Vagalumes no deserto
curated by Diego Bragà

​

Ailton Krenak says that when you feel that the sky is getting too low, just push it and breathe. The curatorial text begins like this: the sky has fallen, the Sahara storm has hit us and we continue to breathe.

When Martîm's invitation to “cure” his second solo exhibition in Lisbon came up, he had gone through a traumatic experience, after suffering two pneumothoraxes, and had just left the hospital. So I decided to rescue the original idea of curatorship, which is to care. The premises were: reviewing his previous work, dialoguing, understanding his desires and thinking about something that would make sense to him after this new beginning. In the original idea: new and unexhibited paintings, painting as the protagonist, perhaps objects, something that could breathe in time while recovering.

In the hospital, surrounded by people in the field of healing, Martîm felt alone. It was the first time that Martîm became aware that such collective and crowded spaces can awaken a fundamental loneliness and feelings of emotional vulnerability. I proposed him to open his archive of materials and find in it those spaces of solitude experienced in the collective. We opened his photo archive and a photo of a Catholic procession on the island of Madeira caught my attention – this image would be the starting point… An image that activates a performative and ritualistic space in an affective memory of childhood. Characters who are there with a very concrete and collective (and celebratory) purpose, even if their eyes are completely absent from that action.

As a queer child being completely alone in a collective space is an everyday occurrence; life has trained me for this solitude. However, for Martîm, a cisgender man, he could use the power of invisibility acquired by his normative gender expression as a means of survival anywhere. He survived the traditional rites - I didn't - but in him this issue collides in more subtle places and with a masked violence in the framing traditions of his places of origin. To go unnoticed and for that very reason to have to participate (and to some extent ‘to participate’ is to agree with), is to experience this violence of normative rituals that can be perverse for children who are placed by their parents - who were also subject to this before - in the institutions and architectures that harbour systems of domination. Michel Foucault describes this well. But just by giving the plural of mother (mãe) and father (pai) to ‘pais’ (parents in Portuguese) we sign a contract of agreement with the patriarchal system. Whereas I could never enter a space without being noticed, due to having come from a more atypical ancestry, he was able to observe and experience from within, like a competent spy or participant. I understand this as power and not as alienation. We established an archaeological game between us: finding the treasure that is underneath the grains of sand.

There is no desire for therapy here, but there is a desire for repair and purge (like the medieval Carnivals described by Mikhail Bakhtin), translated into a plastic expression that expands to an audience that can interact sensorially with this exhibition. It is an exercise in freedom and release from rigid and square experiences, translated into pictorial squares and archaeological actions.

Through the choice of colors, formats, materials (sand from the Sahara desert, ceramics and biodegradable glitter) and their possible placements, Martîm tries to restore the notion of belonging, questioning (and welcoming) the experiences of other men who passed for ‘normal’ and got lost in some desert.
The act of using painting mainly as a means of expression is just a portal to transpose and transmute learning, challenging Hélio Oiticica's statement that painting is dead. Also because in Martîm, painting is what really kills. It was an intoxication by oil paint that gave rise to the pneumothorax. The word pneumothorax seems as toxic as a luminescent word spoken by a witch who is saved from the fire of the Inquisition. Here the word means healing. The paint is now acrylic. And he already had surgery. And these are the versions of “salvation” in the light of painting in lonely times.

The body of work and the body of the artist. Without the second, there isn’t the first. The body of work is the artist's body. And this must be thought of in curatorships and by the art market. Changing the focus, not losing the importance of the work, even if it’s less important than health itself. As Lygia Clark said, the house is the body.

​

Diego Bragà, 2023

​