Olhos D'água

Introduction

Suzana Queiroga’s installation Olhos d’água marks a turning point both for the work of the artist and MACNiterói, the museum where it opened. First, it is comprised of a group of pieces that recover the dificult memories of the loss of the artist’s father in a plane accident over the Guanabara Bay, resignifying the pain of a tragedy that marked her birth. It also pays homage to her mother, who was pregnant with the artist, and represents care for life. Queiroga produced this installation conscious of the geography and architecture of the site. She chose MAC specifically for its location facing the airport where her father’s plane never landed. Thus, the potency of the artistic phenomena installed at MAC overflows and takes oM from the ocean marked by memories, and generates a territory of poetic revelation.

The Olhos d’água installation approaches the dificult biographical constellation of the artist’s birth-tragedy, and also its indissoluble ethical value and virtue as a plasmatic and plastic happening of infinite resonances. Queiroga here incorporates Nietzsche’s complex ethical vision of the conjugation of existential and spiritual in resignifing forgetting-memory through the active potential of artistic force. Amor fati or total presence as a “yes to life” virtue. Pain and air, flight-drift and art, sea and island, wind and soul, Balloon-Me, balloon-world, are some of the symbolic, metaphoric and philosophic elements that are reinvented by the lyric aesthetic odyssey of Olhos d’água.

This odyssey, Queiroga’s passage on inflatables and voyages by balloon remind one of the curious German word, Fernweh, the definition of which means the opposite of the happy home, the nomadic attraction to the condition of traveler, wanderlust for infinitude and for distant lands. The loss of the father, the plane accident of her uterine-aquatic memory are part of this desire to drift, navigate, walk or fly, that are the foundation of shelter, a true home in the distance suspended from the flux and movement of life. We are also provoked into traveling by the crossovers between the various layers of the artist’s life and the artist’s work in progress. How to separate them? Why? We revisit this question o=en: where does the amplified horizon of the ocean begin in this exhibition? And, furthermore, when does the conceptual, poetic and existential turn come to reveal simultaneously the biography of the artist and the sphere of revelation of the force of her artistic work in the contemporary world? Aren’t these existential forces and works in plastic pointing also to new possible horizons in contemporary art?

2e Phenomenology of Roundness1

<e circular design of MAC, its veranda, emptied entirely for the view, was host to the in/nite ocean of this

exhibition. Turning oM the lights of the main hall, a large, blue in0atable was suspended in the heart of the

museum. <e sublime and lyrical aesthetic of this large multi-sensorial sculpture was mechanically nourished

and anchored by a potent fan.

To 0y one must think roundness – to think roundness it is necessary to live the in/nite spherically in all

directions. <us, Queiroga brings not only paintings or sculptures to MAC, but also travel and 0ight journals,

revealing the ocean of existence, suspended like reversible dissolutions between ocean-sky.

In her books AR, MAR and DOR, Queiroga invents writing embodied on the surface of the paper, and

also breathed like air across the porous paper of the plasmatic game between memory and forgetting. Each

poem leaves clues and fantasies inscribed or camou0aged in drawings made by a con/dent hand, directed by

roundness thinking – by Balloon-Me world.

me apequeno

voo

me separo vento (Livro do AR)

Each piece is crisscrossed by universal uncertainties which serve to subvert the micro and macro scales

between the drawing series and the large suspended in0atable. Olhos d’água gives form to aMections for

the senses, over0owing the “roundness of the being”2 like a lesson in universal solitude that subjugates the

architecture of MAC to its oceanic and celestial scale. <e work of art brings the viewer this experience: “In

fact, it is not a question of observing, but of experiencing being in its immediacy.”3

A Balloon En Route to the East

Queiroga 0ies on roundness thinking. From there visions of the Archimedean point, from Hannah Arendt’s

