução do visível à lógica imediata da coisa vista, pela redução da imagem ao objeto. 

     O trabalho de Laura Erber, tanto no Livro das silhuetas quanto em O Livro de linhas, é o reverso desse parti pris, pois, neles, as imagens renunciam às formas, o que contradiz, por exemplo, a estratégia minimalista, na qual as formas é que pareciam querer renunciar às imagens.Nessas obras, não há um objeto, uma coisa definida, mas a formação de algo no tempo, como uma variável em si mesma, em situação. O que vemos é pura latência espaço-temporal, por meio de imagens em plena transfiguração ou linhas em trânsito: formas que se experimentam, vacilando sobre a própria possibilidade formal que talvez um dia terão. Formas que avançam, retrocedem, estancam e recomeçam, mas não se encontram: um vir-a-ser formal duvidoso, que suspeita desse mundo estável e eterno dos volumes e das coisas. 

     Em Laura Erber, a forma é, necessariamente, experimental. Depende da experiência do seu fazer em processo. Depende da troca intersubjetiva entre a sua aparição vacilante e o sentido que terá para nós. Como arrulhos de crianças que ainda não dominam a língua, as silhuetas e as linhas encontram-se no limiar da linguagem, como seres que titubeiam diante da própria face que vão assumir. As linhas não constituem corpos, e as silhuetas dançam em perfis que engatinham no espaço, como que buscando o seu reconhecimento no mundo das figuras. Em animação cinemática constante, o fator temporal interfere diretamente nessa imprecisão figurante, sendo essencial ao processo de transmutação.  

     No Livro das silhuetas, figuras e palavras transformam-se permanentemente, por meio de situações imprecisas e moventes do desenho, desenvolvendo uma espécie de coreografia entre o corpo e o texto, que se fundem, se separam, se buscam um ao outro para, em seguida, se perderem e novamente se reencontrarem. A simbiose entre poesia e performance corporal faz parte de uma escrita imaginária e efêmera, que apenas se insinua na delicadeza gestual da animação, tentando interagir os mundos verbal e visual na mesma página. O corpo, ou sua silhueta, coloca e tira de si as suas próprias palavras, como uma figura ou personagem hipotético que busca seu sentido em “mal traçadas linhas”, procurando constituir-se na medida em que se processa como linguagem.  

     No Livro de linhas, entre o arrulho e o balbucio, as linhas remetem-se ao nascimento das formas, àquele momento primordial em que eclodem, e no qual a linguagem ainda é muda. Ao frescor de seus primeiros sinais, confusos, mas intensos, essas linhas distendem-se na elasticidade do tempo e do espaço, sem um destino preciso, como se escarnecessem do ponto final de todas as frases. Preferem projetar-se na infindável possibilidade de constituição das formas, sem corresponder a nenhuma em particular, apenas descrevendo as articulações que precedem os sistemas. Como diz a artista, o estado amorfo desses desenhos fala da “necessidade de se despojar de certas organizações discursivas e visuais de representação”, como “uma tentativa de atingir uma dimensão pré-lingüística”.  

     O inacabado é o demônio formal da história das representações, assim como uma subversão aos esquemas racionalistas que nos conduzem à ordem e às conclusões. Mas o inacabado é também o estopim da angústia visual que acaba por nos levar à busca das formas fechadas, como se nós mesmos não estivéssemos nos desenhando no caminho e à mercê da sorte. A obsessão do informe como estado de propulsão criadora ronda esses trabalhos; não como modo de produzir abstração, mas o informe como modo de produzir não-coisas, a ver.

English version

Common sense – and the perception of some prominent thinkers – insist on seeing the visible as something set deep in the tangible.  On dealing with the world of art still as a world of volumes, thereby confusing image and thing, they commit the mistake of reducing image to object, the visible to the immediate logic of the thing seen.

Laura Erber’s work, in both the Book of silhouettes and the Book of lines, is the opposite of this parti pris, because here images renounce shapes, thus contradicting, for instance, the minimalist strategy in which shapes seemed to want to renounce images.

