Débora Bolsoni

“Débora Bolsoni – No names, but names”
by Claudia Rodrigues-Ponga

[Text written for the solo show “No names, but names”, Drawing Lab, Paris, France, 2017]

La vue glisse le long de l’univers. La main sait que l’objet est habité par le poids, qu’il est lisse ou rugueux, qu’il n’est pas soudé au fond de ciel ou de terre avec lequel il semble faire corps. L’action de la main définit le creux de l’espace et le plein des choses qui l’occupent. Surface, volume, densité, pesanteur ne sont pas des phénomènes optiques. C’est entre les doigts, c’est au creux des paumes que l’homme les connut d’abord. L’espace, il le mesure, non du regard, mais de sa main et de son pas.
Henri Focillon, Éloge de la main

(Once there was a hand traced on a wall)

This is a story about the mixed interdisciplinary roots of drawing and sculpture. It is therefore a story of silhouettes; of a line scratched onto a rocky wall to trace the presence of a hand, of a beast, of an absent lover. Drawing and sculpture, like in Pliny’s story about the origin or drawing, together in this gesture, saluting the paradox of presence/absence. Drawings which are sculptures, sculptures which are drawings. As Henri Focillon said, there isn’t one without the other: the eye needs the hand, because it is the hand that knows if an object is heavy, it is the hand that knows if something is concave or convex, full or empty. “Surface, volume, density, gravity, they are not optic phenomena”^[1], rightly says Focillon. So this is also a story of drawing as a spacial, tactile, endeavor. The story of picking up a chalk and drawing on a blackboard.

(Once there was a hand traced on a wall, and as it drew itself, it felt the wall)

Bolsini’s cardboard gravestones have metamorphosed into stone or cement (all in all, they have been made earthbound) by a splash of parafin, that all-but-innocent material which Didi-Huberman traced back to votive rituals, to death masks, to flesh. Wax moves, says Didi-Huberman, it is almost alive, it is unstable, it upsets^[2]. It is the paraffin that sustains the drawing, and it is the drawing of a silhouette on it that turns the whole thing into a memorial gesture. Finally, it is the sequence and repetition of these draw-tures or sculp-wings that turns the whole thing into a graveyard. Bolsini confirmed I wasn’t making this up: “My sculpture is related to death, as is sculpture in general”, she told me. As Didi-Huberman noted in Ce que nous voyons, ce qui nous regarde, even the most rigid three-dimensional geometrical lump can trigger this feeling of a humanoid presence.

(Once there was a hand traced on a wall, and as it drew itself, it felt the wall and then fled in surprise, shocked by its own autonomy)

The silhouettes represent objects, but isn’t the life of objects also “a strange form of life, kicking through windows, rolling on yards”^[3]? These vibrant, material entities (to quote directly Jane Bennett’s work on “Vibrant Matter”) are activated before us. The “mimesis lesson” is not restricted to humanoid entities; actually, mimesis is more a matter or shapes and memory. A shape which suddenly starts to tremble. Of course, this is agency we are speaking of: the agency of a hand, the agency of objects. What magicians and artists throughout the ages have ached to achieve (and achieved) is now central to a form of contemporary philosophy that reclaims the object as an ontological unity: the world is made of objects, within objects, within objects… and they are all, to a certain degree, autonomous. In the room right beside the main installation, several of Bolsoni’s tile drawings bring with their landscape motives (a little seagull, a flower) a nostalgic reference to nature. In them, human silhouettes relate to some of her usual object-subjects. Landscape, human figure, and still life converse, but somehow fail to communicate, containing each other, but also leaving each other out.

