A thought-provoking poetic arc interconnects the never-before-exhibited series of drawings titled “Passion and Glory” to images that, since 1981, have reverberated in engravings, paintings, photographs, videos, and performances by Monica Barki. They are sharp observations about what unites couples – the way unequal partners attract and sometimes face each other – launched into an ambivalent territory between the factual and the imaginary.
Women in different emotional states – distant, masked, naked or triumphant – are protagonists of these encounters. Light is shed on the agreements, modes of domination and surrender which are kept secret in the intimacy of couples. A certain analytical intuition leads to a mapping of the oppression, against which Barki sets up unexpected counterattacks and accurate revolutions.
In “Passion and Glory”, by investigating the Shibari, a practice of body tying inherited from the medieval Japanese tradition, a tenuous boundary between desire and the sacred is explored. The sublime is revealed on the threshold of suffering in relationships of trust and surrender with an unsettling erotic character.
Differently, in two versions of “Finally Engaged…”, which play with the desire of not seeing, the marriage link is approached as a concealment of desire. The 1981 engraving is displayed under a veil imposed by judicial prohibition, side by side with a new photograph in which the artist and her companion reenact the covert pose. Still, distractedly, we deny the drive of the body, discreetly visible in both works. Each one, in distinct time and context, exposes the erotic bond restrained under the festive clothing of traditional wedding photographs.
Barki approaches the complex balance of every encounter, every union – whether those socially accepted, celebrated along the lines of religious tradition, or the temporary and marginal ones. By achieving an acute balance between seduction and critical humor, she dialogues indirectly with Brazilian artists of different generations, such as Márcia X (“Fabrica Falus”, “Drawing with rosaries”) and Lygia Pape (“Eat me – gluttony or lust” , “Objects of seduction”). It strengthens, with vigor, the extensive and necessary debate about the struggles, concerns, and desires of women.
By resuming images from the Internet, photographic records, videos, performances, and her own works, Barki opens a wide field of investigation that returns and takes her own female condition to the limit. She challenges stereotypes around sexuality, family, and social rites, from their own place of speech. On this sinuous time trail, marked by untimely appropriations, she tears up the veils of social play and follows the contradictory traces of a passion syndrome.
Rio de Janeiro, november 2019
Luiza Interlenghi
A piece of baggage does not represent an end in itself; it is brought along so that something new begins: a journey, a new cycle, a new life. As a summary of one’s heritage, a synthesis of the necessary, and an outline of identities, our baggage underlines our materiality and ephemerality, as well as the desire to go beyond this condition. The suspense lived in a baggage claim area is a metaphor for the alienating urgency of everyday life and the importance of hope. In this exhibition, each collage is a piece of baggage, personal and universal. The fragments remain intact, resulting in a whole that transcends the sum of its parts. A daughter of migration, Monica Barki gears up for the future by reconfiguring her past.
Rio de Janeiro, August 2018
Frederico Dalton
Here is something secret, allegedly revealed, though. Why not presuppose that the architecture mentioned in the title of the show may also refer to the architecture of this gallery? Thus, the space depicted in Barki’s photos and the spaces where these photographs are being shared become equal: motel rooms and an art gallery as moments of contact with a similar type of energy which gives visibility to instincts and feeds the visible as revelation. The secrets unveiled in the photographs and the ones kept in the viewers’ head collaborate in the construction of some sort of architecture of glance.
Just like a motel room is filled with images rebounding off mirrored walls, acts of undressing are intensely reflected and the visual is consecrated, an art gallery celebrates the cultural, predatory and stable qualities that exist in the glance. The motel room seems to tell us that sex will not exist unless it can be seen and multiplied as visual information as many times as possible as long as it is there. After all, the motel is a stage on which the visible charges by the hour. Mirrors multiply the lovers and create an audience of voyeurs made from them: a virtual public within the private.
Likewise, the glance of the visitors in an art show results from the reflections between the works, between the bodies and the place. It is a glance which, just like at a motel room, is born with its minutes numbered. Compared with the experience of someone listening to a concert, a type of fruition that extends over time and is much more mental than physical, at an art show the visitor skips from work to work as if experiencing little orgasms. There is anxiety within the experience of seeing. On what shall we focus? For how long? Either the whole or the part, what to prioritize? There is instability. Anxiety and instability characterize both love at a motel room and the trajectory of a visitor at an art show.
The world is made from relationships. And the ones that Monica Barki renders visible in this show (through sharp objects, erotic situations, sadomasochism) are as intense and powerful as the ones that visitors hide. Deep inside (as well as in appearances), it is basically a game for power. The visual exerts its power over sex, the artist exerts her power over the architecture, and the visitors exert their power over the artist, who then becomes their slave, who fragments herself, exposes herself and creates for them. A winner at martial arts and at the games that play out in her photos, she bows to the glance of the visitors of the show, who remain impassible, sovereign. Standing for just an instant in front of each of the photographs of the exhibition, they never lose their composure, apparently grasping everything they see. However, they know very well how to disguise their ignorance and incompleteness.
Monica Barki’s “The Architecture of Secrecy” is a show about relations, about the glance of power and the power of glance. Many agents perform here. And in the drama of these relationships what stands out is what can or cannot be said, what we assume to know about ourselves and the huge efforts we make to somehow exist. This is a show about the look of power, how it dresses, configures and organizes itself to best frame us; and about the power of the glance, about how the powerful glance of the visitor can undress us.
Rio de Janeiro, January 2017
Frederico Dalton
About Monica Barki’s exhibition “Architecture of Secrecy”
“Declaring” means to announce, to reveal, to make known… What does the exhibit’s title shed light on? First and foremost, it is possible to assert that it underlines the artist’s love of art as an emissary of personal truths. The artwork speaks on behalf of the artist. There is no “art for art’s sake”: her artwork is in charge of something. And that has to be rendered quite clear, which means it should be said in a way that promptly alludes to declarations of love. In Portuguese, the reflexive form of the verb to declare is typically used to express love, a feeling which, by the way, is often blamed for growing on self-delusion. In “I Declare” the artist professes her fascination with the magic and power of images, to which she assigns the duty of speaking for her.
Declaring is also to render clear. And Cultural History is the assemblage of a number of “clarifications” that, although pulling us out of the shadows, also spark off some other crises. For instance, the earth has left its stead of center of the universe; human mind is no longer an assembly of layers heading toward an indivisible, single core; images have been exposed as “simulacra,” biased by consumerism and shallowness. In fact, the very act of looking is under suspicion, as an accomplice of a canny plot to “discipline and punish.” Lastly, with the ubiquity of the Internet, vague personal identity boundaries may be evidenced. And nonetheless, in Barki’s work images, and mainly figuration, remain able to transmit truth.
As she addresses the matter, images are fair and dependable “spokespersons,” capable of conveying her incompleteness and dissatisfaction, and allowing her journey into self-awareness. And this is true not only for the finished images, arising out of a long crafting process, i.e., those shown in the paintings and drawings in this exhibition. In her most recent produce, the entire process to create large-sized paintings entails conferring a legit status on all source images, somehow reinvigorating them. Ultimately, a piece of work stands as a synthesis, insomuch as an assertion of diverse languages, diverse supports, and diverse images.
Each and every work stands as a continuous accumulation, gathering, and synthetizing of prior recordings, by means of a procedure that, meanwhile transcending a figuration produced in a given support, also makes them permanent. For instance, in the paintings of the “Cárcere’s” series, not only gender war is framed, but also a sort of interconnection between video, photography, and performance art.
