The Impossible

The idea of metamorphosis is key to understanding Maria Martins’s art. If, in many cases, metamorphosis is at the service of desire, acting—in Greek mythology in particular—as a subterfuge in romantic conquest, in Martins it represents freedom through rejection of existing forms. A sculptor, designer, printmaker, painter, writer, and musician, Martins dealt with transformation—always in process, never complete—in a number of her works. In her series of goddesses and monsters, of which "O impossível" forms part, the human figure is in an intermediate hybrid state between the vegetable and the animal. In this sculpture, the lower sections of two figures—one feminine, the other masculine—are magnetically bound, but their union is not consummated because of the strange pointy shapes at their heads. This threatening and forever clashing pair of lovers presents a wrenching image of love and eroticism. In them, the aspiration for freedom and the experience of its impossibility converge, as do mutual dependence and the unattainability of completeness. Insofar as it gives shape to the impossibility of total fusion in physical love or even of complete bodily contact, "O impossível" is akin to two major works by Marcel Duchamp, "La mariée mise à nu par ses célibataires, même" [The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even], and "Étant donnés" [The Waterfall]. Duchamp was not only Martins’s lover when those works were made, but also her primary interlocutor. In the special edition of the catalogue for a Martins show at the Valentine Gallery in New York in 1946, Martins included a poem titled "Explication". The text, which may have been addressed to Duchamp, begins: “I know that my Goddesses and I know that my Monsters / will always appear sensual and barbaric to you.” "O impossível", exhibited for the first time at that show, may be the best translation of the sensuality and barbarism that the poem speaks of.