FERNANDA CHIECO – TEXTS A mini essay for Fernanda Chieco by Slavka Sverakova, White Cottage, Wednesday, 14 March 2007 FERNANDA CHIECO by SLAVKA SVERAKOVA Mute as Leonardos mute poetry Chiecos drawings tell stories. Also but not just. A paradox constructed between her inventive intention, which is suggested by the elaborate titles, and the composition harvests the freefalling relationships and inconsistency of scale, absence of closure as well as two different levels of representation. In one, the outline defines a human body respectful of the anatomy and proportions, in the other, the illusion of the three ‐ dimensional form, be it strawberry or a badger, is worked in full colour. Chieco makes drawings in series connected by a theme that is also an event. I shall focus on two of her seventeen series only: Angelus Domini, 2007, and The Banquet, 2006. The series, Angelus Domini, so far five out of planned six drawings, received its inspiration from an image of people stopping for a prayer, which the artist saw on the television in Dublin. Each drawing is composed of twelve figures; a number that may be either completely arbitrary or harbouring resonances of cultural codes, like twelve apostles, twelve months in a year, twelve hours as the exact cyclically re‐occurring share between day and night, or twelve angry men in a film about truth, honour and justice In each image the men and women are engaged in one activity as described in the caption: watching the badger, smoking the salmon, catching fleas from the deer, licking woodcocks and spreading jam on the seal. The figures are rendered in a delicate outline in a variety of positions ranging from frontal standing nude to crouching and reclining (almost) disinterested bodies. I say bodies and not persons for a simple reason: the selected level of abstraction insists on minimal life, and even that is frozen in a given moment. The bodies are frozen in time, however, the eyes are still gazing at us with a force of curiosity and/or accusation. As if observed from H. Bosch, there are unexpected knots of bodies, mostly in the form of the Y cross. Three bodies connect to create an illusion of the only movement in the composition, like a windmill standing still for a second between rotations. Condemned to never rotate they stay still exuding the denied energy for an observant eye to see. The objects, like badger, salmon, fleas, woodcocks and the seal are drawn in full colour subservient to a scientific correctness. The colour accentuates details like the red tongues, the jam dripping onto and from various orifices and parts of anatomy, the pipes are held by unexpected parts of the bodies. In its decline away from the purposeful Angelus Domini moves in between the ordinary and the spiritual. The figures are thus connected by shared fate. However, that is only one story. Underneath, there is another, and may be some more. The one I became aware of connects to the ideas of freedom and truth that would question obedience and submission dominant over the first story. And what better myth it evokes than that of the cave in Platos Republic. Like his prisoners Chiecos persons are chained to a wall. The wall is the empty background of the paper onto which the elegant outlines incise the naked bodies. There is no actual chain; the bodies are chained by their background becoming their bodies, inside the outlines. The male and female gender is clearly but minimally characterised, all comfortable in what appears as a warm daylight. And no they are not either inside or outside. They are in both simultaneously; my perception oscillates between one and the other at a whim. If an image taxes a sense with that degree of uncertainty and still manages to make it feel good it focuses my attention on the idea of consciousness, or more accurately the phenomenology of consciousness (in some translations phenomenology of mind). Hegel proposes a loop: a move from sensual experience to spiritual experience and back again to sense experience. I think, this is the concept Chieco is addressing in these drawings. She allows the people in her images to know themselves ( to a degree) but not necessarily one another. Obedient to whatever task she chose for them they also obey to stop instantly. Alive and not moving, not breathing even, they still posses energy of inner life. Some of their poses reflect classical art, some relate to poses modern models assume in the plentiful media of the present. These gentle citations mediate the aesthetic experience of the sublime, a rare occurrence in contemporary art practice. The sublime in these drawings is a perfect embodiment of Kants dialectic between security and helplessness. (Critique of Judgement, Book II, Part 1) That ambivalent mode of being contains loss and salvation, acquiescence and conflict, servility and freedom. The question What would guarantee an absolute and systematic protection for our existence has no answer. The approximations of an illusion that expels the risks of being in the world by moving ones consciousness above finite existence are anchored to sharp conjunctions of contrasts in an eternally peaceful time and place. Neither time nor place is given concrete characteristics, thus both stay unobtainable, or obtainable through freewheeling imagination. The relief enjoyed after finding a refuge or unconditional security, say, of a regular meal, becomes real, yet the world as a permanent source of insecurity can never be mastered. As a compositional principle, the oxymoron appears to me as a dominant guide to what goes in each image also in The Banquet, 2006, a series made up by eight drawings filled with eight or six figures, once they are nine of them, and connected by a menu in an expensive French restaurant (not necessarily in France). The eight courses with carefully selected wine described in French evoke a culture of eating sponsored by the rich. Each