Another example of the several synthetic efforts displayed in this show is represented by the pronoun “I” in its title. To whom this “I” refers? The most obvious answer is the artist herself, who attracts us, the viewers, as a sort of dominatrix into a mirror where we realize how numb we have grown to machismo and oppression. Furthermore, whenever a visitor or any person says, “I declare” (s)he will become a joint declarant with this transcendental “self,” ushered in by the show.
The artist’s self is disseminated through her faith in figuration. Even if a frame or drawing has sharp boundaries, each of them makes an invitation into the artist’s identity (an identity which also constitutes of her capacity of producing images of herself), to be collectively reshaped. In the Digital Revolution, figuration ventilates the discussion about the relations between image and identity, permanence and flow, virtuality and presence: the artist’s body is then a beacon that lights up the dilemmas of the viewers’ body in an era when keyboards usually intermediate human relations.
The exhibit is subdivided in four different rooms, which may be followed in a given order, which is: firstly, “The Syntheses Room,” displaying pieces that sum up, in a final image, the recordings made on different supports; afterwards, “The Metaphysics Room,” an environment that accentuates gloomy aspects through works about the human condition; “The Machinery Room,” with works put in motion by rotary mechanisms that invite us to think about the potential insufficiency of “pure” supports in the contemporary scene; and, lastly, “The Origin Room,” where we are set to re-encounter the first works and reflect about the integration between figuration and identity, a theme already addressed by the artist in the late 1970s. With such itinerary, the intention is to showcase and shed a new light on the syntheses accomplished throughout the many-hued lifework of Monica Barki, inviting viewers to follow a path until the starting point, where they may feel the bubbling of the Source of Images.
Rio de Janeiro, 2017
Text by Frederico Dalton
About the exhibit “Eu me declaro” (I declare), by Monica Barki
In an unidentified bedroom, one in which secrets transcend the borders of the bed sheets and are whispered by the walls, fables about the male and female become a mythological plot. Beings who are half-human, half-animal can be seen in their natural habitat, totally at ease, and with no worries about hiding themselves from collective moral values. That is where they live and rule, for they recognize those environments as genuine temples of freedom. These beings exist deep inside each individual, be them a man or a woman, cuddled up in a web where the body feels liberated.
Monica Barki’s photographs were taken at motel rooms, at an undisclosed town. By taking advantage of decoration, lighting and other elements that belong to those rooms, the artist creates autobiographical and universal narratives whose script is conflict, domination, fantasy, and sex. Half-naked bodies wearing animal masks act at the threshold of a nonsensical atmosphere worthy of sexual fantasies that lurk around the collective imaginary but which are often segregated to a subversive universe, if not completely repressed. Digitally manipulated, the series Lust inaugurates a new path for the photographic research of this artist, who places herself as the leading character of scenes loaded with eroticism and mystery, thus ushering the work towards a dialog with theater, film and painting.
Conflicting relationships have always been present in Barki’s work. From her early paintings, in the 1970’s, to her latest drawings, such as the series Lady Pink et ses garçons (2009-2011), the domination between genres has featured as central issue and arrives at this work as a timeless reflection about women’s social representation in the field of affective bonds. At the bottom of a patriarchally structured culture, women have always been understood as nothing more than mothers and wives, subjected to men and restrained from expressing their desires. By pursuing self-knowledge and the management upon her body, the artist focuses her entire production on the investigation about power games, exposing in her work a range of feelings associated with this context, such as anger, impotence, humiliation, authority and sovereignty.
That is why the photographs that make up Lust bring together Barki’s search for self-knowledge and the one of thousands of women struggling for the right to independence against sexist codes of conduct imposed to the society as a whole. The feminine in this work becomes a universal sign of sexual liberation and assertiveness in the decision of exposing intimate fantasies. The work affirms the sexual intercourse as a rite, just like pre-historical civilizations saw it as a religious cult, with prostitute-priestesses safeguarding their temples. As centuries went by and the middle age settled in, taboos were constructed and rules to sexual behavior consolidated themselves by means of religious and governmental institutions as a measure for controlling society, only to loosen up as late as in the 1960’s, with a political and identity-oriented connotation. In Lust, sex as spirituality and redemption joins a discourse about body and genre, which gets more and more engaged these days, and turns the work into tribute to its own history.
The artist’s resorting to the image of the unicorn as the face of this exhibition has not happened by accident. As a symbol of purity, chastity and power, the equine represents the penetration of the divine into the Virgin Mary. They are magical, tame and fabulous creatures, though wild as well, and difficult to subdue, their capture being only possible to immaculate women.
Rio de Janeiro, september 2014
Beatriz Lemos
In Self-portrait with a mirror,[i] what we see on the canvas is the artist herself, from her back, making a self-portrait with the help of a mirror that she is holding in her hand, in which she observes one of her eyes. Besides the reference to the Velázquez’s painting, what can be seen is a girl in a plain dress and what can be supposed is the presence of another mirror, invisible to us, that shows to the artist – and to her only – her back. It is all about a blind field, which is discussed in this painting and in a part of Barki’s work: what is shown reveals what is hidden, says Elisa de Magalhães. Or still, as in Didi-Huberman, what we see is what looks at us. In this case, we face the game of the artist’s gaze, looking at herself in the mirror in her hand, in the hidden mirror, and in the canvas as a spectator of herself, standing next to us, apparently as an accomplice, but actually almost without offering herself to the view. What we see is not her body, nor the image of her body, but only her eye.
In the canvas The Banquet, from 1976, the image of the artist offers itself naked on a dining table, set for a party of six. Once again, nothing is seen from this naked body. There are only denotations. I believe that this sort of evasion is part of the artist’s strategy, as we can notice in some of her latest photographs.
The presence of photography in Monica Barki’s work dates back to her first pieces, more precisely to her prints that originated from family album photographs. By the way, one of them even led to her being sued by a relative. It is in this period that a certain unforgivingness can be noticed, and the dissolution of her own family, her preferred subject matter and model. This will have repercussions later on in works like Coco bobo and Ana C., where the artist dissolves into herself and/or into her model, that is: she is, even when she isn’t. The slightest change of a forgiving doesn’t exist anymore. I believe it is in these works that the tour de force that distinguishes her discourse can be found: the artist “unveils” herself in order to remain veiled: she “re-veils” herself.
The family bond, however, doesn’t dissolve completely. Her family’s factory is featured in an installation made with coffee powder and sewing machines in the exhibition Orlândia, in 2001. The more-than-Baroque excesses of her assemblages and her frenzy of sewing and colors also provide another strong and coherent association with her current phase, if one can identify “phases” in a work that is a continuous process: the ambience of sex motel rooms, which some senseless architect has created by trying to guess our sex manias and the our potential for arousal and desire, is present in a large group of photos conceived by Monica Barki, which have not been exhibited yet. In these ambiances there is a predisposition to the Kitsch and to exaggeration and art nouveau volutes are combined with art déco angles as if Jiri Mucha or Aubrey Beardsley were made to draw only in straight lines.
If perversion and debauchery are either exposed or suggested in the images collected from the internet, and which serve as “live” models for Lady Pink et ses garçons, what gives itself to the view is the artist’s command of the pencil on the paper, which affirms the mastery of the perfectly trained hand.
