PT / EN
written in the occasion of the exhibition
Petisco
October 07th to November 4th 2023, Projeto Vênus, São Paulo, SPby Leonardo Stockler
We know Nature both for its strengths and for its fruits. And if we ever want to imagine a different Nature, perhaps we should start by thinking through these two ideas.
It's true that Stephanie Lucchese's works inhabit an all encompassing Nature. We can contemplate it through her images, which are scenes of crepuscular biology. Its unusual fruits are the ingredients of an endless banquet in which this imagined vegetation celebrates itself – profane made sacred without any profanation.
Nature is credible, it has its own rules. If the artist's greatest interest still lies in fiction, it's because fiction serves as a gateway to more real places. Mythical time, the pleasure of nostalgia, entering an ecosystem according to the logic that distinguishes it from other horizons, and finding there another garden of delights – in order to record this landscape, it may need to create a religion of its own.
Nature communicates, as narratives emerge from one same source – we can see their outlines at a glance, in traces that extend from one scene to the next, and which we try to grasp as an ongoing process of individuation, as if this banquet was still in its puerperal stages, without an established form.
That's why we don't see faces. The bodies, however, continue to express themselves – it's just that the faces are not on the heads. What is their vocabulary? The framing of these figures cannot be called complete. Their axles aren’t absolute. The inconclusiveness of their forms is subtle. We are able to discern them when they are frozen by the light – with a delicate almost theatrical artificiality. When the light is turned off, Nature goes back to celebrating itself, devouring its own fruits.
Travelers' stories, naturalist catalogs, mythologies and alternative timelines all serve as reference for the research and development of the artist’s themes. None of these fruits exist in our terrestrial encyclopedias. Their nodes and flesh, their pulp and juiciness are original expressions, like alternative combinations of one primary imagined membrane to which all the branches of evolution go back – including those that don't exist. They are visions of silhouettes that, if captured by sight, could give rise to a single mosaic – a religion made up almost entirely of images sought out by its devotees already in their own indentations.
In their mythology and doctrine, in defense of an internal verisimilitude, certain objects and forms are banned: sneakers, watches and cell phones are some examples of items that will never be seen in her landscapes. The immanentization of the otherworld is an act of magical materialization – and one must not bring into this world that of which is not of one’s interest. Everything here is moving towards repetition in an order outside of time, and a mythological autophagy is inescapable. Is this how one sacralizes form?
The creation of another world also involves a certain escape – one must traverse another plane. The poetic power that communicates another vitality ends up opening up another space – an escape inwards. There, in the cavity that opened up, are we contemplating a new planet or just a version of the one we're already on? Do artists paint what they want to see? It is still necessary to preserve a certain power of suggestion, to hide certain angles of its content.
In a couple of swings, a god designed the dimensions that would accommodate our entire experience. What was the moment from which his temple was built? The characters on these canvases – the fruit of an ever fruitful season – flaunt themselves to one another as if completely unaware of the intentions of the demiurge who sculpted their forms and their matter. From where we are, we try to discern an essence that asks to be contemplated. It doesn't hide under a metaphysical background. Its substance is explicit – and yet impossible to capture. There is nothing beyond the surface.
Everything arrived to its current form through a long process of shapening in which each thing is fitted together. But what are the gestures we want to see them enact? Nothing is uncomfortable. Each involuntary pose captured here has its own brilliance. The body is an action traced – and from where to where? Colors help delineate the true extent of each realm. Death hides itself, and it always does so with a certain elegance.
There is a mutual insinuation game between the natural and artificial.
In which cavity of the body does the soul continues to hide?
Gentle hands drew on a canvas what the mind conceived: the transfer of will implicit in the act ends up animating the inanimate.
In the progress of technique, the greatest celebration of our competence as craftsmen is the creation of something that distracts us.
Imagination is an extension of this world into another.
There is an invisible color within all the others.
The taste of taste, the smell of smell, the sound of sound; reality is based on an ongoing act of perception, but there is something in the perceiver that cannot be understood head-on.
What kind of awareness seems to try to emerge from the depths of this movement?
Eroticism is a virtue of forms.
What is ephemeral tends to expand before it’s subtracted by time.
In the white void of a canvas that awaits you, each gesture is a creative act against entropy; the odds diminish as each stroke is executed.
The body walks towards a fruit and the sense of taste in an invention of the appetite.
What seed is capable of fertilizing an imaginary body?
An artist's certainty: the mind is always heavy with something greater than itself. It serves as a passageway for something that continually places itself in the world, individual after individual, pushing creation ever forward, towards new places.
Nature puts on a costume appropriate to its own time. At no instant is it really dead. Energy is an update of condition.
Its characters behave as if, on the other side of the screen, there was a mirror – there where the setting sun recognizes no face, and you can only reach it by following the directions of strange invaginated fabrics.
If there is no north, there is an even further south where semi-erotic vegetation spreads over a warm ground that can no longer be seen.
Each fruit gives rise to a new season: childhood disappears between Summer and Spring.
Eternity is the frozen movement; the instant is the promise of its unfolding.
In which species did charm and elegance first insinuate themselves? For some reason, the affectation of style lingered in the human species, but already seemed to want to germinate in the mineral world.
Meditate about the following theme: a type of taste that doesn't exist, a color that doesn't exist, or a sound that doesn't exist.
The corollary of this reinvented nature is this: the center of its food chain is dispersed, like a circle that won't close.
The silent priesthood of the leaves; the mysterious loyalty of the shadow.
Desire is the true artisan of matter.
The fleeting ripeness of a food; in the light of geological time, the feast of the senses is an anonymous banquet and the guests have the memory of their former kings between their teeth.
Letting yourself be contemplated – where does such permission come from?
The relationship between embellishment and waste – nature's tendency is to preserve its successful experiments.
What is hidden and what asks to be seen – what language operates between the borders of these realms?
The figuration of a digestive process that tends towards the infinite, and the mixture between the nourishing raw material and the residues of the craft.
Leonardo Stockler