The new exhibition by Edgar Martins (Évora, 1977) at Cristina Guerra Contemporary Art is part of the second moment of a bigger project that was first presented in Portugal at the MAAT – Museum of Art, Architecture and Technology, in 2016. With the title Silóquios e solilóquios sobre a morte e a vida e outros interlúdios, the show confronts the viewer with a variety of questions concerning death and the intermittencies of life, with the interludes and intervals that, between each image, reveal indicia and objects that – under the specter of death – ramify in a vast archive of conceptual, visual and documental relations. This three yearlong investigation was developed by the artist in the National Institute of Forensic Medicine and Science, in Lisbon and Coimbra; and includes some images from his personal archive.
In this project, the different strategies Edgar Martins uses to address death include a process of approximation between images in which the reality of the dead body (the corpse?) finds correspondences with, for example, the chemical effects of toxic fruits used in India to commit suicide – the chromatic intensity of a scarlet tree confronts us with the ambiguity inherent to its aesthetic radiance and poisonous nature. On the other hand, written language is present as a final moment that is materialized in the suicide’s last letters, something between presence and absence that alludes to that intermittence of life. In one of the photos we can see the representation – an austere image on a black background – of a paper plane photographed in a vertical position, reproducing the shape of a supposed last letter of a convict as it was launched from the window of his prison cell. One other image refers to this first moment; a memory or the volitional testimony of the suicidal despair we can read in a text message on the screen of an old Nokia cellphone: “Charles, please take my friends out for lunch. Prey for me. Goodbye”. Just like the seemingly abstract photograms, photos reproducing the limits of the paper and where the written message, as a specter or as a lifeless body, is limited to the weather information concerning the day a certain individual committed suicide.
These are just some of the examples that can be articulated in each exhibition using the archive compiled in this project. The appropriation of photos and documents from archives belonging to newspapers and other publications propose an approximation to the history of images and to the notion of their inadequacy – often so close to the feeling of rejection, or denial, death often instigates in the viewer - as the symbolic vocabulary that reveals this condition of loss the body is subjected to. We are confronted with an anachronistic temporality that exists between what the image reproduces of that lifeless corporeality and the humanity we psychologically attempt to recover from the interstices of a document, published or exhibited, that confronts us with the social regulation of power, with the law and with its ethical and moral consequences.
Intersected and fragmentary, the possible narratives are shown in different photographic formats and projections, singled out in small sets that include documental text, newspaper clippings recovered by the artist, somehow linked to the murders, or objects that, after a post mortem exercise of recognition, are transformed into “necrophagic” objects – like the stone smeared with blood, or the ropes that become historical documents because they were kept by the National Institute of Legal Medicine and Forensic Science after the autopsies (a singular aspect in the constitution of a unique collection of objects by such an Institution).
The exhibition Siloquies and soliloquies on death, life and other interludes presents us with a wide field of possibilities, and confronts us with our corporeality, with our own body as the correlate of a material and visual universe that arises from the ambiguous representation of death – something which we can never know – and from all the documental and fictional documents that continuously debate the possibility of images reconstructing a moment, even if a fleeting one, in which the body resists the presentification of the corpse. And even a perforated skull is still the image and the reference to the act and to its effect, recovering the identity of someone, often anonymous, but who still lives there. As Sérgio Mah writes in the catalogue of the first exhibition at the MAAT: “The project is based precisely in this contrast between images, imaginations and imaginaries of a dead body as an interstitial realm, an interlude between art and non-art, between past and present, reality and fiction.”
João Silvério
September, 2016