In the current photographs, the large number of mirrors will not go unnoticed, as well as the image of the artist always veiled in some way. What immediately catches the eye is the naked body. Actually, the body is never naked, visible, in full frontal, exposed: there is always some kind of interdiction: a veil, a mask, even its positioning in the image, like in Two Mirrors, as affirming a hide-and-seek game. In the pictures taken at sunrise by the wisdom, the body that seems to be naked is actually standing in such a powerful backlight that it cannot be defined. It cannot be defined, but one can suppose it. Perhaps it is here that the artist unveils herself: when she allows for suppositions.
I also point out the fact that one cannot see who operates de camera: it is clearly that it is not the artist (except in Getúlio), which suggests that the camera has been carefully positioned not to allow its operator to be seen in the mirror, thus eliminating the identity /identification of the accomplice/non-partner: it is all about creating a work of art in a solo authorship. Some of the photos could even have been taken by means of a self-timer, but the posture of the artist in the scene implies the presence of the other, and in this case, the other is us, the viewer. The first other, the self-timer, will be present, however, even if some retouch program is used – such as Photoshop –, what dates back to the time when prints were made. By the way, it is the retouching that one can notice coldness, present here in the chosen tones of color, as well as in the powerful presence of painting. Although a photo camera has been used, the photographic character has been removed: perhaps the artist is painting with different media.
The dominating/dominated stance appears in the allegoric use of some animals, fantastic or not, such as the King Kong-like gorilla, the Unicorn woman and the Lizard men, besides the artist herself, climbing the walls or cornered. The expression “climbing the walls” refers to Lust, the title of the exhibition. In a simple reading of the myth of the Unicorn, which is not for this text to analyze, this fabulous beast has an Oriental origin, associated with the Third Eye and with the access to Nirvana, with the return to a Center and to the Unity, towards the inner transmutation that constitutes the primeval androgyny[ii]. It is also present in the dream is one of Freud’s patients, who is violently critical in regard to this, what prompts Lacan to discuss this violence itself. Lacan[iii] evokes Serge Leclaire’s formula, “poordjeli”, a word created from the expression pauvre Philippe, used by the mother of a patient of Leclaire, who used to dream of the Unicorn to make her son sleep. In French, Unicorn is licorne, and thus “poordjeli” is born from the sonority of pauvre, je (I) with the syllable “li” from licorne and from Philippe, which allows one to “introduce in this sequence a whole chain in what his desire becomes alive” and affirms that the interpretation is a signification the gives rise to an irreducible signifier. Let’s keep in mind that in the definition by Houaiss a signifier is the acoustic image that is associated with a meaning in a language to form the linguistic sign [According to Saussure, this acoustic image is not the material sound, i.e., the spoken word, but the psychic impression of this sound.] In other words, the signifying chain determines the dream and the structure of the language is inherent to the unconscious. It is not desire, but pleasure which must be taken into consideration, and both have to be considered in opposition. An excerpt from a text by psychoanalyst Conrado Ramos states that:
“On the side of the symbolic a Poordjeli is useful to name the desire of the Other and to empty the real in the symbolic. If a Poordjeli can be the real phallus, it is to him that the function of verifying the puncture is assigned, that is, to knot together two consistencies that, without being produced by him, continue running free: the Symbolic and the Symptom. The puncture is not ontologically previous to the spit; it is the act of spitting out the puncture that generates the cause of the puncture, through which the puncture verifies itself. A Poordjeli can be, for this reason, the material support of the puncture, for the puncture is what an endless straight line performs in a space.”[iv]
The Unicorn represents the maternal phallus and Philippe’s refusal to accept her mother’s castration.
What allows us the next step: the Unicorn has a threaded horn just like the screw of the drill in Getúlio. Masked heads, horns and drills stand for the same and one phallus and reinforce the domination game, with the recurrent veiling in the paintings shown in the anti-striptease of the order of images. Let’s keep in mind that the Unicorn, besides being a male dream, is exclusively male (except in its primeval Unity), as said before; and the toad-lizard may be the fantasy of Prince Charming in which repulsion and desire are combined.
The exhibition is titled Desire[v] appropriately. Here there is no pleasure, there is no complementation, there is no freedom. There is no revelation; they are digital images, only images that meet our eyes, our imagination, exposed images that take issue with the experience of pleasure and with frustrations that are laid bare.
As someone who is going to bathe in water or in sex – or possibly only get some fresh air – the artist drops her panty all rolled up on the ground. Multiple choices.
Rio de Janeiro, agosto de 2014
Wilton Montenegro
[i] Barki, Monica. Monica Barki: Sensitive Files. Rio de Janeiro: Aeroplano, 2011. This issue can be studied more deeply through the Reading that Lacan did of Lewis Carroll’s Through the Looking-Glass, in Seminar 11.
[ii] The myth of the primeval androgyny is present in the Upanishads, in Adam Kadmon, in the Kabballah; in the Old Testament, in the book of Genesis; in the second Surah of the Quran, in Plutarch and in Plato’s Symposium.
[iii] Feldstein, Richard, Fink, Bruce and Jaanus, Maire. To read Lacan’s Seminar 11. Rio de Janeiro: Jorge Zahar ed., 1997.
[iv] Ramos, Conrado. The Singularity and the “university” of the ends and consequences. Os Desafios de AEs. In http://fcl-fortaleza.blogspot.com.br/2011/08/iii-encontro-internacional-da-escola_29.html. Fortaleza: Escola de Psicanálise dos fóruns do campo lacaniano, 2011.
[v] Exhibition Lust. Curated by Beatriz Lemos. Rio de Janeiro: TAC Gallery, 2014.
New geometric games: between feelings and method
In the everyday use of garden hoses and electric appliances with their conspicuous wires and cables, Monica Barki comes across the formal and symbolic potential of the plastic tube. Besides being interesting because of their endless variety of colors, malleability and widths, tubes allow us to reflect on communication between different kinds of matter and the safe and efficient conveyance of energy and information. However, their utilitarian nature and its shape reduced to the maximum by a clearly defined function also talk about the controlling of a flow. Just like a maestro conducting an orchestra, a tube is both the facilitator of a spurt and the perfect regulator.
It is also some sort of reconciliation between feelings and method what Monica Barki carries out in her series New geometric games (1991), shown at the São Paulo International Biennial this year. In the exhibition room there are baskets containing pieces of tubes in diverse colors and lengths. Visitors are asked to choose some and fit them into gaps cut out in large-format pictures. These paintings, which in actual fact are geometric compositions despite the lack of strictly straight lines, are the third player in this game. Fitting a new tube will continuously change the relationship among the areas of the painting, thus creating a new whole.
The freedom within limits available to the viewers-participants of New geometric games serves as a metaphor for Geometric Painting itself, which usually makes use of pre-rationalized forms (squares, triangles, rectangles) to present a mystery without which art cannot exist.
Rio de Janeiro, 2011
Frederico Dalton
Eduardo and Verônica form a pair with contrasting heights. Characters that live in a drawing by Monica Barki, they are shown in front of a sofa in a hotel room, under the light of a side lamp. The exaggerated elongation of the female figure woman causes her face to be projected upwards. The upper part of the background – in front of which she seems to watch us – becomes indistinct. The wall looks like an enigmatic, turbid sky. That is where an odd horizon is formed, a romantic allegory that dates back to the extreme limits of all things human. With its unexpected depth, it alludes to images of the far away, of disappearance. We know, through Bachelard, that poetics of distance evoke the loss of oneself, the finitude[1]. In the world inhabited by this couple – common to the drawings from the same period –, the sense of humanity is like a horizon drawn in interior spaces: hotel rooms, brothels, fighting rinks. In these allegoric havens, gigantic, crafty, smiling, violent women confront fragile, subdued, fetish-like men, just like small Eduardo. The body, the classic emblem of subjectivity, is clearly addressed to once again. Women and men verge on aberration; they face one another physically in limit situations.
