Materic Threads
1/6/1996

 

 

The recent  works by Del Pilar Sallum keep a pendulat shock between the energy of the material and the movement. It first engages itself in acumulating more and more material, that is, metallic threads thickly wound around her hands, until it gets to a degree of rigidity and potencialized saturation, so as to propose to the material that it gets smooth, when the threads start a process of unfoldings, when they are in part unrolled. At an exact point of dislocation of 

tension, this distension of the threads redraw lines in the space that permit the objects to have a lacerating expansion. They are bodies, they are bolls, they are volumes that dilate and shred, even when they are recognizable. They win material lightness, lightness added by metallic iridescence made more volatile, but they do not forget the pain that engendered them. The internal niches emerge to the look  in the tridimensional space that lets us see marks and scars, also stricken in the photograph register of the swollen hands that have suffered the immobilizing contention of the cable that have envolved them. Now free, these hands, that “have washed the crystals in the dark” as in the poem by Borges, had printed sensual and deep marks of symbolic density, when they rewrite on the skin the metaphors of a history of femininity.

 

 

Stella Teixeira de Barros