Ilha I

AN INTIMATE PLACE
The Brazilian artist Carmela Gross began her career in the nineteen sixties, and her work has travelled through the last forty years of Brazilian art with a constant and striking presence in the context arising from the avant-gardes of the fifties and coming out into a new understanding of the scale and public nature of the work of art.
The work in the Colecção da Caixa Geral de Depósitos is entitled Ilha, and belongs to a series of works that deals with the outlining of spaces on walls or the floor through a drawing configured as a physical frontier between the outside and inside of a space defined as closed.
This work alludes to two ideas that run through Carmela Gross’s poetic approach: the limiting of a space – which she carries out in a literal manner, conditioning the spectator’s movement – and the idea of Utopia – in its ambivalence between an ideal and a non-existent space, as Thomas More defined it.
In Carmela Gross this Utopian place emerges in many forms throughout her work, with the word and drawing being the processes she seems to use most to do this. Drawing is a very peculiar device in the way it is used in her work, in the sense that it is often dematerialized into light or produced using three-dimensional constructions, most usually in the form of installations occupying the ground, and thus dealing directly with the spectator’s bodily presence, his movement in space, and therefore his freedom. This is what happened in the installation Em vão, presented in the Oficina Oswald Andrade in 1999, in which a labyrinth of black ribbons placed among the colonnade of an atrium conditioned the spectators’ movements.
However, the work that belongs to the Colecção da Caixa Geral de Depósitos is connected to the installation Alagados (produced later, in 2000), in which the threedimensional nature of the drawing turned into a frontier, first on the wall and then on the floor, which guides the gaze and carries out the passage between the universe of the line and the space.
One can easily understand how the relationship between the place (present in the Utopian aspect), subjective marking out of the space through drawing (which Gross has developed since her works of the seventies) and the defining of public spaces, that are modified and transformed into a different physical experience on the part of the spectator, belongs to the same universe of relationship between the public and the private, between the social space and the intimate place.
That is what islands are: bordered places, great, fenced-off monads that may equally be metaphors for our personal condition as for the Utopia of a place in which intimacy is the final condition.

Delfim Sardo