Departing from videos and photographs captured on the Internet, the appropriated image is printed out, reconfigured, blown up and transferred to paper, on which the artist intervenes graphically. Both on the computer screen and in the atmosphere of one’s home, a barely clear infinite opens itself. In it, the woman’s height greatly surpasses that of the man. More than portrayed individuals, the pairs formed by Barki – Lady Pink et ses garçons, Rachel and Tony, Eduardo and Verônica – are bearers a strange emotional typology which is gradually revealed through confrontation. The fight unfolds in several rounds. The artist gathers, observes and interrogates. Such incoherent, delirious, gloom-natured humanity, we know, would not be that intensely observable in open air, in broad daylight. So, opaque strokes of a pencil, with an artisanal, authorial character contaminate the anonymous records. The drawing remakes the digital image with groping movements of the hand, the vigor of the stroke and the intimate modulation of the color.
In transferring images that circulate without the institutional stamp of art, Barki tangentially touches on the poetics of the New Brazilian Figuration, which partially indentified itself with American Pop Art. Artists like Rubens Gerchman, the first director of the Escola de Artes Visuais do Parque Lage, where Barki attended print courses, invested in a Pop imaginary (soccer, newspaper reports, collective means of transportation and multifarious perspectives on the urban), as chronicle and review of life in the metropolis. The treatment of the figure by several artists, as claimed by Frederico Morais, “after the decline of geometrical and informal abstraction, oscillates between the critical field (New Figuration, Narrative Figuration) and ideological neutrality (in fact, only an apparent one: Pop Art, Hyperrealism)”.[2] If, then, right at the peak of the 1960s, the big city was considered the major emblem of social structures associated with mass culture, ten years after the turn to the 21st century, digital media, interactivity and mobility make up an all-new field in which the meanders of the human condition can be tracked.
Amidst the flows through which the digital image circulates, Barki has access to a dysfunctional, tortuous, grotesque and frequently funny imaginary, due to its caricature-like allegories of weaknesses, perversions and pleasures (kept secret, as often as possible, in havens of sparse visibility). The seven drawings of the series Lady Pink et ses garçons (2009) are like photograms of a sequence whose fetish-scene alludes to male sexual initiation, presented here as a wrestling event. With her own body, the woman holds down a fragile opponent – and grins. The subject is resumed in the diptych Blade Runner (2009) which, humorously evokes the conflicts discussed in the Ridley Scott classic regarding the transposing of the limits of the human body. To Barki, in the post-human fight between man and woman, the latter is the one who has the upper hand. In The medium is the massage (2010), absurdity is handled with irony. The huge woman uses her crushing body to massage a thin, disproportionally smaller man, whom she subjugates with all her weight. Analyzing the period that precedes the strengthening of digital media, when the importance achieved by television allowed for the prediction of major changes, McLuhan claimed that, besides being the reason behind social structures, media would have an even bigger impact on life, becoming extensions of human beings. As it is the case in Barki’s output, these extensions of the social body would eventually, as we know, replace the metropolis as the privileged field of investigation about contemporary societies.
The raw material for the first paintings by Barki had been photographs taken by her in the streets, in her life with her family or in poses conceived for a painting. At that time, what was going on was a circular exercise in which the observation of the Other was linked with self-knowledge.
In the decade where feminism was strengthening itself – consider the summoning from Hélène Cixous for each woman to participate actively in her own story and to do this on her own initiative –, the budding artist risked a self-portrait. With her back to the beholder of the picture, she, almost a girl, sees her image reflected in a hand mirror which has the shape of a woman’s profile. She is holding a brush and pointing it to the large blank canvas. Her face is occult, but, it is partially reflected in the small mirror through which her eyes meet ours. The emptiness of the screen seems infinite. The task awaiting the fragile brush will be monumental.
In that same year, in O Banquete, (The Banquet) the painting is configured as a table seen from above. She is ready for a solemn meal: crimson tablecloth, crystal and china. In the center, once again with her back to the beholder, instead of the main dish, there lies the body of the artist, as offering herself to being tasted. Both paintings, and other works from the same period, contain indications of the sinuous process of self-knowledge. With No Cabeleireiro (At the Hairdresser) (1978), for example, Barki peers into the behind-the-scenes where female stereotypes are produced. The painting brings to the limelight the phases which precede the drama of the big hairdos and red fingernails. At the beauty salon, under the “cupola” of the hair drier, the hair rollers mold the women’s outline. She seems to be daydreaming while checking the polish on her nails. But she is not ready yet.
The performance that is equivalent to maleness is presented with humor in Saiba usar a cabeça (1978), a painting made from a photograph of a shop window with wigs for men that also displays the “before and after”. The same man reappears with a new value and the smile of someone who refuses imitations: who uses only “genuine false hair” from that manufacturer. The use of photography led the artist to American Hyperrealism and to juggling with the limits between the screen and the world (the edges of the painting coinciding with those of the shop window).
The first paintings from Barki were those which insistently send out signals with the deepest restlessness in her trajectory: her formation, self-consciousness and the different configurations of identity of women established in the social game.
A gallery of incongruent characters make up Álbum de família (1982), lithographs developed at the print workshop of Parque Lage, simultaneously to the period of training at the Centro de Pesquisa de Arte.[3] The series of black and white portraits include, in traditional poses, – birth, birthday, wedding, graduation –, indications (not always subtle ones) of private whims, veiled complicities, desires and traits of character frequently erased from family representations, breaking with the tacit agreement that keeps the family united. Although several characters of this series are part of her collection of photographs – which has resulted in personal and legal conflicts with her own family – the types make up an iconography of the dilemmas typical of every family life and which cannot be disconnected from social relationships. Álbum de família constitutes itself as a silent statement, nevertheless impactful, of perceptions and conflicts resulting from a first positioning of the artist on the threshold of her private world, an atmosphere in which she could test the outlines of a broader social dynamics.
Having overcome the impact of Geração 80, who opposed the previous politicization and dematerialization of art, the approaches of the system of art assumed different strategies, hardly congregated into a single front.[4] In Novos jogos geométricos, (1991) Monica Barki’s works start including elements that could be handled by the public, who could fit them into the cutout canvas. Reconsidered as a game, the painting would incorporate the verse and reverse of the canvas, occasionally interconnected by plastic ducts. Immersed, due to maturity, in children’s imaginary, she explores the threshold between the geometry of colorful toys, which become part of her everyday life, and the Brazilian constructive tradition.
The playful character of painting, strengthened in the debate by Geração 80, is resumed with irony by means of comments that underline and buy-and-sell regime of the work of art, a game ruled by the gallery owner. The work O Jogo do marchand, (1991) made up of schemes, lines and markings that remind of a closed circuit, evokes the dominating positioning of the marchand as a middleman between artists and market.
In this artist’s trajectory, the critical comments, the subverted celebrations (like in Banquete), irony and catharsis are based on her experiences, tinted with the affective intensity of the moment, watered with the fluids that spring in the small cavities of unexpected feelings, unique and at times extremely painful.
