Gold-revelation
Maria-Carmen Perlingeiro is a sculptor of Brazilian origin (born in 1952), graduated from the School of Fine Arts in Rio de Janeiro, and from the École Supérieure des Beaux-Arts in Geneva. She left Rio at the beginning of the 1980s and moved to New York where she enrolled in the Art Student's League to learn how to sculpt stone. Since then she has lived in Switzerland. If she created very different works, and touched on materials such as marble and slate, what interests me more here are his alabaster sculptures, and more particularly the use she makes of gold in her works.
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Maria-Carmen Perlingeiro is equally inspired by alabaster, the material itself, than through its history. By this I mean its uses by Man, its extraction processes, but also its “ own nature ”.
Unlike marble, alabaster is a stone into which light can penetrate. Thus emerging from the depths of darkness, the light also shaped it and kept it in memory. A paradoxical fact that in my opinion it materializes by the recurring presence of gold, another prestigious, luminous, enigmatic and indestructible element.
She thus places her work in the long term of geology, which she seems to extend in a delicate way, and systematically connect to the cultural history. The vocabulary and materiality of the stone are important in his work: we use the terms of threads, veins, and the extracted blocks are ovoid in shape ( the egg shape is often present in his work). In addition, the stone may contain the fossils of a past life. The series “ One fragment, 2 figures ”, double-sided sculptures of objects that belonged to his deceased father (stapler, stamp, scissors , white collar….) are they not a kind of “ portraits ” sculpted without faces (busts!), fossilized still lifes ?
This geological memory joins on the one hand the body memory (veins, skin) and on the other apart from the very notion of sculpture : to extract is to take out the stone, but it is also reveal what is “ in ” the stone (forms and ideas). Uncovering secrets, playing with enigmas, immortalizing (by drilling, drilling, engraving, polishing, etc.) are the sculptor's favorite themes and gestures.
In its history, thealabaster was considered to be a prestige material, particularly in religious statuary, or in Ancient Egypt, with the portraits of queens and the canopic canopies which contained the organs of the pharaohs. But it has also been used in objectsmore « simple ». Some are linked to the funerary world (in the Italian region of Volterra, the Etruscans had the tradition of making funerary urns) or to everyday life (vases, lamps, containers, trinkets). The relationship to immortality, to traces and intimate remains, is therefore fundamental to understanding his work.
The notion of set(s), of apparently isolated elements and that it relie, is recurrent in this artist, just like the numbers 2 and 3. The elements meet: a material and a light, an object and a material, matter and the immaterial, an artist and a/materials... This central idea takes all kinds of forms in which, as we will see, gold plays its part in various ways.
Thus, the idea of slipping into continuity, of being part of lineages, of creating bridges between History(s) can be seen at different levels :
with the story of the stone, we have just said it
beyond, with the history of the universe (his series "ofAsteroids" and eclipses bear witness to this, as does a nail cut in « Lunaticas » looks like a quarter of the Moon)
with its own story (figuration of intimate objects and filiation)
with natural history : animals are present (snails, oysters, antlers, hair of foxes, goat skins), plants (ginkgo, fig tree), as well as landscapes ("Mountains", twilights…) or even water (series of "Drops", "d'Eaux -Brights", "Ice Blocks", "Dew Points")
with the history of knowledge and religion (presence of words, books, notebooks)
Light-gold
As for the history of art, it also slips into an aesthetic tradition, in following the path of contemporary sculptors such as Constantin Brancusi or Hans Arp. By the purity of the lines, the softness of the volumes or the relationship to the material, whether she works with marble or alabaster. Likewise, his indirect references to older Western statuary, and to the notion of perspective (in his series “ Inside/Out » for example) follow this logic.
In one of the "Aquatiques" series, she pays homage to Matisse : in rooms circular alabaster, placed on the ground, the plant Selenicereus antonianus , a recurring motif in the painter's cutouts (the notion of cutouts, of fragments, is also central to Maria Carmen Pelingeiro) is represented in gold.
Similarly, in the installation « Maesta", it is inspired by the immense altarpiece by Duccio di Buoninsegna (14th century) : of this representation of the Virgin and Child in majesty surrounded by angels and the holy apostles, she will keep the golden halos around empty silhouettes (or full of alabaster ?!), each in circles that are both isolated, but united by the installation.
So Maria -Carmen Perlingeiro very often uses yellow gold (sometimes also white or pink gold) and it is interesting to see what she does with it and what it brings:
gold is often placed inside cut-out shapes, or on holes (recurring patterns of grids, buttons), then questioning what is inside/outside, the notion “ through ”, empty/full, passages...
but it also fills full surfaces, either figurative shapes or geometric shapes such as ovals, circles again (with elements or words engraved), polyhedra, and often triangles (which evoke arrows, rays, a divine presence...).
The gold can :
separate (or connect? ambiguity again...) two parts (as in "Love letters" or "Organs")
be placed either at an angle or at the edge (questioning the notion of limits)
be discreetly present in the form of thin threads, lines
recreate a unit : gold brings together Trios, aesthetically unites a group within the same piece ("Piercing", "Deux Lunes").
The relation to light and trans-lucidity, is already present in alabaster (or selenite that it also works), but it is redoubled/ materialized by the presence of gold. In « Inside/Out ” or “ Piercing", the Light seems to pass through the stone, depositing particles there. Almost like the trace of an intimate collision : when the piece is seen from the front, the gold seems placed at the edge of the cut materializing a sort of vibration ; when seen from an angle, we see that all the golden depth has kept its passage in memory. Light of which we do not know in the end if it married the shape pre-cut by the artist, or if it pierced the shape that the sculptor subsequently gilded?! Thus gold reveals what is hidden, and brings a triple depth : a material, spiritual and intellectual depth.
The question of gaze is obviously fundamental. His pieces play a lot on ambiguity and the polyvalence of the angle of view : visions from below, from the front, in profile, through a cut-out geometric shape , through the material, the reflections (series of " Floating Objects"), shadows... What is hidden, what is shown... What is considered worthy of being carved (and gilded) or not...
The metaphor of the gaze is thus represented in an abstract way, by the numerous golden triangles which dot his works (figurations of fields of light as well as fields of vision), by the permanence rounded/ovoid shapes, or more literally with representations of glasses, irises,
Similarly, the reflection between the volume and the line : gold is at the same time an immaterial energy of which there remain traces (under shapes of lines, yellow in color contrasting with the often white alabaster), and also a spiritual substance which causes a sort of extension of the piece.
But the presence of gold is not always so “ sérieuse ”, because Maria-Carmen Perlingeiro has a lot of humor. In her subjects, she takes steps aside from the solemnity of the genre. Sculpture and the noble materials used. Some of his works, the most figurative, can even seem totally irreverent.
We note thus :
some childish references : the geometric, hollow, cut-out shapes can evoke pastry cookie cutters, or even games educational (shape boxes)
everyday objects : brushes, inkwells, trays, salmon steaks, brooms, telephone are gilded with leaf 'gold
and finally everything that evokes the body/being hidden, intimate or fragmented : bones, orbits, organs (kidneys, heart), cut nails, feelings (moods, sighs, tastes), what he eats (biscuits, chicken breasts), what covers him (shoes, gloves, boots, underwear, glasses, swimsuits bath, pants...haloes!).
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