Between air and water

Paulo Sergio Duarte

The vertical extension of these paintings of Daisy Xavier grows and involves us, going far way beyond our own body. The canvases are big, but not enormous, it is as if there were a perfect adjustment between the scale of the painting and the enlargement of these fragments. The painting brings us in a direct allusion to the body and not to a scenery, it makes us stand still, but doesn’t demand standing in attention, before that, it requests us movement, it wants us to get close of the  material details of its surface and soon requests us the due distance so we can look at it in the whole and in this back-and-forth movement we find one of its secrets. These movements are, also,  this outer part in which without it doesn’t show itself. But it is not that movement who always arises in every big canvas, that one that forces us in order to see the whole, the back and forth movements to notice the details. It’s about an inner movement into the work which is urged to the person that observes, a movement which utters and gets into our body. It’s a different movement because we are not in the validity of totalities as in the great canvases in history or even in the modern tributary abstractions of a belief in Gestalt psychology, but fragments which we see all together but not in the Whole. These huge fragments are details of a painting which dooms itself to never be concluded and not even allowing to invoke this illusion .

Very close or far from the canvases I’m always before ghosts in the very strict psychoanalytical sense of meaning which materialize themselves visually. This last assertion  is dangerous and therefore demands corrections. The painting is far away from any surrealistic  illustration of oneiric fantasies or even the use of associative technique. If there is a free association here, it will always be in this side of the canvas, amongst  the fruition of who contemplates them, not only in its constitution. These paintings are, on the contrary, the manifest  of extreme conscience  of always up dated character, incomplete and illusive of  conscience itself. However, why they have to exist on a form that only invokes fossils, remains of a past time? Why Daisy insists that the living memory of the present cannot exist without this condition of, in the same moment that it is done to a always not perfect preterit , disfigured  by the desires and repression of what was not possible to return to conscience. The painting, therefore deviates of the realistic illusion  or any ideal form and wants, even more distance of the world of certaint and precision  which was established as the regime of truth of our time. However, this denial turns back on the world just like it is offered to us in the valid forms, it rebuilds the world in the ghost presence of the body, in the possible image after these consecutive refusals. And it appears to us as frights and ruins, like hands that touch themselves literally out of the body and exposed encephalic masses.

The amphibian being of Daisy’s thematic seems not to belong to earth, it stands between liquid and aerial, between air and water, between the blue of the sky and the green of the ocean. It doesn’t want the steady rest of a dry soil, not even the swampy area and the uncertain mud of the bound. It prefers the fluid area where the figures and things will be settled without the firmness of a ground, where the surface of the canvas unfolds in materials almost transparent like the threads that make recipients which capture the air without imprisoning it, utter the emptiness without insisting in its permanence, but remind it as a moment of one state of the being. Sometimes, the canvases are made in parts and assembled with unlike parts that meet and fit, accepting that the possible painting can’t be continuos and homogeneous, but the result of a construction which follows no outer engineering with its rules a priori . Here, emerges a poetic memory of the body, but not from the visible body, frontal, which I catch a glimpse in the mirror, either this visionary body which confronts the canvases, but a dynamic body which I catch for a moment  and soon loosens in imaginary. Of these pieces, which, not on purpose, I put all together and are part of me and pictures me better than photographs 3x4 of the bureaucratic documents of my outer identity, come this other one, which I should never be concluded , which I make and remake,  so many times regardless my will and find it in these canvases that also make and remake by the work of the painter, by the layers of paint, by the assembling of patch work, by objects installed, registration of an outer world that come to live in this shelter. Daisy Xavier’s painting doesn’t impose us strategies, when it tries to give us back the memory of the body, but reminds that it is also memory of the art. Therefore it swings, between figure and abstraction, between determination and indeterminateness, between plane and volume, between random and arbitrary construction. In this other memory, courageous, it stays alone, doesn’t look for likeness, references or citations. It just wants to be the painting of Daisy Xavier.