In the 1990s, her paintings are usually realized by using collages of fragments of images manipulated in a photocopier as the raw material. Tridimensional objects, such as fabric, embroidery, jewels, rugs, dolls and threads, besides magazine cutouts and an old-fashioned women’s encyclopedia are processed graphically – at times, by chance –, in small montages that are blown up onto large-scale canvases. They can be grouped in two categories. In the first, under the total impact of painting, the fragments mix themselves visually into whirlwinds of color and form, whose subtleties led to an investigative attitude. It is not about a game of hide-and-seek. On the contrary, the painting sustains the indetermination of the image to capture the glance in a sort of emotional transference with which the observer involuntarily completes the indefinite regions. These works are close to the poetics of the Informal. Keeping themselves partially open, they welcome the imaginary of those who observe them. Unexpectedly, then, the observer is led to catch, with the corner of the eye, his or her own image reflected there.
Another set of works that are close to the procedure of Cubist collage and Dada montage. Fragments of text, images within an image and planes of color interact in a game of varied combinations. Setting themselves apart form works where maternity was implicit, paintings like Denise e sua beleza clássica, Mme. Brunnaut and As Probabilidades de sucesso no casamento, all from 1994, hack back, in a different way, to women’s condition. Vestido em pedaços (1996), for example, amasses fragments of women’s figure that socially rule women’s identity. The two words “and still” makes fun of the addition of one more layer of ruffles to the awkward outfit, mounted on a dummy. The painting is almost Matissean: the planar palette brings together disparate elements – a fruit bowl and a head severed from it body. Her flowered hat and the red lips are cut out against the background in which a small, dreamlike female figure is wrapped in a whirlwind of colors. But Vestido em pedaços does not celebrate the female universe. All its elements are parts of a woman who is oddly absent, incomplete, distant. The classical beauty and the goals of a French handbook in which the precepts by Mme. Brunnaut teach women to become someone – as long as to a man – are mere fetishes.
In his essays on sexuality, Freud stresses that the forming of fetish involves the replacement of the whole by the part and that this breaking up of a unity takes place in what is seen. Visual impression is the one which rouses the highest excitement – hence, all considerations on beauty, form, color or brightness of everything with which desired is associated. Art drives the interest in the opposite direction: from the part to the whole, allowing for the overcoming of the dimension of fetish. Interwoven with the deviations of desire, wouldn’t art be a privileged world for the investigation of the female universe? [5]
Matrices that differ from the photographs previously used, the images from the Internet that since 2009 Barki have been making her own constitute themselves as fragments from that social body predicted by McLuhan. The artist observes it, collecting modalities from different genres and the relationships between the two – relationships of subjugation, desire, anger. However, the processes adopted in the capture and editing – sensitive cutouts in that ever-expanding archive –, also work in a reverse direction, as the tracking of one’s own veiled emotions and, at times, catharsis.
Rio de Janeiro, October 2011
Luiza Interlenghi
[1] I am referring to Gaston Bachelard’s thoughts in em A água e os Sonhos. São Paulo: Martins Fontes, 1997.
[2] Frederico Morais in the entry Neofiguração in Enciclopédia virtual Itaú Cultural. Pageview in October 2011.
[3] The lessons at Centro de Pesquisa de Arte, with Bruno Tauz, the heir of a didactics adopted by Ivan Serpa and which is focused on self-knowledge, would frequently be more welcoming to figuration than to a conceptual debate. In both cases, what one sought were humanistic connections with an analytical character, a central aspect in Monica Barki’s work.
[4] In the 1970s, the identification of the art market with Capitalism itself would lead to a critical stance towards the so-called circuit of art, which was considered an extension of the Capitalist system. The material presence of the piece of art, especially in painting, was fiercely attacked as a fetish-object. It is against the radicalization of this stance that painting will be approached again later on. Heralded as the rediscovery of a generation, the new interest in painting fostered the reactivation of the market and the opening of new galleries in the biggest cities in Brazil.
[5] I am resuming some reflections published in my text as the curator of the exhibition Deslocamentos do Feminino (2000).
Today’s world is marked by disposable consumption, haste, superficial relations and hindered thinking. It is a world mediated by mass communication vehicles that stimulate this process. The massive amount of information available at any given second leads to a relation with things and people where thought and contemplative attitude decrease in inverse proportion to this increased flux. Thus, the relation that gets established is one of diminished contact with reality, experience and reflection.
In Lady Pink et ses garçons, Monica Barki has captured images on the internet and used them as the basis to produce her drawings. By extracting images from the global network of computers and reinterpreting them by means of pencil and textured paper, the artist restores the unique character of the work of art in a new context, through an operation that veers towards the fake typographies of Roy Lichtenstein, who appropriated and reinterpreted images from comic strips. Making use of home videos posted on YouTube, identifiable by their disregard for fancy finishing, resolution and image quality, Barki expresses with her art the characteristics of a new time: the YouTube aesthetics.
Her works — among them the brilliantly ironic The medium is the massage (1 and 2), also shown in this exhibition — subvert the electronic medium and disconnect the image from the web, where the circulation and maintenance of the network are configured in the meaning itself. Strangely isolated, having their visual aspect altered and the immateriality of their bytes and ions embodied in graphite, these wrestling matches acquire a new meaning, in an original code that is incommunicable on a digital scale of values. It is the artist who distinguishes, in an analytical/creative process, the elements that will constitute the work of art. The low resolution of the original videos is transformed into an array of granulations and marks that reiterate the draftsmanship process, perceptible in the well-adjusted outlines and in the play of chiaroscuros that shape the strange characters. Despite its realism, Lady Pink et ses garçons reveals the manual craft that is lost in photographic reproductions. It is something copy-proof. And it demands the presence of a viewer.
Outside the web, these videos that are turned into drawings acquire a new visibility, being submitted to a double suspension. Devoid of movement, they return to the photographic realm, the root of every (so-called) technological art. Secondly, they are stripped of any documental aspect they might still be attached to. There is something dangerously ambiguous in these drawings, whose uncertain similitude with reality as we understand it unsettles the boundaries between matter and memory.
Through subtle anatomical deformations, the minutely executed drawings of Monica Barki focus on the winning, fighting woman on wrestling rings or in its symbolic double, the whorehouses and alcoves. Thus, Barki subverts the gaze upon the feminine condition, a recurrent issue of her production. The logic of domination is inverted — female wrestlers overpower and humiliate the male figure with super-human bodies, with mockery and abundance. The feminine supremacy has a biographical and sociological dimension. Not to mention an artistic one.
Rio de Janeiro, July 2010
Mauro Trindade
New paintings by Monica Barki resume old issues
Some notions resist time. The notion that there is some private, feminine, passive and emotional space that erotically stimulates and shelters the power of men, the inhabitants of an external space and holder of rational interests, originates in the 18th century. And it persists until today. Monica Barki dislocates this order which has been propping up most of the conceptual architecture still in power. In the six canvasses that make up her exhibition at Galeria Anna Maria Niemeyer entitled Ana C. e outras histórias [Ana C. and other stories] but also in her prints, the artist, as the large character-puppet, Ana C embodies this passivity which is ready to receive men’s power.
As a character from the Mamulengo puppet show, Ana is avid; she deceives you. Ana, the lustful, as said in the verses by Monica Barki. But she is also an exposed Ana, with her lifeless arms which are jolted about by those who handle her. An Ana who is tied up by two strong men (in one of her previous exhibitions) and, immobilized, goes to the slammer.