“(...) and the Archimedean wish for a point outside the earth from which to unhinge the world”.4 In one of

the small drawings from her book, Livro do AR, she places herself in the middle of the Gordian Knot of

the “In/nity” symbol – in the center of one of the circles of a /gure 8 or of an hourglass. From the telescopic

height of a hot-air balloon, the artist sees herself or projects herself as a small 0oating body, like a passenger of

in0atable or 0uid time, part of an in0atable (un)dirigible between worlds – surrounded by the in/nite, present

within the in/nite. And she writes her thoughts there, poetically:

voo como quem morre

some

dissolve (Livro do AR)

<is is one of the most symbolic drawings of the Olhos d’água installation; it synthesizes universal and

existential indagations. Following are a series of sublime miniatures that 0oat above illuminated papers of

diMerent tones of blue, specially transformed into skin and a map of the word, as printed pages from the

artist’s books AR, MAR and DOR. We observe Eastern structures of expression in the minute attention given

to each of these drawings, and a poetics that transports us to the transtemporal micro-macro universe of the

skin tattoo or the aerial landscape on the body of the world. <e balloon appears to be en route to the ‘Orient’

intuitively absorbing or reincarnating the manifestations of a lyric Chinese aesthetic, integrating its three

perfections in the unity of art – painting, poetry and calligraphy.5 <ey are 0ights in the form of visual poems,

the big and minimal balloon – a world suspended above the destiny of the universe, 0oating drawings in the

ocean of every page.

+-

ignorar os signi!cados

desse vento

é abuso d’alma (Livro do AR)

In her gouaches, Queiroga dominates the miniature of the paper with a cosmic scale, like a lyric Chinese,

Buddhist or Taoist artist of the thirteenth century, in what is a play of aesthetic virtue not present in her

earlier works. In each painting, the image is positioned and dimensioned at the center of the paper, allowing

emptiness and wind to cross to the borders, like visual Chinese poems that veil the power of the invisible and

silence, like metaphoric games of dissolution of the dichotomies between heaven and earth; air and sea; life and

death. <e drawings become calligraphies and the verses become drawn images.

Ethics of Amor Fati – Total Present

vida, eu passo (Livro da DOR)

In this circular exhibition, Queiroga appears and reinvents herself in many ways. If on the one hand, we are

reminded of the incurable melancholy of the Fado of her Portuguese ancestry, then on the other, precisely

for the conatus Espinosa presents in his Ethics, “like the will, appetite or desire, that creates a force to renew

and inaugurate one’s existence,” 6 we share the odyssey and artistic force of Queiroga’s life. She surprises us

all by placing herself as a girl, camou0aged in each image, as a character turning to Nietzsche’s amor fati –

“Yes to life.”7 From the pain of losing her father, in her in0atables and her paintings Queiroga presents air

and sea as changes to future will. In these words and ethics the total presence are embodied, she updates

Nietzsche’s “bestowing virtue” in which, in Zarathustra, he declares it a gi= to return riches back to life8. At

the same time, she discoveres in Bachelard: “<e phenomenology of the poetic imagination allows us to

explore the being of man considered as the being of a surface, of the surface that separates the region of the

same from the region of the other.”9

quantas asas, essa dor

rota às cegas (Livro da DOR)

Museum Time Balloon – In!atable Poetics of the Real

Laboratories of Transparency

Upon entering the exhibition, the visitor is overtaken by a multi-sensorial experience of simultaneous

utterances – each becomes a passenger of this dirigible and museum-balloon, parts of a single roundness,

a 0oating body of many voices. Queiroga’s trajectory for the in0atable manifests a parallel in painting, the

great adventure of modernity, crossing the turning point of constructivism to the dematerialization of the

artistic object, to the suprasensorial experience of the environmental reality. <e artist’s re0ections on these

leaps into real space make up a system of plastic forces of becoming that we can call the existential laboratory

of transparency. <ese organic sculptures of separation of equals – of air from air, of life from life – work

re0exively in the model of the artist’s horizon experiments. <e artist is conscious of the experience of

solidarity that happens inside her chromatic bubble environments. <e future remains half-open with an

experience in the present, like the yearning of various modernist generations. Here, Queiroga also describes

the future of the twentieth century, the prospect of an existential aesthetic or total art (like un/nished

projects of Mondrian, Malevitch, El Lissitzky, Oiticica, Lygia Clark and Pape, among others) of immersion of

the “spectator-participant” like a subject organism – active and structuring – in the indivisible experience

between painting-sculpture and world.