There is no object in these works, no defined thing, but rather the formation of something in time, like a variable of itself, of a situation.  What we see is pure space-time latency by means of fully transfigured images or lines in transit: forms experiencing themselves, vacillating as to the actual formal possibility that they may have some day.  Shapes that advance, retreat, stay still and start again, but never meet: a dubious formal coming and going that looks on this stable, eternal world of volumes and things with suspicion.

For Laura Erber, form is necessarily experimental.  It depends on the experience of its being processed.  It depends on the inter-subjective exchange between its vacillating appearance and the meaning it will have for us.  Like the cooing of children still unfamiliar with language, silhouettes and lines meet on the threshold of language like beings tottering before the face that they will take on as their own.  The lines are not bodies, the silhouettes dance in profiles groping about in space as if in search of recognition in the world of figures.  In constant cinematic animation, the time factor interferes directly in this figuring imprecision as an essential part of the process of change. 

In the Book of silhouettes, figures and words are in permanent transformation, causing imprecise and moving situations in the designs and developing a kind of choreography between body and text, which blend, separate and then look for one another before they lose one another and then meet once more.  The symbiosis between poetry and body performance belongs to imaginary, ephemeral writing that is merely hinted at in the delicate gesturing of animation that attempts to make the verbal and visual worlds interact on the same page.  The body, or its silhouette, inserts its own words in itself and then removes them, like a hypothetical figure or character in search of its meaning in “poorly drawn lines”, endeavoring to put itself together while being processed as language. 

In the Book of lines, between cooing and babbling the lines take us back to the language of forms, to that primordial moment when they burst and when language is still mute.  In the freshness of their early confused yet intense signs, these lines stretch out in elastic time and space with no precise destination, as if mocking the full stop, the period in all sentences.  They prefer to project themselves into the endless possibility of building shapes without corresponding to any in particular, just describing the articulations that precede systems.  As the artist says, the amorphous state of these drawings speak of the “need to strip off certain discursive and visual forms of representation” in an “attempt to achieve a pre-linguistic dimension”. 

The unfinished is the formal demon in the history of representations, a subversion of the rationalist schemes that lead us to order and conclusions.  Yet the unfinished is at the same time the spark of visual anguish that ends up having us look for closed forms as if we ourselves were not drawing ourselves on the way to and at the mercy of our lot.  These works exude the obsession with the unformed as a state of creative propulsion, the unformed as a way of producing not abstraction but rather non-things, to be seen.

Versão em Português

O miserável milagre das imagens – por Laura Erber

English version

The Miserable Miracle of Images

LAURA ERBER

At the age of eight, Louis XIII makes a drawing similar to the one made by the son of a New Caledonian cannibal. At eight, he is the age of humanity, he is at least 250 thousand years old. A few years later, he has lost those years, he is only thirty-one, he has become an individual, he is only a king of France – a dead end, where he remains. What is worse than being a finished product?

HENRI MICHAUX

Nothing in me is final.

FRANZ KAFKA

What is worse than being a finished product? To Henri Michaux, not even death is worse than the restrictions that come with finality. The shapes and figures that inhabit his texts and images are always less or more –  always something other – than mere identity, yet few modern writers have used “I” so freely and unabashedly. And yet Michaux’s “I” lacks any permanence or security – he multiplies it, tortures it, subjects it to incessant perforations. What drives Michaux’s prolific creative trajectory is his terrible fear of the stabilization of meaning and form. Therefore, by denying this finality in its varying degrees and extents, Michaux delves into the investigation of passages, relentlessly probing the gap between the subject and its physical shells, the gulf between language and the self. Contrary to what might be expected, howeve, there is nothing vague or allusive about his works. Rather, they constitute a “passage from mist to flesh” – they are works of stunning acuity, filled throughout with rigorous descriptions and attention to detail, which lend an irrefutable quality of concreteness to phenomena that would otherwise be purely abstract, intellectual or devoid of interest.

