About the Exhibition

Mariana Moranduzzo-Static Processist – exhibition essay by Mario Trono

Many artists allege a philosophical status for the meanings of their works. It‘s easy to do in artist statements, and you can’t blame artists for trying. After all,good work that is also compellingly theorized by its creator remains the ne plus ultra of the more stellar exhibitions. Since contemporary modes of art criticism long ago eschewed affect in favour of ontology, and since the reports ofTheory’s demise are not so much greatly exaggerated as they are a kind of desperate, wishful thinking, we will continue to see some artists’ statements clogged by abstruse language and abortive argument, tacked onto work that bears few traces of the claims made for it.

You will see precisely the opposite of this state of affairs in a show by visiting Portuguese artist Mariana Moranduzzo entitled Transmutation of Being. She offers an artist’s statement that I hope most viewers read after seeing (as I did) her etchings, woodcuts, and drawings on paper. The statement, read after, will most likely evince thinking congruent with your own.

Presented many times in the work itself is the unmistakable contour of an object most figuratively akin to rock, that most blunt symbol of materiality (and, to the old existentialists, of the burdens of consciousness). In a few of her counterpoint works, the shape figures less prominently in what feel like desultory responses to those other clearer shapes, a response that seems a type of thought. If architecture is frozen music, then the abstractions of art are static thought. It feels to me like Moranduzzo‘s images, collectively, are thinking. 

And they got me thinking. The rock-like object appears to float at times, something that only suggests an experiential unlikelihood if one forgets physics. The earth itself is a weightless rock in space. But it has mass.The more mass (concentrated or otherwise) a body in space possesses, the more gravity it has, and as physics now tells us, time itself will slow down near large celestial bodies. Rocks in space exist not in but are the very essence of the universe’s being. 

But as we all know, paper covers rock; I wasn’t looking at rocks when I beheld these images but at paper. And so are/will you inside the exhibition space, and that fact brings human perception into the equation that Einstein worked so hard to create in order to explain existence in space. Art, more than other human creations, needs to account for its own being, especially complex art that ever sits-because of its complexity-at a cultural remove. The savviest art accounts for itself by drawing your being into a consideration of its being. This occurred to me as I beheld Moranduzzo’s “Earth Memory”wherein the rock-like object reminds one of a human skull. Gazing out of one’s skull is, by its very nature, a contemplative act,and the contemplator is always deeply implicated in the contemplated. To perceive a rock or a piece of art when both you and what you look at exist together-in space and time inside never ending processes that govern existence-well, that is itself a process.

Moranduzzo’s work seems to suggest this, or at the very least gets it. It’s like her images limn the contours and outlines of process ​​philosophy which holds that something we might call the Real is best understood not in terms of things but of processes. When you gaze at art, you are in process with it, inside the larger fold of gallery space and gallery hours, inside the still larger phenomena of universal space and time.

In this sense, Moranduzzo’s work is the real deal. Ironically, she is a process-ist expressing herself in what is only ostensibly a static medium. Nothing is static. Not even the typographically set sequences of her and any other artist’s statement. After you’ve read my words, and hers, both she and I-and then you too-will move towards new and different meanings attributed to this art and what will soon become our earlier thoughts. In an unending process of meaning attribution. All our minds are one and the same as those rock-like objects-that is, we are evidence of a coalescing in space and time of some… thing.