jc schliwinski 1
Duda Moraes, the forces at work
Brimming with energy, with blooms without reason or order, Duda Moraes's canvases seem at first glance to overflow towards us: a satisfaction of exoticism, if not joyful, at least immediately vivid and colorful, restless yet exultant. However, as suggested by the title of this 2023 series, Duda Moraes also invites us to "Look at the flowers." This means we are invited to pause, to step out of preconceived images and tropical clichés, out of the register and calendars of art and emotion. And what we then see is quite different: it's the gestures, the movements, and the depths, the substances, the impulses, the sketches, the impatiences, the indecisions, and the firmnesses: a whole chthonic activity and theatricality on the canvas that supports the floral. And the thought. Work and germination, a visceral abstraction, something beneath the color.
Duda's flowers combine these "imaginary forces" of which Gaston Bachelard spoke in his preface to "Water and Dreams: An Essay on the Imagination of Matter" (José Corti, 1942). Some find their rise before the novelty; they play with the picturesque, with the variety, with the unexpected event. The imagination they animate always has a spring to describe. In nature, far from us, already alive, they produce flowers. Other imaginary forces dig into the depths of being; they want to find in being, at the same time, the primitive and the eternal. They dominate the season and the history. In nature, within us and outside of us, they produce seeds; seeds where the form is embedded in a substance, where the form is internal.
Between baroque and aridity, explosive musicality and the slow work of cataclysm, the flourishing here at work is of a radical contemporaneity.
J.C. SchliwinskiAuteur
/Documentariste Février 2024