Born in 1899, in the small Belgian village of Namur, Michaux is the author of some of the most authentic and irresistible works of the 20th century. In his first book, Qui je fus (1927), we find his earliest fictional-poetic explorations of “life in the folds”, a kind of foundational writing of the self, in which the subject appears to be split in two: “I am inhabited; I speak to who-I-was and who-I-was speaks back to me”, “we are not alone in our skin”. From early on, his creative activities were influenced by his desire to escape, which led him to take long trips to places like China, Malaysia, Indonesia, Japan, India and Latin America. As it happens, Michaux visited Brazil in 1939, a trip which prompted reflections about an “evil man” whom he saw feeding the animals at the Belém zoo, and a note about his impression of Brazilians as having a rather “caffeinated intelligence – all reflex, no reflection”. In his travel writings, Michaux shows none of the tolerance common to the modern traveler, nor does he aspire to instruct or edify the reader, or to somehow sublimate European sin through immersion in the exotic cultures of faraway places. Rather, Michaux the Traveler displays a simultaneously skeptical and irritable sensibility, keenly aware of the great variety of humanity, drawing attention – with scathing humor, no less – to the limits of his desire for proximity.

Later, driven by the notion that poets ought to create their own field of reference, Michaux produces some of the most fascinating fictional ethnographies literature has ever seen: Voyage en grand Garabagne; Au pays de la magie; Ici, Podemma and, later, Portrait des Meidosems. The people he encounters are the Émanglons, the Omobuls, the Ourgouilles, the Aravis, the Ouglabs, the Ossopets, the Kalakiès, the Émagrus, the Halalas and the enigmatic Meidosems, all of whom are described in stunning detail – equal in precision and beauty to the descriptions of Latin Americans, Indians and Asians found in his earlier books. These fictions emphasize the potency of writing unencumbered by existing systems of coherence that have been forcibly introduced into the domain of literature. Michaux breaks the ‘referential pact’ of travel writing and shuns the fieldwork which modern ethnography holds as indispensable. On the other hand, the magical or fantastical quality of his inventions does not make use of ciphered languages, nor does it rely on sociocultural myths that have been slightly remolded by the imagination. Rather, Michaux creates a wholly unforgiving and indomitable world, a world which, as Maurice Blanchot puts it, can barely withstand our presence, yet “despite it all, this universe in which we are not is our very own universe”. In approaching mystery as a phenomenon, Michaux sets the stage for an even greater surprise: according to Blanchot, “He imparts a certain prominence to mystery, he treats the mysterious not as something that cannot be seen, but as an actual manifestation”.

THE WORKSHOP OF THE BRAIN

As a young man, Michaux had a spell as a sailor, a career which he ultimately gave up on due to lack of physical fitness; he also toyed with the idea of becoming a composer, “if one could only inhabit the keyboard and get inside the music” – in this case, he lacked any formal musical training, and yet he never abandoned music altogether. The piano, however, remains a strong presence both in his writings and in the images he produced, which clearly aspire towards a musical dimension of existence. In a rare interview to John Ashbery in 1961, at the hotel particulier, on Rue Séguier, in Paris, Michaux said he began creating images under the influence of Paul Klee’s paintings and of the trips he’d made to the “Far East”, where he was introduced to an entirely new rhythm of existence. Bot no one creative strategy could quench his thirst for exploration. So in 1955, Michaux once again embarked on a cycle of trips – not to new countries, but to the uncharted territories of the “far interior”.

In the summer of 1954, Michaux and Jean Paulhan exchange letters in which they mention plans to experiment with mescaline together. Paulhan says he has acquired seven doses of the drug, and that he’d like to take them with Michaux over the span of four days, from a Sunday to a Tuesday:

“We should remain in a dimly-lit environment/ No phones or visits, obviously / Some flowers, perhaps? / in case one gets anxious or nauseous, one should drink very strong coffee or tea.”