(Once there was a hand traced on a wall, and as it drew itself, it felt the wall and then fled in surprise, shocked by its own autonomy, and when it turned it saw itself and its absence, on the wall)

In some objects, says Didi-Huberman, loss comes and goes, like objects which have the ability to look convex and then concave^[4]. Of course, a sculptress who has long studied the urban environment is devoted to this movement, to this simultaneous “here and there”; this rhetoric transhumance that Michel de Certeau walks us through in his “pratique du quotidien”, a text which Bolsoni knows well. What better figure to incarnate this dual presence-of-absence than a silhouette drawing? Are these objects being put to rest or are they being brought to life? Here we see no names, but, of course, there are names, names that hover like a superstition, lined up like in a Borgian library. Again, I did not make this up: Bolsoni has been learning from her object-subjects for years now, observing carefully how they contain each other. From libraries, shelves, and books she has taken their ability to exhibit themselves, to be unit and structure at the same time, sculpture and exhibiting device, form and language. Or, in other words, to be names within names within names within names…

^[1] Focillon, Henri, Eloge de la main, p. 6
^[2] Wax Flesh
^[3] Lyrics from Bonnie Prince Billy’s song “Strange Form of Life”
^[4] “Neles a perda vai e vem” p.116. “Este volume, diante de nós, estar cheio de um ser semelhante a nós, mas morto”, p. 38

“Debora Bolsoni – Pra Aquietar”
by Claudia Rodrigues-Ponga

[Text written for the solo show “Pra aquietar”, Galeria Athena Contemporânea”, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, 2017]

Night is the plaything of the day.
The day is the plaything of the sea
The sea is the plaything of life
To calm, to calm

Luiz Melodia

In a text by the artist entitled “Statue Game,” which refers to the child’s game known as “Statues,” Bolsoni describes “an interrupted scene in which objects, as if they were moving bodies, were surprised before arriving at their proper places, or before they reached the place they were headed.” While this is happening, “the artist, peeking in deliberate amusement, lets go of controlling the materials so she can surprise them and make an abrupt and unexpected cut, as if collecting a sample of the time for study and analysis.”

In the game which Bolsoni refers to, movement is as essential as stillness. The winner is the one who avoids being seen moving, but who nevertheless moves (“eppur si muove” as Galileo said in a whisper before the tribunal of the inquisition that judged him). Whoever comes before, paradoxically, is the one who stays still the most…who moves the most is the one who moves less? These ideas may be contradictory, but they have been recurrent in metaphysics since before Aristotle, through whom we have gained the idea of the “unmoved mover.”

The unmoved mover is in essence the pure act: “that which moves without being moved.” It is a kind of amoral god with no anthropomorphic characteristics. The unmoved mover is the primal cause, but it is not the creator of things, nor does it meddle with them with a sense of directed causality. This Aristotelian god attracts things by putting them in motion in the same way in which the loved one puts his lover in motion—through an attraction or force. It is not, therefore, a mechanical operation, despite what the word “mover” implies today. In the unmoved mover there is no power, only an act; but the act does not imply movement. On the contrary: the unmoved mover can be the first cause of everything only because it does not move.[1]

Are Bolsoni’s works the ones we interrupt when we enter the scene? Where do they go? What moves them? What if they were not going anywhere? The works suggest trajectories in potency that seem to be still, to hold themselves back, to freeze when we look at them. But isn’t it the other way around? And what if they didn’t have the power of a trajectory? What if they were a pure act? That’s why these works always win: because they’re not playing the game they seem to be playing. They have already reached their destination because they weren’t going anywhere. As Bolsoni says in the same text that I began by quoting “the cut in the timeline is only a tactic for seeking permanence. An attempt to glimpse, in the suspension of the acts, some inexhaustible essence.”

Like the breaks in Luiz Melodia’s song, which gave this exhibition its name, these cuts in time are, in fact, the key to any movement, its inexhaustible essence. The force that generates movement through the power of a magnetic flux, an attraction. Like the Island of Paquetá, motionless in time, drawing Sonia Braga to it, guiding her steps. Or like the famous “forbidden zone” of Tarkovsky’s film attracting the stalkers to his always indecipherable area of influence. They are not random references of the artist. Waves, cubes, or slithering snakes, paths, words, wheels, carts… we have already noticed that Bolsoni’s works reflect on the nature of movement, but perhaps what moves is not the works but we, firmly and slowly orbiting around them.

1 “In effect, the first principle or primary being is not movable either in itself or a ccidentally, but produces the primary eternal and single movement. But since that which is moved must be moved by something, the first mover must be in itself unmovable.” Aristotle, Metaphysics, book 12.

