O canavial: memória metamorfose de um corpo ausente

BEFORE
There is a book by the Italian writer Roberto Calasso in which the author is always asking about what is before. Before thought, before philosophy, before reason, before the logos. Before.
In the network of reeds in this sculpture by Alberto Carneiro there is the same question about a before-art towards an aesthetic vernacular nature.
O canavial is an installation from 1968 that links two other installations in his work that start out from the same principle and which are: Uma floresta para os teus sonhos [A forest for your dreams], 1970, and Um campo depois da colheita para deleite estético dos nossos corpos [A field after harvest for the delight of our bodies], 1973-1976. The three are tellurian situations in which the smell of the land recreated in the exhibition space by the strict and careful organization of elements from the nature cycle produce machines for travelling in time and space towards the spectator. When faced with these sculptures we are transported into a time before and an originating place. The layout of the works, the logs, the haystacks or, in this case, the reeds, obviously follow strict aesthetic and organizational criteria, but the feeling that the spectator gets is that he has dived, through some emotional and affective mechanism of transportation, into a time before the artistic, into a lost time in which aesthetic emotion was linked to primary sensations. For this reason O canavial is an extraordinary work – a passport manipulated by the artist towards something that does not belong to the field of created nature but of creating nature itself, of Natura Naturans, as Spinoza used to state.
Art can try to do very little more than this: to transform its aesthetic organization into fiction that is truly original and, to this end (which for Alberto Carneiro is ecological, as he wrote in the 1968 Manifesto) to involve the spectator – above all because in a reed bed the search is for the absent body, for that body which one day (if ever) might complete ours.
We always have a memory of it, and in it resides our expectation of completeness.
“Life is beautiful”, wrote Jorge de Sena, “particularly because we do not have any other, but also because we hope tomorrow to have the body that we desired yesterday”. Art, sometimes, is the most happy and most raw food for that fiction.

Delfim Sardo