But Michaux would only begin to experiment with mescaline in 1955. His experiences with the drug resulted in the production of a series of books, beginning with Misérable miracle, published by Gallimard in 1956. In it, Michaux reproduces 32 out of some 150 pages written under the influence of mescaline, many of which are unreadable and therefore textually ineffectual. After his third ingestion, however, he began to produce drawings. The pieces produced under the hallucinogenic effects of mescaline are included in the book, together with a lengthy text that analyzes après-coup the distinct qualities of mescaline, its inner workings, it’s operational style, so to speak. The texts are accompanied by extensive marginalia that situate and offer glosses on the most important phases of the intoxication cycle. To Michaux, mescaline’s style, as it were, is abstract, serial and extremely fast. There are no pauses, only extreme agitation, extenuating vibrations, thousands of tiny deaths and resurrections. The images produced under the influence of the drug are devoid of sensation, and the writing “is expressed through enumeration”. It is a caste, anti-erotic kind of drug. Furthermore, it is not conducive to the pleasures of the flesh, despite keeping virility intact. “Above all, mescaline offers an all-encompassing vibration – multifarious, fine, polymorphous, terrible and seemingly unceasing.” The imagination is diminished, images are de-sensualized, whereas words become swollen, too dense to be pronounced. During these “psychotic experiments”, all is multitudinous, everything comes in droves, nothing is unique and nothing can be isolated from anything else, it is a torrent, everything tramples upon or overtakes everything else, like a verse that overtakes the following verse, emerging before it reaches its last tonic syllable. But Michaux fails to see anything supernatural about the experience: “You scarcely left the human. Instead, you felt caught, a prisoner in the workshop of the brain”.

A SMALL LUMP OF FLESH WAITING TO BE KICKED

“Since you lost your center, you could be a man but just as much a toad, a small lump of flesh waiting to be kicked”. With the introduction of mescaline to his creative dynamics, drawing becomes the ideal medium through which to convey the struggle between opposing forces such as pleasure and displeasure, life and death, embryonic shapes or decadent shapes – inextricable forces pulling and pushing ceaselessly at each other. Michaux claimed he could never identify or recognize a single figure in the famous Rorschach test; similarly, the images he produced with (or against) mescaline were not intended to impart meaning, or to define what could be seen. Quite the contrary, Michaux would produce anthills of doubt, he would open up and expand signs, he would leap out of himself, risking self-destruction, risking becoming forever lost, risking becoming imprisoned in the inner reaches of his own sensorial labyrinth or being swept away by the the weltering infinity of language. Working mostly with India ink, gouache and watercolor on paper, his images (both drawn and painted) assume the risk of becoming “plastic” and performative writing; a desperate and relentless attempt to get into the frenetic rhythm of his intoxicated thoughts.

Michaux takes up painting and drawing in the 1920s, during which period he produces his Alphabets, a collection of undecipherable symbols that appear to be dancing in place on the white page. The poet had always disliked the process involved in oil painting and had therefore adhered early on to water-based techniques, which not only suited the immediacy of painterly gestures, but also allowed him to easily imprint the rhythm of his hands upon the page. Given his intention to depict the awareness of existing as well as the flow of time, these aqueous materials provided the perfect medium with which to effectively convey the flickering and impermanent quality of the images, or, as René Bertelé calls them, “apparitions that refuse to have a definite existence”. The Alphabets are the earliest works in which Michaux stretches the limits of writing, bringing the Western alphabet closer to the oriental ideogram. Though drawing and writing share an origin in manual gestures, the history of culture tends to draw a distinction between them, circumscribing images to the sphere of sensation and writing to the sphere of intelligibility – as cosa mentale or a matter of the mind. But Michaux blurs the line between these two spheres, reconnecting writing to the body and drawing to thought. To Michaux, however, drawing was a tremendous struggle, a violent experience of “turbulent infinity” – an inexorable flux which no image could keep in check –, at the end of which, all that remained was a miserable miracle.