+*

Little by little, the question posed by the artist – “where is painting? inside or outside the in%atable?” –

also comes undone in the air, while the work is 0oating, inserting a “betweenplace” that takes advantage of

the movement of the visitors-passengers, taken and taking enjoyment from the collective being, participant

and constituent in this contemporary living structure. With Olhos d’água, Queiroga breathes in biographical

memory to shape a game metaphor that enables her to break with systems and orders already fossilized in

the art, science and philosophy of the last century. It is also from the phenomenology of the imagination

or roundness that Queiroga embodies Bachelard’s vision of the “Dialectics of Outside and Inside” in her

in0atables – when you suspend a balloon as metaphor for the meaning of art and the human condition: man

is a “half-open being.” 10 From there, too, one recognizes in Olhos d’água the half-open existence of art in the

greater meaning of public experience. <us, we celebrate MAC’s architectural resonance with our intuition,

breathing and dri=ing tragedy and life in the exchange of air with landscape. Maria Cristina Ferraz11 presents

Nietzsche’s ideas about artistic power, memory and forgetting very clearly with attributes of the embodied

spirit, indissoluble from the body which is continuously liberated from what is heavy and past to live fully in

the creative state of the present, as an invention and attraction of the future. Would Queiroga be practicing her

fullest willpower and artistic power by undoing in the air her father’s airplane tragedy at sea?

ilha ao longe, perco-me

a ver mais espaços do que coisas

esse mar eu não esqueço

a alma tudo venta (Livro do MAR)

It behooves us to remember Van Gogh’s tragedy, and his speculation that “life is probably round.” 12

<e Olhos d’água installation is oriented to the formation of a unique atmosphere of diMerent 0uxes: lifedeath,

air-water, sea-cloud, and the drop in the ocean that contains the reversions between the human and

cosmic scale, micro and macro. Queiroga brings each to a place that is solitary and social in the union and

separation of life and art incorporated as coincidatio oppositorum. In the bluish penumbra that takes over

the central space of the museum, the visitor transits between poetic enigmas, videos and drawings that veil

and reveal small poems and pearls of wisdom of the tiniest existence between in/nities. Above the visitors/

passengers is the great in0atable or sphinx of the air, art and ocean, 0ying over inquiries without answers,

be they from the dominions of contemporary art critics or existence itself: where does the ocean of this

exhibition begin?

Queiroga transforms the museum into a large living organism, where her blue in0atable embodies

the respiratory organs – lungs, pneuma (soul), putting them all in the same balloon/airship. Queiroga’s

dri=ing process of intuition is expressed in a forceful manner: “this exhibition is totally loving.” If MAC

can be compared to a Greek temple, then Queiroga, as a contemporary artist, creates a transcultural and

transtemporal passage to the myth of the centaur Chiron, the injured curator who heals everybody but

himself. Queiroga oMers everyone the transformation of her personal tragedy through the renunciation of

silenced memory, for her own forgetting, by the power of art and plasticity of self.

