Lo Nube (Cloudiness)
There was an extremely violent era in the history of planet Earth. A time from which almost no vestige remains. The violence was so great that it is essentially unknown to humankind. The violence of the Earth, of its power to set off commotion and effect transformation, was what, in a temporality too vast for us to grasp, shaped everything that surrounds us.
The time that saw the origin of matter, of fire, of fluid states. Gaseous time. Cloud time.
It was a pre-ancestral age, prior to even our idea of the primitive and to the documentation of human memory that would codify historical narrative and its uses. Beyond calendars are the stones that hold within them the time of the Earth’s action and its ways of building the world.
Layer by layer, from core to surface, these witnesses of life continue to mutate by the agency of the same elements that gave them substance: Time and matter as the makers of everything that enables existence.
Dolores Furtado’s works seem to be made of the memory of that age of collision. Without a prior plan, testing the technical limits of resin, her forms are the result of incidental action on the material. Rather than objects in the conventional sense, these are things, contingent documents that record processes that yield outcomes not entirely predictable.
They are metaphors for a pre-past tense. Proto-forms from a dismissed landscape lodged at the very core of the Earth. Archeological remains of states of matter preserved by the violent action that also witnessed their birth. The Earth’s ghosts. Archeological mist.
But the ghostliness of Dolores’s art is bound not only to quantifiable physical phenomena. At play as well are traces of human and protohuman existences. Ancient presences that float and become flesh in contingent bodies that the artist, simulating nature, shapes.
Some of her pieces have a human scale; they seem to establish a dialogue with the viewer. More than a conversation, though, these translucent and evanescent forms make up a diptych—one subject-body and one subject-ghost—that informs us about states of matter.
Come to think of it, perhaps cloudiness is also ghostliness.