ON ARTIFICIAL HEAVENS AND HELLS

The combination of literature and drugs is an old one, but in modernity it acquires a new distinctiveness: if the modern subject reveals his full potential by investigating his constitutive precariousness, drugs can only be viewed as an element by means of which a subject can make turbulent contact – no matter how fleeting – with the shapelessness and the unnamable that lie within him. As Baudelaire noted, reflecting on the effects of hashish, drugs don’t radically transform the subject. Rather, they intensify him, exacerbate his perceptions and conflicts, and cause the self to brush up against its very limits. As early as 1821, following a harrowing struggle with addiction, Thomas de Quincey publishes Confessions of an English Opium-Eater in which he describes anguished dreams that were generated by a part of himself which he was altogether unaware of. De Quincey’s Confessions anticipated a number of questions that were later taken up by his successors; in it we find the horrors and delights of hallucination, the psychic storms and the powerful discharge of angst which drugs can induce. Decades later, Baudelaire would declare hashish and wine great allies of poetic writing. His Artificial Paradises contains a substantial reflection on the hallucinated consciousness that threatens to split the subject into pieces. In Baudelaire’s case, he was especially interested in the capacity of drugs to increase sensibility, a hypostasis of the senses which allowed one to access a much more vigorous world, in terms of its natural intensity, than the world of real life. In The Poem of Hashish, Baudelaire boldly provides the reader with a recipe for dawamesk, praising the Arabian method of preparing the drug, which, he believed was superior – in terms of hallucinogenic effectiveness –  to the preparation normally used by Europeans (who mixed tobacco and hashish). And although he concludes the book by praising the poetic sensibility which forgoes hallucinogens, Baudelaire remains fascinated by what he saw as the drug’s capacity to unleash a state of synesthetic suprasensibility – where sounds are filled with color, and colors contain music –, the true experience of the deregulation of the senses, to use one of Rimbaud’s terms.

Michaux also experiences the drug under a sign of excess and infinity. But, unlike the Baudelairean vade mecum, the information he imparts to the reader does not amount to any kind of user manual. His notes are meant, instead, to translate (as subtly as possible) the effects induced by the drug and his struggle to capture these phenomena “in real time”, seeing as it it is precisely one’s normal perceptions of time and reality which are transformed by the experience. When, in Connaissance par les gouffres (1961), Michaux attempts to recapitulate his experiences during 1950s, he describes these states of delirium as “abysses-situations”. In these situations, thoughts acquire such a terrible speed of propagation and multiplication that they never allow ideas to settle: “Before a thought can be finished, before it can develop, it becomes pregnant with another thought, and this newborn and inchoate thought brings yet another thought into the world, a litter of other thoughts that interact among themselves in just the same way, in astonishing and uncapturable exchanges – to this day, I haven’t been able to recapture this experience”.

What distinguishes Michaux from most writers before him who were concerned with the investigation of altered states of mind is the singular path his creative production ultimately takes. Mescaline isn’t a wellspring of literary production stricto sensu. Rather, it unleashes ambivalent visual processes, culminating in “plastic writing” – a paradoxical liberation of signs and symbols caused by the mortifying pressure of hallucinogenic substances. Misérable miracle is an all but unclassifiable book, a log book of sorts, complemented by images, some of which are attempts at writing which fizzle out halfway through, phrases that have lost all substance, phrases trickling down the page. This plastic writing isn’t a novel and unintelligible language, nor is it the ephemeral expression of the unconscious sought by the Surrealist school; it is a seismograph of a nervous flux of thought. In it, we observe the tremendous difficulties faced by one who attempts to translate the tensions produced by these altered states of mind. “Mescaline and I were more often at odds than together”, Michaux wrote.

“THE HUSK OF MY BODY WAS HOVERING AROUND ME”

The images produced by mescaline stem neither from the imagination, nor from vision, but rather from a sense of urgency: “There is haste in me. There is urgency. I would like. I would like anything at all, but fast”. These images are produced by the “unbearable, intolerable” quality of the vibrations. Yet, they can also erupt from a word that one has read. At a certain point, Michaux leafs through an illustrated zoology book, but he cannot seem to retain the figures he sees in it. When he closes his eyes, the animal immediately dematerializes – no shadow or trace of it is left. On the other hand, when he reads a sentence in that same book about the life of antelopes, the word “giraffe” produces an overwhelming effect on him and, lo and behold, a monstrous giraffe materializes before him, with a neck like a seven-storey building. And it is not alone. There are dozens of giraffes galloping towards Michaux. Words trigger visual processes, but they also exert a certain magnetism on neighboring words, creating endless cascades of related terms: “irremediable”, “incurable”, “indelible”, “invincible”, “indefatigable”, “indomitable”, “incomprehensible”, “inflammable”, “incongruent”, “intolerable” and so on – a hail of words with the “in” prefix which Michaux can’t seem to keep in check, reminiscent of the intriguing paratactic style of contemporary poet Christophe Tarkos (1963-2004).

