Contemporary  Heritages
1/2/1997

 

As in Leonilson, the work by Del Pilar Sallum (São Paulo, 1952) shows a deep nearly embarrassing intimacy. Her work is  a literary extension of her own body.The artist welds metallic threads, compulsive and thickly, around parts of her hands and fingers. Therefore, they become casts, frames, supports. Finally, they become the past.The threads which  create the sculpture-object are empty and caste. They speak about the void, the loneliness and of time past.

Enveloping lots of threads around her members the artist leads us the bandages which are applied on sick bodies and the same time recalls the feminine activity of knitting, of working with woolen skeins.In the body of Del Pilar Sallum there is also disintegration, an overcoming of its physicality If each sculptured volume requires a physical discomfort later it is formed by the very lack of the body which produced it. Then they becomes  the repository of memories, niches, nests of physical memory.

 

Katia Canton