Reduced verb, suspended name
by Ana Maria Maia

[Text written for the solo show “Mischaracter”at Galeria Jaqueline Martins, São Paulo, Brazil, 2016]

A neologism brings to a close Débora Bolsoni’s recent procedures, some of them gathered in this solo exhibition, many others not, as they remain in waiting. The title “Descaracter [Mischaracter]” does not lend its name to any of the works or pay tribute to verses of the popular chansonnier, although it could well do so. It’s a feeling that fills the chest, sometimes the stomach, and soon slips through the fingers. It manifests itself as intuition, will, searching and living in generous harmony with the unknown. It has an abstract and often inexplicable form, but emerges with force and urgency, leaving no doubts about the doing.

Between the artist’s body, the architecture and the other bodies with which it relates to exist, the word and everything that is made from it become absent from the dictionaries and in debt to sensitive experience, they break away from language as convention to the extent that they take it as a laboratory for trials, errors, vestiges and suppositions. “Mischaracter” seems to have come from the verb “mischaracterize”. On the other hand, it might also result from a suspicion about the most assertive of human attributes, “character”, as it is combined with a negative prefix. Let us examine both these possible meanings and also the chance of there being other meanings or even none at all.

1. Mischaracterize

Débora Bolsoni’s production tends to stem from dealing with simple materials, such as paper, cloth, sand, wood, string and wax. Once in the form of a work, even when kept in sight of the public, they end up confusing people, primarily because their vocations are reshaped by the uses given by the artist. The fragile becomes enduring; the vulgar, monumental; structure (or sculpture), meanwhile, is investigated to bear softness and delicateness, to gain thin, organic and far from inert layers, risking its own ruin in the process.

Débora produces mischaracterized artefacts, whose physical appearance involves bigger or smaller doses of betrayal. Often not exactly how we imagine them to be from a distance, they request our approach, investment and calm. If it weren’t for the abilities of the present body to suspect and discover, we would carry on believing in the veracity of the patinas. The images of these artefacts – even though great photographs mounted in the gallery – are insufficient to translate the system and rapports they are part of, since the creation process.

Shared with masters of different crafts, who help the artist to recognise a minimal repertoire about the materials that interest her in each new project, this process is also nurtured by the availability, of both parties, to deconstruct their modes of production. In this exchange, constantly marked by adjustments to the language and measurements of incomprehension, the ideas must necessarily be focused back on the paths and limits of the consolidation. The crafts, in turn, come out reinvigorated from tackling absence and error, from the artist’s applied ignorance. In her discipline, therefore, there should reside an anti-discipline.

2. Suspending character

Whereas the prefix “un” indicates negation by absence, “mis” negates by opposition. In other words, in “mischaracter” there is still character, but perhaps another one, willing to contradict the radical from which it stems. Between contrary and equivalent vectors, a game of forces is established, a polarized and dialectic form, instead of those that rest safe on unilateral certainties. This is how the act of suspending functions in this solo exhibition. Seeking a stability that is not on the ground, where it would be subject only to the imperative of gravity, Débora was filled with the desire to hang things. This, in truth, was her first desire, when there was still nothing of what is here now.

She decided to hang a net, and in it a box and some rolls of textiles. Attached to the wall by a single point, they gradually lose their ambiguity to adhere to figurative and morbid meanings. The box has the proportions of a coffin and, before being entitled Pendente, it was referred to by its nickname “The Hanged”. Therefore, even as a preliminar project, the installation already concatenated the scene, traces and victim of a crime of unknown authorship.

The assembly of the work, more than carrying people away, binds all those involved to the exhibition, artist, gallery and visitors. How questionable do their attitudes become in relation to the hanged? If not guilty of killing, are they not responsible for witnessing a death and doing nothing about it? Perhaps they are also responsible for invading the intimacy of a suicide, thus breaking the code of silence that usually averts tackling of the subject through media agendas and common sense.