It is curious to note that, in Misérable miracle, figurative images are only conveyed through text, whereas images drawn under the influence of mescaline do not depict identifiable figures. Rather, they are non-retinal and non-mimetic figures that have somehow eluded the visible world. They do not, however, constitute pure formal abstraction, for they retain an indirect link to the body and to the empirical world of sensations. Under the influence of mescaline, Michaux becomes creatively passive. He draws with his nervous system, forging a direct link between the hand and the muscle of the mind. Jean Starobinski believes this is the reason why these images seem so penetrating to us: “They appear to correspond to our fibrillar truth, to the inner workings of our nervous system”. But this direct link to the turbulence of our “mental spectacle” doesn’t translate into pure visual chaos; furthermore, a number of mescaline drawings tend towards a certain symmetry, and they emerge along a dorsal spine of sorts. Others are rather more arborescent, composed of dramatically contorted micro-lines, advancing and retreating and branching off in different directions. In contemplating these images, we have the impression that we are experiencing the infinite movement of a subject that is unaware of himself. The opening lines of his poem Double Life, in Épreuves, exorcismes (1944) –  “I have allowed my enemy to grow from within me” – sheds light on what he calls the mescalinian style: the repetitive gestures of an afflicted body, a body which is struggling against its nervous impulses. In materializing the immateriality of hallucinated thought so lucidly, Michaux creates a kind of literal visuality of the splitting subject, a subject who becomes the “incorruptible spectator” to his own delirium. As is well known, intoxication isn’t really a safe system of revelations, and, following his fourth ingestion of mescaline – having mistakenly taken a larger dose –, Michaux experiences first hand the risks of going insane: “The main horror of it was that I was only a line. In normal life, you’re a sphere, a sphere that comes upon panoramas. […] Here only a line. A line breaking into a thousand aberrations”. During this moment of radical dispossession, one doesn’t even have the possibility of holding on to the commonplace of emotions: “Emotions? I couldn’t even hide behind an emotion. […] I realized it ten days later while watching a vulgar drama at the movies, when I felt something that “penetrated my heart”. During those days of horror, I’d forgotten altogether that such a path existed, such a comfort.”

One can always envision an art that abdicates lucidity and relinquishes control of its instruments in the name of the radiance of a new and spontaneous language. But there is none of that in Michaux. In mescaline’s miserable miracle, there is no heroism, no naïve notion of freedom. At best, there is the “morbid jouissance” which Baudelaire spoke of, violent instances of creative eruption, despite the fact that the notion of creativity seems inadequate or insufficient when talking about Michaux’s works. The mescaline drawings are testaments to a state of abject perturbation, a continuum at either end of which lies imprisonment or total dispersion of the self, and this oscillation between the two reveals the exciting and moving encounter between man and the potency of debilitated thoughts, the delights and the ordeals of man’s interior elasticity.

LAURA ERBER (1979) is a visual artist and poet. Her works have been shown at Fundação Miró, Grand Palais de Paris, Jeu de Paume, Moscow Contemporary Art Museum, Le Fresnoy, Skive Kunstmuseum and Centro Cultural Banco do Brasil. She is the author of Os corpos e os dias (Editora de Cultura, 2008), Vazadas e molambos and Bénédicte vê o mar (Editora da Casa, 2008; 2011).

 1. Michaux uses this notion to describe the Meidosems, in his “Portrait de Meidosems”, La Vie dans les plis, in: Oeuvres complètes. Tome II. Paris: Gallimard, 2011, p. 214.

