Ópera Natural

Natural Opera

a lightning bolt strikes the old Jequitibá tree that falls the painting

studio

Ereshkigal plays the flute in the deep waters of the underworld

Pandora enters the woodskissed by a serpent

but no one can explain her sudden and complete

disappearance like a sacrifice

on the altar of some lunar goddess

a lightning bolt strikes The Tower throwing leopards to the ground

and i follow them

down below i find trees and mud i find myself and my  in silence

my body as

a temporary space a displacement built with care

i take my brush and paint white birds the tears flow

with linseed oil

i descend each day more and more getting closer to the waning moon

i see flying fish birds that fall but won’t die my flight finds no landing

I find critters monkeys, capybaras, tarantulas, fireflies and I am

woman a stranger most of time

a species under self-examination nomadic heading toward

the definitive end of what is not a mystery

and the truth is transparent the one who comes and goes is not the one

who goes but the one who comes

and i am the one who’s coming but i am always going to look into the

mythologic eyes

of now

determined to be stranger cause it is who i am when i’m away i

recognize my alien face

barefoot out there painting in the woods without gloves without shoes

without a home

i don’t want a home nor to get marry there is always paint under the nails of my hand

you may think I’m a pig

and i may as well be i can be whatever what i am and what i will be
is

alive

for it is always

other people who die says the grave epitaph of the Duchamps in

Rouen i think a lot about it

and venture away to witness the mighty night

Sardenberg is pleased to introduce Camile Sproesser’s new exhibition, Natural Opera, her fourth in the gallery.

Her work is characterized by the articulation of natural signs also found in symbolic systems parallel to psychology and metaphysics, such as alchemy, astrology and tarot, among others, as we will see later, with contemporary imagery, calling into question the senses of purity of ancestry.

What Camile Sproesser brings from the past as images, in the form of animals, landscapes, anthropomorphic figures and archetypes of magical symbolism deciphered mainly by Carl Jung, is mixed and filtered by references from the tropics through the unconscious and incorporated into the present, creating a multiple and fluid identity. It may seem hermetic and obscure, but the result is a joy to explore the field of nature and culture, which generously invites the epic imagination to express itself as a natural opera, an idea which, incidentally, gives the exhibition its title.

Notably, the paintings presented are on Jute, a plant that gives rise to the natural fiber fabric which, according to the most recent archaeological evidence, originated in the Hindu region around 4,000 years ago. Its history stretches from the British Empire’s domination of the textile trade in the 19th Century, to the Japanese colony introducing it to Brazil at the beginning of the last century, later becoming one of the forms of sustenance for the riverside populations of the Amazon.

With this temporal and historical arc that unites East and West, colonial history and the formation of Brazilian identity, the artist impregnates this natural fiber with archetypal images, painted with the lyricism that takes us back to a Henri Rousseau, we see The Tower and the reinterpretation with leopards instead of the men who fall from the tower, the magic of the numeral three of the Holy Trinity and more remote figures such as Hermes Trismegistus, which make up the works where birds in the landscape represent earth, water and air and fantastic animals, starting with a horse, multiply in an anthropomorphic way from 1 to 3 beings in Horse Crossing the Underworld, Double Aries and Mermaid. Finally, possible riverine myths, such as Yara, are transformed into the figure of the goddess of the underworld from the Sumerian mythology of Mesopotamia from the third millennium BC, in the monumental work Ereshkigal Playing the Flute.

This brings us back to anthropophagic memories. However, the most intriguing thing about Camile Sproesser’s work is precisely her ability to process ancestry like a great sponge of everything that affects her in a mystical and contemporary way. Far beyond a single linear story to be told, she induces us into a kind of anthropomorphism of the imagination and thus never stops questioning being.