The fragility of the visible

The exhibition as a form of research is the motto of HElena Valsecchi’s exhibition “L’Invisibile”, where everything is possible and uncertain, but materialised as a primary process, the beginning, where the exhibition is constructed as a laboratory experiment and its presentation in the Analytical Chemistry Laboratory leads to its public visibility. “Since our perception of reality depends entirely on appearance, and therefore on the existence of a public sphere in which things can emerge from the darkness of sheltered existence, even the half-light that illuminates our private and intimate lives derives, in the final analysis, from the much more intense light of the public sphere.”¹ The artist’s searching stance in relation to research and reasoning is perceptible, resulting in an absolute critique devoid of any previously conditioned analysis.

The exhibition’s narrative establishes contact with the invisible and the possibility of intersecting other perceptive manifestations. To quote the artist, “the invisible is something that exists and cannot be seen. But the very existence of a concept of invisible testifies to the importance of certain aspects that, although not visible, do exist.” Proof of the existence of phenomena that escape the realm of visibility is the perception of these objects as artistic and a surrender to artistic creation as a last resort.

These artistic objects’ histor, their memory as a non-artistic object is invisible. As is the case with “Passagem” installation, suspended in the centre of the room, and made of a number of glass pieces from old windows, broken by a performative action², fused and accidentally broken again. The pieces draw shadows on the floor, which mix with the traces of pigments from old laboratory experiments. Here, artistic and scientific languages intersect, complement each other and don’t lose their own identity. And, to quote the artist, “everything is interdependent because each thing/being is a partial manifestation of a global body, whose temporal forms follow one another in the alternation of the latent and the patent.”

“Dentro de”, the piece installed in the foyer, in blown glass, burnt wood and dog hair, is suspended and floats, accompanied by the two sound pieces “Falésia” and “Cotopaxi”, human and volcanic breaths that dialogue from the opposite ends of the room. To quote the artist, “Breath gives form to glass, breath gives form to life, breath unites everything. And breath is fluid, as my work is fluid, as glass is fluid when it heats up. It’s also this fluidity that I seek in my practice: there’s a fluidity of thought that translates into fluidity in the form and in what the form touches.” In dialogue is the piece “Instante de Instantâneo”, made of blown glass, and placed in the window.

Inside the drawers there are some drawings and retro-projected sculptures in glass, coming from old frames, and moulded on a human body and on stones found by the artist on her hikes on the West Coast, as well as the pigments from fossil coal and clays, used by Valsecchi to make the drawings. In dialogue, in the cupboard opposite, there is the piece “5 corpos”, a drawing placed on a fallen tree branch. To quote HElena Valsecchi, “We can’t see the origin of these drawings, which are superimpositions of contacts and gestures. They are born out of a walk, of an observation, of a ‘being with’ a place-body, of the contact with that body, of caressing it, of transforming it, of registering it as if it were a human body, of registering a human body as if it were stone, and then, in transparency and superimposition, of working on that invisible bond.”

As a symbolic dimension of the present-absent, the exhibition is created from the transformation of glass objects, footprints, fire, sounds, time… where history, memories are not lost, but remain, invisible. “Deposited in the collective unconscious, these experiences, interpenetrated by the new, generate the utopia that leaves its trace in a thousand configurations of life, from lasting constructions to fleeting fashions.”³ While in another dimension, transformation flows and artistic creation is born.

The fluidity that HElena Valsecchi seeks in her work and in her choice of materials is closely linked to her fascination with the invisible. “The obsession with the invisible and the anxiety of madness pass through this endeavour to represent what is by nature unrepresentable. The invisible is also unspeakable: the whole endeavour of Maupassant’s heroes and of the writer himself consists of giving it literary form.”⁴ Maupassant and HElena Valsecchi bring the invisible to life, one in literature and the other in visual art.

HElena Valsecchi’s poetics, materialised in the visible and felt in the invisible, clearly questions and formulates guidelines for reflection on this paradigm of the invisibility of the visible in her aesthetic pragmatism. “But for now I’m in the midst of what screams and pulses. And it’s as subtle as the most intangible reality. For now, time is how long a thought lasts. And of such purity is this contact with the invisible core of reality.”⁵

Sofia Marçal