 2. Henri Michaux, Qui je fus, in Oeuvres complètes. Tome I. Paris: Gallimard, 1996, p. 73, 79.

 3. Maurice Blanchot, “L’ange du bizarre”, in Henri Michaux ou le refus de l’enfrentement. Tours: Farrago, 1999, p. 20.

 4. Ibid., pp. 34-35

 5. Henri Michaux, “Cronologia”, xxxvii, in: Oeuvres complètes. Tome I. Paris: Gallimard, 2001.

6. Henri Michaux, Oeuvres complètes. Tome II. Op. cit., 2001, p.670.

7. Ibid., p. 621.

8. René Bertelé, “Notes pour un itinerárire de l’ouevre plastique d’Henri Michaux”, in Cahier de L’Herne – Henri Michaux, n.8. Paris: Éditions de L’Herne, 1966, p. 360.

9. Henri Michaux, Connaissance par les gouffres, in Oeuvres complètes, Tome III, Paris: Gallimard, 2004, p. 47.

10. Henri Michaux, Oeuvres Complètes. Tome II. Op. cit., 2011, p. 620.

11. Ibid. p. 630.

12. I refer particularly to the beautiful book of poetry titled Anachronisme. Paris: P.O.L Éditeur, 2001.

13.  Jean Starobinski, “Témoignage, combat et ritual”, in Chahier de L’Herne: Henri Michaux, n.8. Paris: Éditions de L’Herne, 1966, p. 355.

14. Henri Michaux, Oeuvres complètes. Tome X. Op. cit., p. 820.

15.  Henri Michaux, Oeuvres complètes. Tome N. Op. cit., p. 739.

16. Ibid, p. 736.

*texto de apresentação da exposição homônima, realizada na Galeria Mercedes Viegas Arte Contemporãnea, Rio de Janeiro, Brasil, 2011.

A série de desenhos de Laura Erber, que nos circunda, se apresenta ao mundo como páginas, já querendo deixar de ser, de um caderno. As linhas passam a revelar o mundo não pelo que sempre descreveram mas pela sua própria forma. Apesar da imagem de um caderno de notas, não nos deparamos com palavras, mas com uma autonomia da linha, que passa a ser objeto. Laura se alia a uma pesquisa das artes visuais contemporâneas na qual o desenho passa a ter uma vida própria e independente, está longe do seu passado subordinado como preparação de uma obra final, seja uma pintura ou uma escultura. 

Seus desenhos possuem uma continuidade, isto é, há uma história sendo descrita que se confunde com a própria percepção do desenho enquanto corpo. Os desenhos pervertem e inquietam as associações entre linguagem e imagem, pois a linha não é somente legenda (ou aquilo que dá forma a um pensamento por escrito) mas assume um modo próprio de construir sentido. A linha não serve mais como suporte para a palavra, ela agora exerce as funções da matéria verbal mas enquanto “coisa”. Ora, o que produz a “estranheza” desse desenho não é a contradição entre a imagem e o texto, mas a perda do lugar comum à imagem e à linguagem, o desaparecimento de uma região onde, parafraseando Foucault, o desenho e o texto que deveria nomeá-lo acham lugar onde se encontrar e se alfinetar.

Até então, rígida e conformada com a sua função, a linha finalmente é exercício experimental, passa a ser sujeito; constrói o espaço como um organismo, vivo, justamente porque mantém os seus fluxos ativos, evitando o seu repouso absoluto. Algo como se a linha quisesse se colocar como a protagonista e não o suporte para o aparecimento de ideias ou sentenças. São linhas que se constituem como paisagens, pois são reveladas superfícies, volumes, transparências que implicam em um relevo. A linha também se confunde em ser costura, ou seja, em tornar visível um delineamento de territórios. A aparição desses lugares é sempre orquestrada por uma economia de elementos; portanto, por trás dessa minimalidade de traços há uma precisão na fabricação dessas imagens. Diante dessas frações de paisagens, nos deparamos com a ausência da figura humana, que não necessariamente nos induz a um estado de melancolia mas de espera por um acontecimento que nunca se revela.

