‘Sem título’ is a revisiting of Man Ray’s ‘Poème phonétique’ [Phonetic poem, 1924], a ‘silent’ poem in which words are replaced with segmented lines that mark the rhythm and metre. While Man Ray’s work consists of black segments over a white background, Sena inverts the image by covering the canvas with black paint and leaving the line segments in white. In this painting the silence of Man Ray’s poem is reaffirmed through the phonetic impossibility of its message, in which words are replaced with their memory and become present in absence.
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