on the silence of the things for still life

felipe scovino

When coming into contact with Estela Sokol's work, what strikes me most is her ability to retain an expressive power of softness, daintiness, and silence. Transiting through Morandi’s, Volpi’s, Agnes Martin’s, Robert Ryman's worlds amidst many other artists and visual poetics, an expansive universe of ideas takes shape along a non-spectacular feeling advent from an economy of gesture. Sokol's work reveals transparency to the apparently solid body of painting and sculpture.

        Her "pinturinhas" (little paintings) - as she affectionately names them in their diminutive form, augments to me this characteristic of daintiness that is so present in her work - reveals a handmade character in their manufacturing. At times, they are enveloped in PVC and/or PV tapes, and at other times these same materials are cut out and their slivers distributed, placed juxtaposed, or/and superimposed, over the wooden frame.

        The paintings reveal two important circumstances that are confounding to a certain extent: the first is an instance of what we could call a vibrating or expanding surface, that is, from the choice of material and the geometric dispo-sition, the color tends to propel the plane toward the space. As an optical illusion, several planes are constructed in a way that puts our certainties about what is before us in doubt. The aspect of translucency is what conditions this. The painting takes on an infinite dimension in which it constantly moves toward space. The second circum-stance is the way in which the different shades of the same color operate. Her monochromes differ from what we are used to defining as monochromes because they are not concerned with the uniqueness of form, but pre-cisely by generating a considerable amount of chromatic differences. The subtlety of these differences, color in constant mutation, constantly mutating, metaphorically revealing our capacity to identify it as body, and the choice of material allows us to perceive that the painting is exploring intimate characteristics of sculpture such as density, volume, and verticality (see certain objects or lines contained in the paintings that indicate this image). In addition, textures and the porous character of these forms compose a network full of symbols and affects for Estela's paintings.

        As I wrote, her paintings make use of many sculptural attributes, but this rule also goes in another direction. A crooked geometry that tends to failure, disorganization, about to tumble, insecure, but, precisely because of this, human. These qualities are present in all the artists cited at the beginning of the text, but also in Torres-Garcia, in the initial and slightly constructive organizations of Iberê Camargo - whom, I make it clear, never affiliated with this trend - and in many other painters who placed geometry, as an instance of the sensitive, linked to the image of loss or instability. The often diminutive size of these works reveals not only the artist's daintiness, but also the commitment to intimacy between work and spectator. They blend in with everyday objects without losing the aura of a work of art because they are also things of the world: they can be easily moved, and placed in the palm of a hand. They are sculptures that warn us about the dualities of the world without advancing into confrontation, as the world generally deals with, when recognizing the other as different. I say this about Sokol's work because invariably, the choice of materials reflects this antagonistic quality between them. We have a light material coexist-ing with a heavy one, an opaque one with a translucent one, a flexible one with a rigid one, and a soft one with one that hardly exerts flexibility. This exercise of recognition and coexistence in her sculptures is no small thing and creates a fruitful and condensed dialogue about the world around us.

        In White Heat, we have the painting that finally collapses and adheres to the world or the sculpture that collapses onto the ground and becomes horizontal. We change our perspective as a viewer. We start to look down, we glimpse and identify the minuteness or details that inhabit the space below our neck. Occupying a large part of the first floor of the gallery, the installation is also a metaphor for time. As the artist points out, while the exhibition progresses, some of the materials, especially the foam and fabric, will change color. This phenomenological in-stance of perceiving the work as a body, not motivated by morphological but philosophical aspects, already has a certain tradition in Brazilian art (I remind you of an iconic example: Amilcar de Castro's sculptures and the marks of time that become oxidation of his pieces and that are part of his conceptual field of work), and Estela intelligently rescues and reclassifies it. Bringing characteristics of painting and sculpture, shuffling them, and proposing what is seemingly linked to the canons of modernity, she advances and presents the work as a living, organic, and dynamic body.

        The work is desacralized, it becomes mundane, and together with the smaller format sculptures, it brings the pos-sibility to coexist with antagonism. They are side by side, soft foam, and marble, paraffin, and fabric. The silence that hangs over the room enables us to identify, comprehend and establish such coexistence between these sup-posed differences and the passage of time, as the index of body and dialogue, metaphorical, of course, with life.