one is perfect, beautifully combined ingredients illustrate high craft of preparation of meals. Food, in the titles of these drawings, is presented as the chief of all things, the universal good, nourishment for body and mind, capable of creating daily health and happiness. The images themselves do nothing of the kind. The whole menu is presented in a public toilet of a Victorian design, each meal accompanied by different detail: oysters with Don Perignon are sited at the open door, entrée under an open window, pasta is placed in a washbasin, fish under a shower, lamb next to a bath tub, cheese and baguette next to a toilet and chocolate with cherries in front of a mirror. The poses of the figures are less hieratic and less obedient than in the Angelus. Chieco also allows, either by design or oversight, rapid conflicts of different scales, a small figure crouches near, what appears, a giant. One famous example of this strategy is Grunewalds Mary Magdalene under the crucified Christ in the Isenheim altarpiece (1517). There she resonates the feeling of anguish. Anguish differs from fear by pertaining to an individual who has been isolated from a significant being. Chieco almost cancels that possibility by connecting all the individuals with visible lines. Look closely and the connections are not doing their job. They are together as complete strangers, without togetherness. The high class menu and the public toilet form one of many superb oxymoron tropes invented by Chieco for The Banquet. Going along with the evocative force of such connections, it is pertinent to think of the Symposium as a classical Greek equivalent. Plato in his take on this has an interesting beginning: Socrates gives his place to another person and disappears; Agathon, the host, sends messengers to call him back without success. They start eating the food with an explicit regret at Socratess absence. Much later Socrates returns and is asked to sit near Agathon, so that I may touch you and have the benefit of that wise thought which came into your mind. As if the food was just a pretext for a different nourishment. In The Banquet, there are only two persons clearly outside, both partly detached from the groups who a busy connecting, touching, pouring etc. The groups virtuosity in fulfilling the task seems effortless, forging a kind of background noise from which significant articulations in colour derive. The unusual modulations of food and drink are contaminating the wine vignettes, and precise definitions of fruit, meat, cheese, pasta etc. The precise closures insist on normality of these events, the unusual connections undermine that view. The authentic life (Heidegger) is turned into a spectacle. It may be of interest that the idea of spectacle received similar treatment by Heidegger and St Augustin as a degraded love of knowledge. Modern culture differs the search for knowledge is good. Chieco degrades the culinary culture by enveloping it with the culture of waste forging, in my view, a stream of wisdom about the convergence of things in undifferentiated closeness. Grasped by opinion and sense perception the physical world comes to be and passes away (Plato, Timaeus, Part I). Passionate and philosophical these drawings are in a manner preferred by Plato in Timaeus: to be intelligible to the viewer and in the fullest accord with the artists intention. By leaving each open ended Chieco wrestles them from that duality and offers them freedom to go to a symposium of curious minds. GOETHE‐INSTITUT BRASILIEN, Studio Visits BLOG, January 2011 / http://blog.goethe.de/studiovisits/plugin/tag/fernanda+chieco FLYCATCHERS, TONGUES, AND SUCKING RED LIGHT: ENTERING A PARALLEL WORLD DURING A STUDIO VISIT WITH FERNANDA CHIECO By STEFANIE HESSLER It is Friday afternoon, 5 pm. I am meeting Fernanda Chieco at her studio. She has set up her working space at her apartment, a clean‐cut place dominated by simple shapes and a functional, clear design. I came across Fernandas work at her gallery Leme in Sao Paulo, where I saw the piece The anteater died under the bridge as soon as the wolf ate the giraffes cherry (2008) of the series Battle Fields. Looking like a war zone between movement and coming to a rest, the drawing is inhabited by simple‐lined naked figures who execute their actions individually, following their own destinations and absorbed in their own world of thought. In the midst of the scene stands a giraffe‐
headed man who is urinating on a person cowering before him. The other figures are hit by cherries, suffering, apathetic, but all seemingly emotionless. Intrigued by this scene entirely following its own logic, I contacted Fernanda for a studio visit. While we have coffee in her kitchen, she tells me about her work, her time studying at Goldsmiths College in London and her residencies in Bristol, UK and Ballinskelligs, Ireland. Fernanda Chieco explains that she is interested in the functionality of things and the limitations reality imposes on us. Finding more freedom in drawing that offers possibilities, which in real life could not be implemented, the figures and constellations in her pieces also create doubts of whether they could really exist. Her compositions are arranged in a manner that remind of the large‐sized mural paintings and frescoes in Italian Renaissance churches. The people in her drawings are connected in an elaborated system, which nevertheless does not allow for any direct communication between them. Tongues, which in Fernandas narratives take on the role of the source of life, connect the people by coming out from and entering their mouths and anuses. Fernanda invented an own logic and system of rules for the universe she has created and that obeys her decisions. She has invented a world in which the tongue ‐ as sticky as a flycatcher, lending its name to another series of works of which Lizard watering the moss (2009) forms part ‐ can grow to an infinite length. In a question / answer section on her website, she explains the functioning of the tongue: It is the essential organ for the figures, whereby they can connect to other individuals. Those who do not possess a mouth or other way for the tongue to leave the body, have swollen bellies with rolled up tongue trapped inside of them. When a person dies, the tongue leaves the body and looks for another humans or animals tongue to connect to in order to survive. While the people in Fernandas images seem to mechanically and almost apathetically follow a task that the artist has given them, they neither feel pleasure nor pain, behaving like the artists instruments. Seemingly posing and of perfect body shape, they act as if they knew that they are being watched. Without any architectural reference or background, the figures are set in a non‐space, impossible to define. The representation of this idea of a self‐containing scheme with its own set of rules, gains strength through the objectivity‐adding black and white shades of the drawings that do not allow for any marginal doubt about the systems truthfulness and functioning. Seemingly emotionless and due to the pure lines that form their silhouettes, the figures allude to firmness and veracity in this world between dream and nightmare. People whose heads are replaced by those of a lama, frog or lizard, mingle with the other figures and are placed into the centre of the images. Only those details that enter the closed system from the outside and give a work its title, such as the giraffe in the work described above, are coloured. In Fernandas participatory installation Red light suction device (RELISUC) (2005), participants sit down in futuristic armchairs, naked like the people in her drawings, and suck in red light through optical fibre. Alluding to the tongues in the drawings, people are connected through the pipes, seemingly taking up red light into their organisms. Fernanda explains that for her, peoples roles in social environments is a main subject of interest, rather than gender roles ‐ what might seem likely when looking at her drawings first. The objects that take over the humans and execute a certain control over their bodies become the metaphor for a criticism of our supposedly free will. Instead, Fernanda addresses issues of control, consumerism and connections we might not be aware of. In her studio, she is currently working on a large‐sized piece on which an elephants head is starting to take form. Allowing for more colours to enter her world, Fernanda continues with the creation of this phantasmatic universe between scientific research and her own concepts. ARTFORUM international, nov2009, XLVIII, no.3, p253 FERNANDA CHIECO By Katia Canton translated from Portuguese by Clifford E. Landers Fernanda Chieco, a graduate of the University of São Paulo and Goldsmiths' College in London, is among the most promising of Brazil's new generation of artists. Her works are bizarre narratives of the body, strange stories that seem to echo the absurdity of human life. While her first pieces were sculptural objects, suggesting bodies whose openings were connected by tubes, conduits, and passages, soon her work with objects gave way to drawing, a medium in which, in her view, everything is possible. Her first large‐scale drawing was Tabvla Prima, 2003, an enormous piece more than twenty‐six feet in length depicting instruments invented to connect people. Chieco is still thinking about bodies and their connections, as one saw in her recent show, "Os Catamoscas" (The Flycatchers). Using the techniques that have become her hallmark, the artist draws human and animal figures with clean, spare, graphite lines and uses color only for interstitial elements. Her new work focuses on the tongue as a means of interaction. And Chieco's tongues are quite singular. At the gallery entrance, a sculptural drawing, Catando Moscas (Catching Fies; all works 2009), laid flat on an elongated plinth, served as an introduction to the atmosphere of strangeness: Two croughing people, a man and a woman, are united by a flesh colored tongue more than thirty feet long. The artist explains that the tongue is the most powerful muscle of the body and as sticky as a flycatcher. In Chieco's alternate world, the tongue grows ad infinitum, connecting people and animals; if cut in two, tongues double their ability to connect bodies. Her figures may lack mouths, in which case they have tongues emerging from their anuses. If the anus, in turn, is blocked up, their bellies well, looking pregnant, full of coiled tongues. The installation in the gallery was strangely clear and systematic, as if offering a scientific demonstration of some esoteric research on flycatchers. Each wall of the gallery's main space displayed four drawings featuring human bodies with animal heads and, of course, elongated tongues. The bodies are drawn with graphite pencil; the only color lies in the tongues and the heads of som animals, interacting with them. To color the tongues, the artist used watercolor for the first time, relating the fluid medium to the organ's wetness. One drawing, Umedecendo a pele do sapo (Moistening the Frog's Skin), shows a group of people with intertwined tongues above the body of a frog; they are keeping it wer, since the frog is accustomed to living near water. In another, Prea levita em campo magnetico lingual (Guinea Pig Levitates in Lingual Magnetic Field), eight people join their long tongues to form a field in which a guinea pig floats. Estimulacao cerebral profunda do peixe bicefalo (Deep Brain Stimulation of the Bicephalic Fish) portrays a two‐headed fish‐person performing a yoga headstand, supported by the network of tongues formed by the people around him. In these curious, often grotesque fables, presented with refined technique and delicate line, Chieco redeems the power of the absurd.