<e artist states: “<e location of the museum is essential for this project because it is situated at the

entrance of Guanabara Bay. Symbolically read with these memories, the shattering and dissolution of the

body in the sea, fado, waiting for someone who will never arrive. It is a growing contact that I make with my

Portuguese origins… In order to dive deeply into this proposal, I had to do research about the crash and to

recently open, with my mother, /les she had not seen since the time of the crash, the newspaper articles, the

love letters they exchanged, my father’s journals, telegrams, that is, all kinds of things that allowed me to get

to know him, and I found amazing coincidences, his drawings in blue, his journals with covers in the same

blue I use, telegrams from my mother talking about blue. Little by little, I know this man with memories built

in the now, which will maybe line with some kind of membrane this huge hole I always felt in my chest.”13

+,

"#$+&

* Gaston Bachelard applies the concept of the “roundness

of this being” to this approach uniting the dialectics of

the exterior and the interior from the perspective of the

phenomonology of imagination and roundness: “(...)

suddenly we /nd ourselves entirely in the roundness of this

being, we live in the roundness of life, like a walnut that

becomes round in its shell.” BACHELARD, Gaston. A poética

do espaço. São Paulo: Martins Fontes, *;8;. p. ,.:.

, Ibid.

. Ibid. p. ,.:

7 Hannah Arendt explores the discovery of Galileu’s

telescope as a paradigmatic argument for the discovery of the

Archimedean point of view. ARENDT, Hannah. A condição

humana. Rio de Janeiro: Editora Forense, *;8*. p. ,+,.

9 Wen Fong and Alfreda Murk present the universe of

Chinese art in three virtues, <e <ree Perfections: poetry,

calligrafy and painting. Although Suzana Queiroga, in her

drawings-paintings does not add a calligraphy of ideograms

and brushstrokes like written chinese, she brings carefully

situated to each painting as part of the design. MURK,

Alfreda; FONG, Wen. Words and Images. Chinese Poetry,

Calligraphy, and Painting. New York: <e Metropolitan

Museum of Art and Princeton University Press, *;;*.

+ Adriana Belmonte Moreira draws an excellent parallel

between Nietzsche and Espinosa, from the concept of

aMection to the power to act with the conceptualization of

overall health of the body. MOREIRA, Adriana Belmonte.

Nietzsche e Espinosa: Fundamentos para uma terapêutica

dos afetos. Cadernos Espinosianos, XXIV.

: To this other ethic that says “yes to life,” Nietzsche

gives the name amor fati: “My formula for greatness in

a human being is amor fati: that one wants nothing to be

diMerent, not forward, not backward, not in all eternity.”

(EH/EH, “Por que sou tão esperto”, § *-). MOREIRA,

Adriana Belmonte. Nietzsche e Espinosa: Fundamentos

para uma terapêutica dos afetos. Cadernos Espinosianos,

XXIV.

8 Fred Evans explores Nietzsche’s concept as “the gi=

of giving virtues or the gi=-giving virtue” – as a “a virtue

ethics” of the multivoiced body: “<e gi=-giving virtue…

forcing all things into yourself that they may 0ow back

out of your well as the gi=s of your love.” EVANS, Fred.

<e Multivoiced Body. Society and communication in

the age of diversity. New York: Columbia University Press,

,--;. p.*;8.

; BACHELARD, Gaston. Op. cit. p. ,,7.

*- Ibid.

** FERRAZ, Maria Cristina. Nietzsche: esquecimento

como atividade. Cadernos Nietzsche :, p. ,:-7-, *;;;.

*, Bachelard, in )e Phenomenology of Roundness cites

Van Gogh: “life is probably round” (p. ,.,).

13 Suzana Queiroga in interview with Paulo Aureliano

da Mata. Performatus. Ano 1. n. 6. Set. 2013.

Love and Art are fundamental feelings for the transformation of modern and contemporary canons. With

immense gratitude we honor the courage or conatus (force and resistance of life) that surrounds this exhibition.

It re0ects an existential and spiritual turning point of the artist, but also of the twentieth century into the

twenty-/rst, exteriorizing the accumulation and consolidation of various centuries at once. What is at play

is not a plot or trauma of private life, but a transmutation or overcoming of dichotomies between life-death,

body and soul (pneuma), as the forgotten basis of public meaning for the artistic event in the world. <us, this

exhibition also heals the museum-memory, so that it can be a place of future memories, transits and 0uxes of

collective artistic power.