Frederico Brízida – “Equimose”
endeavoring to prolong the unfathomability of this entity-force, its mystique and its tragedy. The
certainty of an answer always blurred – and hence all its latency and attraction -, I may, however,
venture that it is by crying that Eros can know himself as body and thus participate in the body of
others, in the bodies of the world, bursting, into tears, from his height of god to the plane of mortals,
those who truly understand nothing about the existence that animates them. So the being of Eros
falls apart in other rivers, in other bodies, all diluting and mysteriously approaching. And thus also
ours: a body, a river, as Eugénio de Andrade knew. A body that, intimately connected with this
primordial river of tears, breaks through the earth – a realm of images -, enigmatically whipped by the
movement of its tides. It is in this land that it is drawn, that is defined as landscape, piercing the
images that also pierce it and leave in it, as memory, its sediments. The bed and the banks of this
river, which shape it and are shaped by it, are the record of its passage. Always tense, though
irrepressible (here is the shadow of Eros), sometimes violent, sometimes calm, made of unstable
undulations, unexpected slopes and momentary swirls.
Frederico also knows that the body is a river that makes its way but permanently oscillates because
it is inserted in the world that sees and that gives him back the look through a touch impossible to
define. A touch that can sometimes spread under the skin – that of the body that looks and that of the
images that are looked at. The works he now presents are the potential condensation of this touch,
half-opening the invisible and tumultuous space where visibilities in conflict intertwine and disturb
themselves, developing gestures whose first movement began somewhere in a primitive place. This
is the place of the indomitable desire to see and of the mysterious awareness that one is also seen.
Eros never stops crying.
This desire, which we may call erotic (the sense of gravity with which the river flows), is the one that
Frederico appropriates in certain images to print upon them, and let them be seen by us, the marks
of a body (in this case, his own) that passed through them.
And if we think that the formation of ecchymosis, may be only evidence of an invisibility (engendered
by the touch) to densify from within a body that looks and to externalize itself on the surface of its
skin, these extravasated stains can also be an event in the internal structure of the images and also
on their surface, as a result of a body projecting into them and actively participates in them. These
ghost-marks are part of the history of that body but also of the never finite history of these images.
Bringing them (those that were already concrete images of concrete bodies themselves) from the
universe of pornography, Frederico denies them an eventual association with poor or flat images
which, often, we attribute to them by their excess of visualities, fast consumption and rapid
dissipation, referring them to an apparition under successive veils and coverings. Stains that
translate a process of dilution between the borders of the body that appropriates and the margins of
the bodies-images that are appropriated; a fog that confirms a mutual and indistinct closeness. And
this is time, duration, memory, to assume an intense encounter with beauty, the emergence of the
opacity of the world that is also one of Eros’ enigmas.
José Gil says that the look is done with the whole body. I also say: let us look at Frederico’s images
with the whole body. They ask us this look. And perhaps it is in this moment that the ethic of Eros –
the erotic – can begin again. As the first reason of the image, the most agitated substrate of a body
(now also our own). As the first moment, but also the end, of all aesthetics. So that the cry of Eros
may not be in vain and that all the rivers may continue their course, and may converge in that
inscrutable ocean that welcomes and unifies everyone.
David Revés
Lisbon, June 2019
Categoria
Past Exhibitions