Descripción de la Exposición
The end of a drawing, the beginning of a text
Everywhere, metamorphosisI come across it in my reading, in films, dreams, nightmares, analysis sessions, in the sphinx-like messages in teabags. Whenever a word is highlighted, it seems to become multiplied amidst the realms and the streets, dancing before our eyes, insisting on its signs, inviting us to discover its paths. Like Alice, who pursued the White Rabbit deep into its burrow, or the Fool, who takes a firm step towards the abyss, I suddenly see myself leaping on the precipices of metamorphosis, burning with curiosity because of its various meanings, uses and images. Simply speaking, I fall into a very deep, dark well – it is, in fact, one of two things: either the well is too deep, or I am falling very slowly[1].
The journey does in fact begin with fantasy, where metamorphosis first appeared to me – or, at least, where it first appeared with all its splendour, without any shyness at all. Given over to speculative daydreams, the body yields in its anatomy, takes on other colours and scales, plants new bones, causes stick-noses to grow – in short, it becomes agitated without any obligation to respond to its own limits or to a primal nature. Not by chance, in Mattia Denisse’s work, there is an intense sensation – exactly that, a vague and profoundly intuitive feeling – that we have gone beyond the impertinent chronology of the before-and-after and are now confronted instead with the always-has-beenHis repeatedly curved motifs, dome-shaped and unstable, seem to capture an extremely brief moment, within this constant chain of changes and accumulations, of the muddle[2] of things – the forever unfinished nature of existence as the sole condition of all forms.
But, if the experience of metamorphosis makes any thought of origin seem idle, it is also true that there is nothing in it that points to a kind of mythological time. It may not acknowledge the past tense, but it nonetheless indicates a retreat. Witnessing one of Denisse’s paintings is like looking at a prehistoric image, unknown to language, prior to human life – prior to the creation of the world. In some cases, we even find ourselves confronted with this moment when everything is done or has been unprecedently invented: the first A, the first B, the first Anthropoid, the first hands that fix the first painting. In a fraction of a second, however, the first becomes the last: the last eucalyptus burning, the last spoken truth, the last image of a unicorn before drowning, the last winter or the last summer that remained liveable before the nuclear desert. In the transformational system of the myth, the reversible and the irreversible are short-circuited, the continuous and the discontinuous, that which transcends while it inscribes (and writes) the concrete, like someone issuing a warning.
Metamorphosis is placed on a card, in an Arcana from Tarot, in an image drawn by Denisse: it reveals to us something that is absolutely evident, while, strictly speaking, it says nothing at all. As in the mythical text, it does not contain within itself the key for its deciphering – or, as the author Carola Saavedra would say about oracular art, polishing the questions shows itself to be more urgent than defining their solutions: “when they become perfect, you won’t need the answers anymore.”[3] In this way, from fantasy to myth, metamorphosis takes a step down towards the mundane in order to appear in the dream – that almost daily delirium of the desire that is never confessed, that is never revealed. Even if it is painstakingly dissected by the most skilled of Freudian psychoanalysts, it will always retain an unfathomable point, a cul-de-sac – the “navel of the dream”. And then all the navels in Denisse’s metamorphoses are illuminated: a bullet in the shoulder, the darkness of a crack, a pair of impenetrable eyes, the core of an apple or just simply a focal point that punctures the composition.
In a certain way, that inscrutable navel is also the navel of Plato’s Symposium , reminding me of Denisse – the mark of a traumatic cut that disconnected the human being from his other half, leaving him incomplete and searching for the chance to reconnect with the world. I resist the idea – personally, I insist that it is excess and not shortage that characterises the will to live – but I do not deny the beauty of the hypothesis that absence is the driving force behind metamorphosis. Perhaps this is why the artist resorts to twin images, to the vice-versa or the repetition of language, resources that intensify an existence or a meaning that was previously fleeting, because it was unfinished: if anything is, in fact, distant, then it is far, far away; a fish therefore also has to be a fish-fish, seeing that a fish, alone, can easily be (or become) something else.
And, as we are now talking about fish – or flamingos, oysters and worms – there still remains the metamorphosis of the most concrete plans, of what happens under the scope of the physical and anatomical possibilities of bodies, albeit just as routinely as fantasy or dreams. To paraphrase Bruno Latour about Vinciane Despret’s scientific fables, thanks to the Denisse effect, “we move from the question of anthropomorphism” to that much more interesting one, “of the multifaceted nature of what it means to be ‘animated’. Scientists, creators and animal lovers, pet owners, zookeepers, meat-eaters – we are all constantly trying to evade the inanimation or hyperanimation of those beings with whom we swap forms all the time”[4]. In the last resort, we even swap forms with the dirtiness of waters, a pink sunset or a mushroom cloud – landscapes are also entities with which we interact and negotiate agencies.
At the bottom of the well, a culminating metamorphosis – although it is never the last one: death. Blood, the reverse, war, the grotesque. The wilted sunflower, the exploding flesh. The sudden change of scale, biomass, silence; not even doubt. At the exact moment, there is already a new language, an amorphous onomatopoeia rending the air: the end of a text, the beginning of a drawing.
Laila Algaves Nuñez
[1] A slightly altered sentence based on André Cristi’s translation of Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland., according to the digital edition of the book published in 2019 under the Mojo Institute of Intercultural Communication's seal.
[2] A reference to the line “In the buginning is the woid, in the muddle is the sounddance [...]”, in one of the most sophisticated metamorphoses ever undertaken in language, the work Finnegan’s Wakeby James Joyce (1939, p. 378). I use the challenging translation into Portuguese proposed by the Coletivo Finnegans in Finnegans Rivolta, published by Iluminuras: “No começo era o palavácuo, no balburdimeio é som-dança [...]” (2022, p. 414).
[3] Saavedra, Carola. (2021). O mundo desdobrável: ensaios para depois do fim. Relicário Edições, p. 190.
[4] Latour, Bruno. (2021). “As fábulas científicas de uma La Fontaine empírica”. In Despret, Vinciane. O que diriam os animais?Ubu Editora, p. 13.
Premio. 14 abr de 2025 - 12 may de 2025 / Madrid, España
Exposición. 11 abr de 2025 - 28 sep de 2025 / Museo Guggenheim Bilbao / Bilbao, Vizcaya, España
Formación. 08 may de 2025 - 17 may de 2025 / Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía (MNCARS) / Madrid, España