There is a thread that doesn’t tear

15/4/2014

 

To live, to sew bonding strings, curl up memory threads so the existence is less craving for an ongoing hereafter, for another texture of many interims. The thread that in its unrolling composes the sensitive history of the time woven with our desires, with the search for images that can draw us, with symbols that we erect within the swirl of the time.

To this end it makes necessary more than living life but to weave it. Weave life implies to notice, as Del Pilar Sallum shows us, that “there is a thread that doesn’t tear” in our core, in the marsh fire of our existence in the Cosmos.

The thread woven by the hands and sensibility of Del Pilar is gifted with the ability of combining opposites; of uniting the disparate and amalgamate different kinds in an ode to acquaintanceship and to dialectic. The brass conforms itself in the seed: at the same time it sensually dresses them, also sterilizes it. But life is, mostly, the belief in symbols. And from such communion of materials emerges, to infinite, the intensity of the form that germinates everything. Poetry of paradoxes. Between the perpetual – the sculptural – and the inextricable organism’s failure – the seed – lays life’s pulse, the thread that doesn’t tear. 

In Greek mythology, Ariadne’s thread guides Theseus so he can get in and out of the maze, in an inside journey of self-knowledge. The Minotaur, who is actually a monster, who lives inside the maze, is in fact a metaphor for fears, doubts and concerns ravaging us.

Del Pilar notices the thread’s expansion of Ariadne’s thread in the folds of the “ongoing flow” of the sheet on the bed, in the sobs of her "discontinuous movements" and "immanent time" of her drawings that dare to occupy every space voraciously.

When the artist recovers the laces of the clothes of many women who have succeeded herself in her family line, she builds a maze of nostalgias and references in which she finds a powerful path to self-discover. A self-referent course from which is left to us intense mimicked vestiges, here universalized, in these delicate and complex images that fuse photography with drawing. 

From the laces once woven, now are juxtaposed the lines of an "intrusive design" meticulous, seductive in their waywardness, obsessive in its impulsive and expansive creation. The lace turned into photographs, is imaginary extended through the drawings to the present time. Its webs no longer follow the rules of the artisan manual. Activated from the artist’s inner mazes, they claim their time-space re-sized by the thread-family. That which doesn’t tears inside us, follows us, in the poetics, sends his signs, oblivious to the chronological time that consumes everything. Only the works of art can touch the idea of the sacred and give contours, even if hopelessly inaccurate, to our daydreams of eternity.

 

Eder Chiodetto