Tempotempoesia or who remembers the artwork's memories

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Pentiment is that of the painting that the painter hid and time unveiled. A word similar to sentiment, but comes from repenting, is the painting’s memory. It is what the painting has been, before culminating into artwork, a term created by museologists and conservators of works by the great Italian masters. In this curatorial project, Antonio Bokel researches what happens when, after the death of painting, contemporary artists appropriate the pentiment as a purpose rather than a consequence.

The works of Carolina Kasting, Clarice Rosadas, and Guilherme Borsatto do not need time to reveal their choices. They use the textures of time to speak of the estate left by the process(es) of becoming and living. Here, memory is not either present or past: it is passage. In their hands, it does not expose that which we try to forget but becomes a registration of what makes permanence. Thought, feeling, and body; memory is, here, poetry alive.

 

It is in shuffling, decaying and rotting that the time poetry is written. Be it through mold, wrinkle or stain, the artist’s creative gesture is analogous to time’s creative gesture, that on the surface prints its passage and transforms what was in what is. Everything that will be, today is. In the domain of tempotempoesia, artist’s work as spiders who adorn what is forgotten with webs, woven so that nothing goes through. Also subjugated to the ravages of time, their web-works do not attempt to crystalize the present to make it perennial, but to, as in a photograph, register the process of becoming memory.

 

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Giovana Macedo
2023