Moon, she said...

“The outer shell of the young earth must have been a good many millions of years changing from the liquid to the solid state, and it is believed that, before this change was completed, an event of the greatest importance took place – the formation of the moon. The next time you stand on a beach at night, watching the moon’s bright path across the water, and conscious of the moon-drawn tides, remember that the moon itself may have been born of a great tidal wave of earthly substance, torn off into space.” Rachel Carson, in “The Sea Around Us”, 1951, Oxford University Press (1991) USA. At La Grotta Gigante, near Trieste, two plastic pipes over forty meters long, each one containing a suspended three millimeters thick metal wire with the same length, are placed vertically in the cave’s big gallery. This apparatus measures the invisible movements and tides of the layer underneath the Earth’s crust that seismographs can’t measure. Some stalagmites are wet and white on top. The guide told us they are alive and still growing at one centimeter per year, with some reaching more than two meters. I love caves and think of the relationship of water and stone as process-based sculptures—the most beautiful ones are impossible to repeat. Mother Earth interior carvings are made with soft and gentle events and endless time. For some time, every Super Moon, we came together. We closed doors, cooked dinner, and had some wine. We knew that as Taurus, an earth sign, we would be hypersensitive that night. We gush out all our interior feelings organized as verbiage to discuss relations, love and friendship, silent suffering, and inner struggle. Microbiology expanded the notion of humans as vessels for millions of nonhuman life forms, which defeats social misconstructions of race, gender, and other systemic prejudices. These bacteria have needs that affect us and our behavior. On the other hand, the Moon affects liquid states on Earth: the tides of the ocean and the mantle, underneath the Earth’s crust, plants and animals, humans and non-humans, and all vessels of other life forms. Many other procedures and rituals are related to the Moon, such as cow horn manure, an ancient agriculture procedure known now as biodynamic, which is made twice a year following the moon calendar and menstruation—the experience of death and renewal—man will never understand. Moon, she said…, comprises works by Paulina Semkowicz, Michi Lukas, and Hugo Canoilas. Their practices share the use of textiles, which imply certain specificities to painting. All of them work partially on a horizontal plan, which is the moment when gravity allows their processes to mimic nature in the way colors react to each other, and how paint intertwines with the fabric’s filaments. Semkowicz’s use of fabrics is underlined in the installation of her works—a thought of textiles as soft materials with folds or adapting to specific environments like a wooden house in the countryside or the garden around it. Semkowicz paints with no center, playing with volumes as tectonic masses, creating basins and mountains, geologically known as revolutions. Opposite to these tectonic forces, the spiritual and psychedelic maps of planets and stars by Lukas are attractions to an unknown. These unknowns reveal themselves during the process-based abstraction strategies Lukas uses to later project mental images on them. Light here is the visibility of interior desires and not of a professed reality. The unknown or barely known deep sea creatures depicted by Canoilas come to the surface attracted by the full Moon. Using a textile painting technique similar to oriental calligraphy or bird painting, they sublimate a new relation with nature and cast new forms of relationship and coexistence. Attraction and contraction are the axes of this exhibition in many voices that resonate with Maurice Blanchot’s idea of disaster: a production with no sun, no center, and no axis due to the myriad of invisible forces that produce the works. The heterogeneity of impulses and relations is multiplied by a collection of stones and crystals placed in the hallway so their immanence can run throughout the exhibition. These stones and crystals are not edited by their specific qualities, avoiding manipulation of the mood or awakening of the visitor. They are anonymous and plural and in symbiosis with the artworks’ matter.