quadra, São Paulo, apr.-jun, 2025
Substance and Foundation on the work of Arorá
1. prologue
In mid-nineteenth century, a popular advertisement from photographic studio recommended: “Secure the shadow ere the substance fade”.1 A sort of memento mori of a nascent mass culture, where photographers offered people (availing from thei anguish) the permanence of the image, or “shadow”, beyond the life of our ordinary “substance”, the body.
With the sophistication that was characteristic of her, the activist Sojourner Truth inverted the terms of this promise that was grounded on individual memory and in 1964 she commissioned several versions of a portrait of her in the format carte de visite, where
it could read: “I sell the shadow to support the substance”.2
Despite being subtle, the change is radical. Truth appropriates herself of her image, transforming the “shadow” of nostalgia into a political tool: the selling of the photographies would foundation and support a collective cause, the emancipation of human beings by the means of the abolition of slavery and patriarchal systems.3
With her gesture, the “substance” of the individual body is transformed into a social body, suggesting that the autonomy of the subject – or human supremacy, built on the white man’s4 – is only violent rhetorics.
2. foundation
There seems to be a parallel between the support of Arorá’s painting and the support to the “substance” in Sojourner’s Truth statement. After all, the artist does not depart from the traditional “on canvas” or “on wood” – that would be mere recipients of an image –, but does painting on painting: support transformed in its more dense synonym; support as foundation. In material terms, Arorá deposits in the plaster prepared canvas, layers of oily sticks made of pigment, bee’s wax, and carnaúba,4 to then cover them with other layers from the sticks and oil painting, successively, until the “substance” achieves a body, while at the same time turns invisible: chromatic plays, compositions, depictions are subsequently covered by the bulged layers. In other words, it is not about a disincarnated image, as painting is oftentimes perceived, but it constitutes itself as the accumulation of materials from diverse natures, slowly and meticulously deposited. A relevant example is Iron Lotus (Lótus de Ferro), in which, in the last layers, the artist deposited silver leafs and white-transparent pigment. This attributes to them an intensity, nonetheless, it is the dark color that is now hidden.
The artist appropriates herself of the pentimento and inverts its meaning, in another possible parallel with the image of Truth (and that only belongs to her). It’s a conceptual twist that avails the technique to reflect on other modes of existence, establishing a direct relationship between image and body (of a person, of a painting, of a political association). A common gesture of Western’s tradition, the pentimento refers to a repentance of the artist, which decides to, a posteriori, modify some of the elements of the painting , by covering them with new layers of painting.5
It is possible, however, to envision that which is “under” painting, and not exactly “underneath” it.6 The artist sometimes scrapes layers of dried painting either with stick or gouges, creating openings that enable other layers to return to the visible surface. Furthermore, when seen rather in an oblique and not a frontal manner – namely, without letting painting being reduced to its image –, the thickness of accumulated materials certify its own presence, although occults the “shadow” of the colors, compositions, depictions, and other elements, created and subsequently covered.
But what remains visible also imposes itself, and the image suggests being bigger than itself. Some diagonal lines depart from a vertex to then extrapolate the frame’s surface and sinuous brushstrokes appear to move in waves, in an explosion, forming flows or currents of energy. The shadow, like in Truth’s, seduces the gaze as an artifice, displacing it towards substance, to all which is occult, but which is ground and foundation.
3. space
Contrary to the pictorial procedure of covering, some works operate with openness. Of such an opening that they seem to be made of air – element both diaphanous and essential to the maintenance of life. Some sculptures structure themselves with silver metal wires creating provisional drawings, which are modify in the length of a walk. Others were made from collected metal rods that after a prolonged contact with the ox- ygen of air and water, end being corroded. With the silver plating, the artist brings to ev- idence all the marks of time, now seductive to the gaze, without disguising its banality.
Within the space off the gallery, the sculptures of corroded material are protected; others, made from techniques of silversmithing where installed in the space of the garden and, therefore, were exposed for the first time to weather change. Thus, Arorá enables in them the impregnation of the dimension of time, which establishes a dia- logue with other works that defy disciplinary precepts. After all, traditional sculpture – just like the image of heroes – should be robust and enduring. The wires suspended in space, almost diaphanous, could almost remind us of John Cage’s piece, composed by four minutes and thirty seconds of pause, or the required silence for the harmony in Western compositions. But, within it, there is no silence: space is filled with the breath, the expectation of who “listens” to the composition , the weight of their bodies. What is there, in Cage, and maybe also in the works of Arorá, is the material impossibility of silence, at least in this Earth.
In some of the plated wires and rods, the artist inserted pearls, at times covered by metal. Pearls, as is well-known, are formed by an invertebrate being’s reaction to the presence of a stranger body in its shelf. As an artifice, the pearls in the open sculptures of Arorá suggest that, besides the present time – of the substance of space, of air, and of sounds –, there is a past history, not necessarily a happy one.
As Sojourner Truth knew well, the immeasurable, and all that which cannot be cap- tured by the image, is also a matter of freedom. And Arorá invites us to turn our gaze not to the “shadow”, but to the foundations: to all that which exists, or existed, and that can be reformulated. Material and concretely, like in a painting.
Notes
1 According to the online portal Brasiliana Fotográfica from the Brazilian National Library (Biblioteca Nacional), “The cartes de visite presented a photography of approximately 9,5 × 6 cm mounted on a rigid cardboard of approximately 10 × 6,5 cm. The reproduction was frequently made using the technique of albumen print [...] [which] allowed the mass production of photographies”.
2 Here, the “support” would also be entangled with financial transactions: Truth remitted the amount of the selling of the photographies to political causes, while in the same year of 1864, she would simultaneously register her own image in the copyright law. Considering that in 1826 she had managed to free herself and her small daughter, and in 1828 would do the same to her other sons, since then, nobody could even wrongfully be appropriating of her “shadow”.
3 KANT, Immanuel. Metaphysics of Morals, 1797.
4 Carnaúba (Copernicia Prunifera or Carnaúba Palm) is a palm-tree endemic to Northeastern Brazil.
5 This elements are frequently “discovered” by the use of x-rays and infra red reflectography. If the carte de visite photography aimed to “save” someone’s image from oblivion, new techniques ended by “condemning” the cohesion of the artist’s painting, years after their death – that disavows the popular imagination of art being the fruit of a special being.
6 See HARNEY, Stefano & MOTEN, Fred. The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning & Black Study, Minor Compostions (New York: 2013).