This one is the clearest manifestation. There are others. The canvas A compra (The purchase) depicts a pitiful, experienced skin-wall which, nevertheless, still offers itself, as a whore, in a commercial transaction. It is all about, at first sight, the well-know statement one gets to through antithesis, through the search for something which is peripheral, anonymous, individual, unsuccessful and pitiful, an isotopic nucleus to be loaded with multifarious affects by a large part of women’s creativity, even in contemporary days.
The first canvas one sees, upon entering the gallery, is Na varanda do nosso apê (On the balcony of our flat). In it, the warning that a displacement exists, a cross-pollination between the two traditional positionings of men’s and women’s space. A field of parallel lines (the grid) and a set of four-squares (the windows) form a geometric, rational structure. However, in one of the windows there sits the Devil with open legs. And, mind you, the balcony is seen from outside, from the street, and not from the private space in the interior of the flat.
It is on the street that Monica Barki is to be found. She understands and represents women’s space, she knows this being-in-the-world. But it is from a men’s space that she things the former. The term postmodern, for being wrongly used so often, has lost all credibility.
But Barki’ language includes a deconstruction – a very up-to-date one, which has nothing to do with the 18th century – by means of decentralization of the author (she makes uses of posters, photos, elements of Cordel literature, digital manipulation); irony (another of her paintings is entitled Ana querida… [Ana, dear…]); the problematization of the mimetic representation (a devil?!); a blend of noble and working-class techniques; and the imbrication between the icon and the deviation: in Retrato de Monike [Portray of Monike], the figure is wearing the same dress as Ana C., but on her face she has a determined expression of someone who is the holder of a not necessarily benign power.
On another clef, the artist also deconstructs the words featured in her pieces. Not syntagmas anymore, but sounds, only sounds, repeated, deviated sounds, in one more subversion of the rational (and of men’s logic).
There is one more turn on this screw. Ana C. is a Mamulengo puppet, a traditional figure of the Brazilian Northeastern culture: Chique & Xique was born from a photo taken at the São Cristóvão fair, there are jaguars and alligators cited in one of her collages. From the gigantic, lifeless puppet we move to another giant, this one asleep on a splendid cradle. Monica Barki understands and represents a form of eroticism, moves away from it to think it over and includes, in this thought, a political view.
In 1982, she had her first exhibition, a family album. In it, the same eroticization visible in interferences on posed, traditional pictures.
It is resumption and a step beyond.
Rio de Janeiro, April 2006
Elvira Vigna
On Monica Barki´s bobbins of paper
Monica Barki, better known for her pictorial work, began her artistic career, nevertheless, with the polemical series of lithographs produced from pictures of her own family: photographs of relatives were manually reproduced with subtle, erotic-tinged touches added to them. These were interferences that proceeded from the artisanal mastery of the artist, who at that time was interested in questions of hyperrealism.
More than twenty years having elapsed since those initial experiments, Monica has recently resumed her investigative work in graphics. The Bobbins that she has been producing result from the combination of images frequently inspired by popular motifs – for example, the “clothesline” or chapbook literature of Brazil´s Northeast, the cordel –, repeatedly reproduced on large rolls of industrialized wrapping paper wound around bobbins used in rotative presses.
Differently from the almost photographic nature of her lithographs, the images printed on the bobbins [of paper] do not possess any realistic or naturalistic content. They do not conceal their manual origin, nor the conventions present in the materials put out in a printing establishment of the popular classes of urban Brazilian culture either, as much in regard to their configuration of forms as in their thematic contents. The artisanal quality of the images, though unequivocal, is subverted, nevertheless, by its serial and mechanical printing on regular intervals of the bobbins of paper. The poetic aspect of these works of Barki´s leans on tension between the artisanal production and the industrial processes of reproduction of the image. Added to this tension, there are other significances that complement the syntax of the Bobbins.
It is well known that the logic of the art market is based primarily on the greater value set on the unique work, almost always artisanal. Being in serial form implies the inevitable depreciation of the value of the work of art. It cannot but sound strange, therefore, that many artists-painters, for example, adopt criteria of the value of their works based solely on their size. Would it be that quality and size are irreconcilable requisites for the acquisition of works of art? It is this that Barki´s ironic parody seems to be pointing out when she sells her images, whether they are on fabrics or on paper, by the meter.
Rio de Janeiro, September, 2004
Fernando Cocchiarale
Hands poised for action, gun-phallus that explodes and a target, a victim: a woman with her mouth to the gun-phallus, a repeated-image-woman riddled with holes. “THE GUY POINTS THE GUN AT THE OTHER [GUY], HE MISSES THE BODY, GRAZES THE FINGER, BUT THE SURPRIZE IS DOWN BELOW. HA! HA! HA!“. In Monica Barki´s O Cabra (Tiroteio 1) – The Gunman (Shooting 1) – 2002, the poorly written sentence in crooked letters reinforces the conflict among the characters presented. The most dramatic of Monica´s series of flexographs, O Cabra, deals directly with the heightening tension between man and woman as a consequence of poverty and social exclusion, the dominating theme of the group of works presented at the Ibeu Art Gallery.[1]
In the large rolls of paper attached to the Gallery walls – ANA GANA ANA CANA; COCO BOBO; QUITÉRIA; O CABRA (TIROTEIO 1), or BOLINHO DE AIMPIN,[2] Monica Barki presents a series of repeated images and texts as one continuous pattern. Some rolls of these flexographs also appear on table supports with a serrated edge that allows the artist to cut lengths of the printed pattern. Each fragment then begins to circulate as an autonomous work.
With the rise of lithography, says Walter Benjamin in his seminal text on art in the era of reproduction, it has become possible to illustrate daily life with an ease greater than painting allows. Modern mass reproduction and the rise of photography weakened the cult value until then associated with an original work. But even today, the cult value of the work of art has not been completely lost and Benjamin himself had already observed the resistance of this cult value in the photographic portrait that reveres human expression.
The matrices of Monica´s flexographs are not original in the pre-modern sense, but a montage of found graphic patterns and edited, digitized photos already destined for reproduction. These matrices can be printed on various supports and attach to different surfaces. The value of art is a complex question that concerns critics, institutions, patrons, and curators. But under the rule of capitalism, in which everything is regulated according to the market, whether the work is a unique one or a reproduction, art always has a market value. Monica Barki´s series of works being shown together at the Ibeu Art Gallery invests in the maximal reproduction of the work as a strategy of disseminating and rescuing the Human.
In the series of photos that document the performance Coco Bobo, a couple is rolled up and immobilized by a bandage on which the same words, appropriated from a roadside sign, are printed. Over-dependence in marriage is an issue in this work. The artist also points to the loss of identity as a symptom of this perceived imprisonment. Tied to the other by a bandage, says Monica, the body becomes a doll without individuality, a “coco bobo”.
Ana C., the character created from the photo of a puppet show doll, is the central icon of the exhibition. She reappears in the paper rolls, bandages, rubber prints, and a series of photographs. In the early 1980s, Monica painted traditional family portraits with ironical interventions that made the perverse features of family life discernible. In her recent works, the artist has broadened her field of observation and changed the organization of the structure of the image. In Ana C., 2002, Monica portrays a character through the use of a cyclical structure, typical of the repeated chants in children´s ring games and in the refrains of popular songs. The figure of Ana C., the yellow of the wig against the black background and the light color of the face which is formed from the blank area left on the white paper, is repeated in the matrix image itself. From each block of four identical images rises an arc with rays emerging upwards from it. Within the arc there are snapshots of the woman-puppet that gradually recede, to dissolve. Without the color of the wig and with the fading contour, Ana C. ceases to irradiate, and to exist.