The presence, in this case, is not enough to trigger any action, only moral judgment and the effects of its always guilty collision between sovereign individuals and the most ancestral doctrines for societal life. The meaning of the word character is found at the centre of this crossroads. It denotes the combination of qualities and values each person builds for him or herself, but presupposes their adaptation to the functional parameters of the institutions in place, such as the family, school, religion and the state.

Those who flee from these parameters are so-called “characterless”. Not because they have no personal values, seeing as, whether for better or worse, for harmony or

conflict, for rupture or for tradition, everyone has it. They flee because they disagree with something prior and inherent to the construction of an idea of character, moral judgment, or else, its conservative face: moralism. The exercise of suspension proposed by Débora Bolsoni helps to reposition the problem not of a moral, but rather of a collective ethic, becoming both the rule and the exception, interdependente and, in this regard, equally questionable, exhaustible, updateable.

In The Coming Community, Giogio Agamben described that ethics should not give rise to regrets but rather to the experience of “exposing, in every form, one’s own amorphousness and in every act one’s own inactuality.” The dialectics of things and of relations is again presented as the path for establishing a sphere of the less oppressive common and, therein, subjects who are both responsible and free and proactive. One should only judge them if they negated their power of creation, if they were repressed in the fault of other and of the past. According to the author, if “they remain in a deficit of existence.”

“Forms of Presentation”
by Cauê Alves

[Test written for the solo show “General Urbanism”, Galeria Athena Contemporânea, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, 2015]

The inspiration underlying the works of Débora Bolsoni mostly comes from probing exhibiting strategies. The devices developed by Bolsoni, be them shelves, trolleys or panels, meanwhile serving as supports for displaying a given piece of work, wind up being the work itself. It is also strikingly surprising that the artist’s reasoning is akin to that of curators. The attention of both of them is geared towards the exhibition design and everything in-between, like the environment and furniture, which is resorted to when staging a show.

Needless to say, the manner how a work is exposed is quite so important as the object per se. To Bolsoni, there is no distinction between “what” and “how” a work is delivered to the audience. Her pieces substantiate the dual aspect of being open for the onlooker’s regard to solve them, but also camouflaged, as if they behaved like devices for exhibiting other pieces. The objects that would be on a shelf end up as the framework supporting it, like a bookcase made of books. But the artist’s books are glazed tiles, in a mishmash with the wall.

Bolsoni’s works abide by an extended ripening time. They remain at the atelier, idle, being viewed and reviewed by the artist over years. Besides this, some materials are dislocated from time itself. Not by chance, the ceramic-coated books are dug in glazed tile dumps that have remainders, unaligned-pattern boards, the civil industry rejects and pieces out of the average taste of consumers.

Not only do these materials endure poetic-wise, some forms are exhibited and reappear in a new configuration after a while, both recapturing the initial sense, and opening it up. This is the case of Splash, which has already been displayed as a rosy-paper calendar and, after some time, became a grid, a sort of door, a city’s fragment mediating the public and private realms. The fencing pattern is sort of household, though it sticks to its segregation role.

Grids and spears are recurring signs in the Bolsoni’s path. They have already been standalones, but now reappear on the shelves. The grids stand as a plea for safety, pointing to the seclusion of social life, but also deliver subtle patterns and drawings. Juxtaposed in a metal mesh, the splash format,inspired by ads, is a hollow element, a platform for an offering, or a warning that is usually there. The shape is designed to draw attention in shop sales. Typically, goods and ciphers are there to fill this vacuum encompassed by a hectic zigzag line. In the universe of cartoons, they would be speech bubbles contoured by pointy triangles, conveying the idea of explosion, or a scream. Over and above, as a quite significant theme for the artist, they are like signs of consumption, an emblem of how we respond to merchandise.

The core piece of the exhibit makes an allusion to a symbolic figure, like the badges or insignia used to represent companies or institutions. Differently, here they are manhole covers, similar to those found on city roads, with a fabric that partially covers them, allowing only a vertical stripe to be visible. Nonetheless, this sort of coat of arts has no writing or translatable element on it. The association with the field of heraldry is conspicuous. There is a certain enigma and opacity to the work, and an opening of senses as well. A fragment of the city, not assigned its original role, is aimed at bestowing the gallery with an urban sign.