É um “desenho de paisagem” que, ao mudar de escala lentamente e suavemente, torna aparente o enaltecimento de um drama. O sentido de paisagem é trazido à tona pelo fato de evocar um conceito largamente explorado pela história da arte – a pintura de paisagem – mas ao mesmo tempo criar um desvio, um senso de experimentação assim como um conflito com os parâmetros tão assertivos a respeito de uma interpretação de mundo. Laura estabelece um percurso em que o enredo fica em suspenso, e o desenho é pura atividade visível diante da costura de uma estória incerta. Em todos os desenhos há um registro de velocidade – que de modo algum se compactua com o descompromisso -, sendo que nos maiores, ou à medida que a história aproxima-se do seu epílogo, um aumento na intensidade desse traço é mais perceptível. É como se nesses, a aparição de uma espécie de revolta da linha contra aquilo que sempre a condicionou fosse mais evidente; a linha finalmente se assume – às vezes com um caráter antropomórfico – como uma forma libertadora de ver, identificar e interpretar o mundo. Essas paisagens não querem corresponder ao que vemos, mas ao que é dado como algo indeterminado, presente e inconclusivo, transparente e ambíguo.

English version

Before a thought can be finished*

*presentation of the homonymous solo exhibition, held at Galeria Mercedes Viegas, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, 2011.

Laura Erber’s drawings present themselves to the world as pages from a notebook – pages that are in the process of ceasing to be pages altogether. Their lines reveal the world around us not through the words they were meant to contain but through their very form. Despite alluding to the image of a notebook, we stand before wordless pages and are thus confronted with the autonomy of the line, which has become an object in itself. Erber adheres to a practice of contemporary visual arts in which drawing takes on a life of its own, unshackling itself from its past of subservience – as a preliminary study – to the finished piece, whether it be a sculpture or a painting.

There is a continuity to her drawings; that is, the story they are depicting ultimately becomes indistinguishable from the perception of the drawing as a structuring body. These drawings distort and disrupt associations between language and image: their lines are not meant as mere descriptions (i.e. that which gives shape to thoughts on paper). Rather, they have their own way of constructing meaning. The line is no longer a repository for words. It functions, instead, as verbal matter, as a “thing”. The “uncanniness” evoked by the drawings does not stem from a contradiction between image and text, but from the loss of a place or common to both image and language, the disappearance of a “shared space” where, paraphrasing Foucault, the drawing and the text that is meant to give that drawing its name meet and engage in a struggle.

Previously rigid, strictly conforming to its conventional function, the line finally frees itself, finally becomes an experimental exercise, a subject; like a living organism, it creates its own space, precisely because it maintains its flow, thus eluding a state of absolute rest. It is as if the line aspired to become a protagonist rather than allowing itself to be relegated to a supporting role as a medium or vehicle for ideas or sentences. Moreover, Erber’s lines effectively constitute themselves as landscapes – they reveal surfaces, volumes, transparencies, reliefs. But they also take on a patchwork-like quality, in the sense that they delineate territories. The emergence of these territories or spaces relies on the sparing use of visual elements; the minimalist strokes, however, conceal the exceptional precision with which the images are constructed. In contemplating these landscape fragments, we are confronted with the absence of the human figure. This absence doesn’t necessarily elicit in us a state of melancholy, but a state of anticipation for an action or event that never reveals itself.

These “landscape drawings” undergo a slow and seamless change in scale, underscoring the overall dramatic quality of the image. The sense of landscape is brought to the fore by the evocation of a concept that has been widely explored by art history – namely landscape painting – and by a simultaneous deviation of form which lends the drawings a sense of experimentation, a sense of struggle against the limits of long-entrenched worldviews. The plotline that emerges from Erber’s images seems caught in suspension, and so drawing becomes pure visuality in the face of uncertainty. Moreover, the drawings convey differences in speed, which in no way condones a sense of non-commitment. As the story approaches its epilogue, the speed and intensity of the strokes becomes increasingly apparent. In these, it seems as if one could more clearly observe the “revolt” of the line against its conditioning factors; the line finally embraces and asserts itself – sometimes taking on anthropomorphic qualities – as a means of freeing the gaze, as a means of identifying and interpreting the world. Ultimately, these landscapes are not meant to correspond to what we see, but to something indeterminate, something present and inconclusive, transparent and ambiguous.