Sérgio Mah:

 

Inside (the head) with your hands out

 

The path of any artist can be understood as a beam of movement. Slow advances, prolonged, sudden, moments of apparent immobility, detours, torsions and setbacks.

(...) In Susanne S. D. Themlitz’s work, drawing is a practice intimately connected to the development of idiosyncratic mechanisms between thought and imagination, therefore, a medium that allows her to explore and feed processes of oddity.

Each drawing assumes a cut with the exterior. The off-field doesn’t exist. Everything is inside, in this inner world, with its singular meteorology and with the unique capacity of gathering forces, energies and vibrations that distinguish it as a peculiar reality.

The artist reminds us that a work of art, as well as an exhibition, before being a segment of the world, they are a world within themselves, they make a totality. (...) drawings tilt towards reduction and subtraction. Each visual field displays a geography of pictorial inscriptions. Within the plan, things seem to be loose, isolated and separated, as if several micro events were in progress with no connection to each other, brief occurrences that were clearly artful. Between the total and its regions, we are before clusters of drawings. So, in this exhibition we will have to start with the details, the fragments, with those things that occur from a practice that articulates a bodily exercise and its mental projections. What happens in our minds and what we do with our hands, define the range of possibilities before pieces that are established in the fluidity of spontaneity, in a playful availability and in intuition.

In that sense, what we see are in a way “documents” of a radical and free performance, with no outlines, immune to constrains of mediums, challenging reflexivity and technical proficiency.

The type of know-how being mustered here is of another kind. The optic is overtaken by the haptic, in order to privilege the corporeal vision. Every shape that we find here has as origin the hands, each one was manipulated and moulded by the hands (and by the utensils they use). Hands with fingers, that grab, pierce, push, knead. The result is the production of shapes that are partial, complex, torturous, mysterious, physical, fragile, volatile.

When we state that these works avoid being representations, in the sense they don’t refer to the shape of the things we know, we don’t mean to say that standing in front of these works you shouldn’t expect the experience of representation. So, we know that the practice of drawing is obviously connected to our persistent compulsion to represent, to establish continuity, nexus, perceptibilities with the world that we are used to seeing. In these drawings and sculptures we see formless remnants, things becoming other things, suspended matter in ongoing metamorphic processes. Potential shapes are projected. The vertical line foreshadows a body or a tree, sharpening the direction of gravity, the fall. The horizontal line projects the meeting with a landscape, the separation between land/sea and the sky, left and right, faraway and close. In the vertical and circular lateral movements of the charcoal and acrylic paint, we sense the movements of the earth, water streams, the strength of the wind and the softness of the clouds. The landscape, as a place and way of imagining is evoked in some of these works. This way, we are confronted with the unveiling of reference shapes, forms that insinuate future possibilities. Insinuations directed to our senses and to our capacity of making fiction.

What should we see with what we are seeing?