Furthermore, this piece also shows a fabric with delicate details, edges and folds that yield triangular shapes, ultimately creating a four-square figure. In spite of the contrast between the fabric, the most intimate and private element, and the roughness of the metal cover, the work is indivisibly shaped.

Recurring figures in the Bolsoni’s path turn into patterns engraved on the ceramic boards. Boards which needed to be settled in the oven. With this, the artist’s drawings establish a liaison with the original glazed tiles patterns.For instance, Splashturns into a sort of stamp. This set of ceramic coats is displayed in a stock trolley, like in a fair of patterns, ashowroom of construction materials. The elements not used in an architectural design, but which are used as interior design and basic elements of households, are the artist’s core motif; namely, the items which customers pick from a display case, like fabrics, patterns, furniture or glazed tiles.

This exhibit, the first solo show that Debora Bolsoni has in Rio de Janeiro, serves the purpose of introducing her vocabulary and repertoire of shapes. An introduction to indeterminate articles that conjoin forms of presentation and the signs of consumption existing in the civil construction industry.

“8 or 80”
by Heloisa Espada

[Text written for BRAVO! Magazine, São Paulo, Brazil, 2006]

Within a system that is constantly renewing its emblems of status and power, Debora Bolsoni questions the value attributed to things, working with an apparently archaic repertoire regarding the notions of honour and merit, for example: medals, trophies, coins, mirrors, thrones and decorative objects. Based on these elements, her works are like narrative fragments: the installations seem like set designs and the subtly anthropomorphic objects seem, at times, to be animated beings.

At the Centro Universitário MariAntonia exhibition, analogies exist at both the concrete and virtual level. Displacing functions and promoting an interchange of attributes, the artist establishes what Roland Barthes would call a “floating chain of meanings”. Floretes-pebolim (Rapier-Baby-Foot) consists of two works of paraffin hung on the wall, as if they were arms. Their appearance is hybrid: the size of foils, with the format of a foosball table stick, where the little players look as if they have been run through by a sword. In addition, proximity is achieved through the similarity of the repetitive actions suggested by the two objects. In competitive fencing, when the athlete handles a foil, the objective is to hit the opponent with only the tip of the weapon and so, between the rapid oscillations of attack and defence, he acts through thrusts. The foosball player also acts through attack. The contradiction is brought about by the use of paraffin that, in conferring fragility to the work and evoking a votive candle, insinuates the notion of silence and pause.

In the piece Confete e Arapuca (Confetti and Trap), a variety of decorative items are placed beside a box suspended by a piece of wood. In it, the bait is like a joy that has fallen, that has been swept up and deposited, for the item on the floor has already served its function, it is now plain rubbish. The papers evoke the memory of a fall that, in turn, provides the movement expected from the trap.

Porta com medalha (Door with Medal) is a stainless steel surface that displays, on its “chest”, a medal stamped with a sequence of asterisks: the image of an encrypted password. As with a person standing to attention, the door exhibits the idea of restriction. It can also be seen as a character in a biased prose, a sentinel of less than convincing authority.

The excess of signs makes the combination seem somewhat dispersive. However, one notices the concepts at play behind the three works. The link between the decorative item and the paraffin is evidently established by the material’s colour and provisional nature. By extension, the decorative item is also a kind of military decoration, thus relating it to the medal. The movements alluded to by the foosball stick are reminiscent of the turning of a possible key to the door. There is an indirect reference to national icons such as carnival and football, which lends a dimension of the proposed allegory. Although a bit of economy may perhaps have conferred a more precise sense to the exhibition – a concision that is evident, for example, in the majestic installation Gruta Pampulha, recently assembled by Bolsoni at the Museu de Arte da Pampulha, in Belo Horizonte –, the articulation between forms, uses and cultural notions reveal and amplify the metaphorical qualities of the objects that appear. This is an operation that is, foremost, evidence of the fertility of a poetic developed some time ago and that undoubtedly heralds interesting developments.