Monica arranges her source materials as if they were pieces of a jigsaw puzzle made of travel pictures, incomplete stories, or the common signs affixed to the stands of roadside vendors. The photographic record is manipulated by means of digital technology. The artists combines these fragments in different ways, manipulating them like the dolls she took snapshots of on the way to the State of Pernambuco, until they begin to take on new senses and tell new stories. Re-edited and printed on other surfaces – rolls of paper, rubber plates, rolls of bandage – the images comment on the developments in the forms of economic domination of the body, sex, and freedom of expression.
Presented without the formal realism of her portraits of the 1980s, Monica´s characters show the other face of the police news and the life of the inhabitants of the large urban agglomerations. They speak of broader social issues, such as violence towards women and the sexism that comes with crime and a volley of bullets.
There is no end to the story of Ana C., only a repetition of the same story. Each of the story-images created by Monica – with their economy of elements, few words, parts of figures, solid colors – cuts out fragments of the artist´s day-in, day-out experiences and reorganizes them into one whole, a visual parable.
Fortaleza, Ceará, Brazil, March, 2003
Luiza Interlenghi
[1] Flexography is a rotary press technique that uses a photopolymer matrix applied over a cylinder to print, with continuity, on bobbins of paper.
[2] Tr.´s N. ANA GANA ANA CANA, COCO BOBO (silly/foolish coconut) – somewhat nonsensical rhymes that children invent; QUITÉRIA – a feminine name; BOLINHO DE AIMPIN – cassava croquette (in correct Portuguese spelling, AIMPIM, not AIMPIN).
These profuse, abundant paintings and these assemblages of baroque inspiration from Monica Barki are the result of a process of slow depuration. A process performed by eyes and hands that learned to be attentive and patient, that learned how to refrain the eagerness to retain and produce what is visible; eyes and hands that, having learned, pass through deliquescent grounds, devising mobile mazes and kaleidoscopes, a plethora of shapes and senses.
An eagerness to retain what is visible because, just like words often spout as if reacting to silence, as if there was an emptiness to be filled, the look usually is satisfied with fluctuating above things. In its ordinary eagerness, the look does not focus, does not examine, does not see the adventure that is picking up the detail, that which is hidden within the folds, within the fissures, the interstices or that which, being more discreet, even being in the foreground, disappears before the boldness of luminous reflexes, of the impetus of the warmest colors that, like the scent of certain fruit, rise dominating the atmosphere.
There is also an eagerness to retain what is visible that is expressed through gestures. Our gestures, one should remember, are an answer to the world. They are good to accuse or to appease the impatience of incomprehension as that which surrounds us invades our senses. Fall into the first case the numberless gestures, from questioning to the interjections that punctuate our day-to-day lives, stressing our verbal manifestations or replacing them when we run into the inexpressible. The second category is that of the shaping gestures: images come to us and, so that we can better understand them, when we represent them, through a scribble or molding them into ordinary material.
Engaged in the task of retaining what is visible, eyes and hands are co-conspirators. Besides that, one should remember that trying and retaining it, both of them, together, dream it and eventually make real this dream, one might say they fabricate it. Although they belong to different species, both the repetitive ornaments which we distractedly cover with sheets of paper as we talk on the phone, products of a productive idleness and the thoughts that can be translated into graphics and prototypes, products of calculus and geometry, fall into that category.
Monica Barkis paintings and assemblages encamp in a peculiar way this universe of questions. Under titles such as The Eastern fruit bowl, Folds and necklaces and Embroidery with Spices, they appear as cornucopias of shapes and colors that boast into sinuous solutions, that curl on each other, entangle in its textures and patterns. All that imposes a constant moving into the eye of the observer, even if in his stroll he makes stops here and there, savoring that which he recognizes, like the beads, shells and pearls, the branches and the petals, the leftovers of a children’s toy, the living patterns of the fabric, the staccato pace of the complex lacework.
Monica Barki revisits the Baroque through surfaces that expand space through twist and mutual engulfing. At the same time, this reference is mixed with a modern concept of painting, close related to the all-over paintings of the expressionistic post-war abstract painting, where there are no hierarchies of levels, where the only logic is that of non-concentration, that opposes to conventional solutions of the background-image type. On these paintings, ourlook becomes stimulated to a non-stop stroll through fields that, through four sided, are too abundant and demanding to the completely explored.
More recent, Monica Barki’s assemblages take the fabric of visible to a point where the paintings, by nature, cannot reach. The world, specifically the domestic, personal world, of memory made matter into objects inherited and kept, is the unsuspected cornucopia of the artist. The house in which we live makes us remember these works, and receives, through time, the impact of our lives – desires, frustrations and petty little things to do – whatever turns the hardness and rigid geometry of its cement walls into something close to a cozy image to which we would like to return by the end of the day’s flame. Each house turns into a private reliquary where are gathered numberless objects that were one day desired, had a meaningful use, but, for some reason – maybe affection, since even objects can be the purpose of out passion – did not follow the cycle of being discarded and trash.
Monica Barki’s picks up skins, laceworks, sheets, quilts, handkerchiefs, socks, bags, purses, wallets, ropes, necklaces, and beads, strings, wood, and other, many other things, things that only a careful look is capable of counting, things that the artist, by her hands’ ingenuity, organizes and gathers juxtaposing and superposing, just like the guts of an organism that we don’t know but has to do – it sure has! – with memory, this physical and mental state where lived things collapse from its original times and spaces, in order to blend into a rythmless and infinite dance, into an immense vortex of which we are in the center.
Rio de Janeiro, march 2000
Agnaldo Farias
On the eve of the turn of the millennium, the evolutional belief is found lodged in memory, at least provisionally, of a time passing by with the swiftness of an arrow. We no longer have the illusion of a progressively better future and not even the pretension of knowing the exact nature of what this improvement would be.
In terms of art, there is also a certain desacceleration with regard to the new and to the rupture as the most important values. We are living in a period of skeptical eclecticism in which diverse tendencies are closely associated.
And the history that could have been banned from the specific space of the arts ostensibly comes to occupy, in a specific manner, the interior of some works. A few years ago, one of today´s most forceful artists, Anselm Kiefer, seemed absolutely obsolete to us with his particular reappropriation of German mythology, the Talmud, pre-modern painting techniques, war plans, and Nazi manuals. Now, along with his plastic refinement, what seduces us is the discomfort provoked by his boldness and conceptual skill in dealing with such delicate themes, until then considered irreconcilable.
Within this uncertain panorama, there are two fundamental requisites for a contemporary artist: knowledge of previous ruptures and a personal language. It is from the latter perspective, especially, that I propose a look at Monica Barki´s current production.
Throughout these more recent years, Monica has been developing one of the most personal languages in Rio de Janeiro´s contemporary art scene. Hers is a language consisting of a vast repertory, which includes biographical data, the condition of the woman, Judaic culture, bourgeois education, objects of her daily life, irony, pop culture, and references to geometrical abstractionism. New elements, colors, and forms appear in various phases of her work, accumulating diverse vocabularies in a language that, in changing, repeats itself.
To Monica painting is something unending, with no limits, and the means through which she relates to the world and in which she leaves her mark. With no end and with no way out, just as existence itself is: at the same time, a task and a liberation. Her painting, replete with fragments, functions like a jigsaw puzzle of images and facts of life that need to be told. Art is around her everywhere: in the detail of the bedroom carpet, in her children´s drawings, in the fabrics in her house, in the school primer, in her memory of external and internal landscapes, Monica Barki has no pretensions about making great declarations about the world, but her declarations of her own world. It is a painting of “small causes” and is strongly connected with the art of the specific issues of the 1990s.
The threads of her history, painting and embroidery keep being woven together as a way of recuperating, conversing with, and overcoming the elements of a feminine upbringing. Monica sometimes organizes the paintings as if they were a work of embroidery, repeating gestures that in the past involved not only pleasure, but an entire system of inculcation of habits and discipline. Not lacking in a melancholic irony, she resorts to these procedures as a way of exorcising them or, at least, experiencing them from another position.
In her present phase, the artist´s preoccupation is superimposed on her biographical preoccupation. One notes in her works an exacerbation of color, form, space, texture and material. The landscapes and memories are more internal, serving an essentially pictorial interest.
The box-objects began to appear in 1995 because of the artist´s wish to experiment with tridimensionality. In them, the objects are found, reappropriated and then abandoned; the biographical references stop being the point of arrival to constitute departure for a visual approach.
In this sense, her works are not “literary”. The search is not for the understanding of a narrative, but for art itself. Monica is no longer interested in that which represents, but in the effect and structure of representation. What matters is the manner in which the story is told even if the spectator does not recognize certain elements or cannot decipher all the clues.
Rio de Janeiro, January 26, 1997
Lauro Cavalcanti
In today´s essentially iconic world, all is image – or reducible to image. In big cities, after we witness a traffic accident or a crime, we wait for the news on television to confirm what we have seen with our own eyes. Only then are we convinced that it was reality and not fiction. If the film is accidentally exposed and the pictures destroyed, last weekend´s picnic turns out to have been a failure after all. The tourist in a hurry sees nothing: he or she photographs. The post card bought in the museum lobby replaces the contemplation of art. In today´s mosaic world, essentially dispersed and discontinuous, we see everything in a fragmented manner.
As we go about the city, shopping, reading a newspaper or magazine, watching television, we are always facing bits and pieces of reality, a fragmented reality. And what does the artist do in this consumer, mass, high-tech society? A creator of original images in earlier times, the artist is now a manipulator of second-or-third-generation pictures culled at random from magazines, comic books, television broadcasts, films, advertisements, computer screens.
Instead, then, of going out in plein air, with a sketch book in which to jot down “minute sensations”, today the artist prefers to explore the forests of isms of the history of art, mass media, the world of advertising. And to do this, indeed, it is not necessary to go out; for now the wider world, the world of images, comes to the artist´s home, in the form of images.
One of the resources by means of witch artists deal with this fragmentary and dispersed iconography is collage. While on the one hand collage has the effect of enhancing the world´s discontinuity, whether through the accumulation of diverse and conflicting images or through the variety of materials employed, it is also an instrument for synthesizing images, rereading, and reassigning meanings to reality. Through collage one may show, for instance, the elegance of the ordinary and the commonplace, the poetry of the small facts (images) of everyday life, and so on. In short, in collage the artist seeks a different continuity, attempts to give a new meaning to things. For while with the scissors he or she isolates, separates, divides, severs, with the glue he or she joins, reunites, adds, puts together.
Monica Barki, in her home-cum-studio in Petrópolis, is surrounded by greenery, fruit trees, forest, water, peacefulness. And from her window one may gaze into the faraway mountains, a view that is conducive to introspection. But what fascinates her in this isolation made possible by nature – which for her is a kind of backdrop of sensibility or spiritual reservation – is the opportunity to contemplate, in peace and quiet, things and everyday existence. But though far from the hubbub of cities, what she handles and observes with her tactile eye are images: old photographs, newspapers, magazines, ads, packages, random words and sentences, paintings and drawings, originals and reproductions etc. What changes, then, is the scale, the way her loving, feminine eye relates to these images. From each of these bits of reality she attempts to draw a new, particular meaning, envisaging them as receptacles of memory and sensations, supports for small bits of poetry and fine irony, and also as color, form, texture.
Monica Barki´s creative process develops in three successive stages. First she clips publications, selecting images of things and abstract forms, which she keeps in an envelope, but all of which can fit in the palm of her hand: a kind of portable image. This is her little big world. With this material she then prepares a number of small studies, collages usually the size of a sheet of legal paper. The third and last stage is the canvas, either medium-sized or large. This is surprising at first, since she deals with minute images, with delicate sensations and feelings. In fact, the infinitely large or distant and the infinitely small or near are reversible, like the inside and the outside, the public and the private, collage and painting. What is large can be perceived at a single glance, but we often miss what is small and requires leisurely contemplation. The grandiose may be dealt with and discarded fast, but the minute requires patience and time, and this generates affection.
In the passage from the study to the canvas, the diversity of materials and their roughness disappears. What we have then is a new, visual, continuity. This, indeed, can already be detected in the color photocopies the artist makes of her studies. In the collage the hand still prevails; in the painting the eye rules. The image loses its iconic nature in order to be reduced to color, texture, abstract planes. Thus the historical development of collage is reversed: from papier collé to tromp l´oeil; from reality to its simulacrum.
This game of virtualities and simulations points to the playfulness of Monica Barki´s visual creativity. She plays with shapes, simulates collage, incorporates the canvas background, the whiteness, the emptiness; she makes up inner landscapes. She also toys with ideas and concepts. She even plays with the history of art. Words or phrases is English, French and Hebrew are strategically placed in between images – words evoke images and images evoke words. They are also treated as icons. Or else they serve to trigger mental and participative processes; they provide the artist with a subtle, ironic way of expressing her opinions on art and life – for instance, the feminine universe. Woman is a recurring motif in her paintings. There are frequent images of women, dancers, models, dress patterns, references to fashion design, print patterns, interiors, women´s names. When we find in her canvases such expressions as les girls, sleeping princess, la femme, cette inconue, we can be sure that they were placed there intentionally; this is her way of taking part in the debate concerning the condition of women today.
Monica Barki´s paintings may seem naïve. But they are not. The artist herself is a delicate person, discreet, almost shy in her manners. Her work incorporates childish scrawls, doodles, stains, lines; it hints at the unfinished state of the sketch. But there is method in this; there is calculation, premeditation, knowledge, technical mastery.
A good example of the artist´s way of working is The Composition. The irony of the English text amounts to a small lesson in the art of painting. To Monica Barki collage – more precisely, painting mimicking collage – is not a vehicle for psychoanalytical exteriorization or a primary search for surrealistic flights of fancy. It is, above all, the reaffirmation of the visual aspects of painting. More exactly, it is her way of, through collage, reinventing painting.
São Paulo, May 1994
Frederico Morais
“… when I perceived the dead-end situation I´d come to in painting. Feeling a great necessity for change, I finally opted for lithography (stone engraving) as a means of expression. The hyperrealism of past times, the large dimensions, the visual impact of my paintings, were substituted by small, subtle interventions of photographic origin within a reduced space, and in black-and-white. With each lithographic stone, I began to try out a finer degree of granulation, which enabled me to focus more precisely on the details. Every tiny pore of stone that was filled came to perform a significant function within the contents as a whole. I discovered that by adding merely one or another detail as well as by shifting an element from its original position, I am transforming the meaning of a situation completely. I see the world as a stage, on which we, the actors, represent, each one of us, a determined role within a certain scenario. They are my personages, each of them having a little bit of me myself, a little bit of all of us ….”
Rio de Janeiro, junho de 1982
Monica Barki