An ever-present symbol in Western cultural history, the rose has emerged as an enigma and representation of nature’s two-facedness and what many could call the “feminine condition”. In this cultural and mythological context, a rose is not only a flower. It is both that and something else, perhaps more profound, equally as beautiful as it is lethal, as pure as it is venal.

A rose is a thorn nailed through the heart; the gothic splendour of a bruise; the softness of a petal shrivelling with time and becoming rough; the effulgence of a creation that only art can render immortal, for the rose is the glimmer before life withers, runs dry, is extinguished. This is the metaphysical astonishment of the rose – a matter in becoming, at once word, tale, legend, form, memory, image and object.

A dead rose, dangling from the vase, with neither vibrancy nor colour. Fallen petals on the table. A thorn – a spike – rusty and sharp – tetanus brewing. A loaf of bread turned into roses in the queen’s lap: ” they are roses, sir, they are roses” – and so the rose becomes also a miracle, fantasy, magic, sorcery.

In the Rosas [Roses] exhibition, Lea Managil revisits this mystery of the rose, which is both vegetable and human, encountering in it not a form, but an idea of constructing symbols and atmospheres drawn from a fuzzy dream or a Gothic tale. Every intervention appears to hark back to that medieval period: the ogival arches, Queen Isabella’s legend, the candles, the long fingernail of a legend harvested from the darkness, snatching at the fruit’s fertility, like a stanza stolen from Beowulf, like a claw driven into Beauty’s body by the Beast.  The rose, in this cultural conflagration, in this hugely expanding nuclear reactor called contemporaneity, while it can be everything, it can also be nothing and, for this very reason, anything it wants to be, freely, unashamedly, handed over to the artist’s daydreams and the burning potential of dreams. If the rose is romance and decadence, meaning and hollowness, any substance without a name or any name without a substance, then it is nothingness and emptiness, just as Umberto Eco argued in The Name of the Rose – a poetic, mystical title that tells us nothing about the book it presents, as it has lost its bearings in the postmodern era and the crushing of signs, meanings, hierarchies and orders, therefore free to be anything the reader and the creator wish or perceive. The artist’s task is to provide a new definition for the rose, positioning it within the panpsychism that brings together all natural subjective minds, human and non-human, inert and organic, on a single wavelength.

As in Lea Managil’s earlier exhibitions, there is something stage-like about Rosas: the epoxy shadows behind the door, the controlled lighting of the pieces, the performance of time, the objects awaiting to be used and tampered with. All seems to be pending an unfolding action, which can only be mental or inward. We encounter opera-like echoes of Tale of Rusalka, the same diaphanous and mythical materiality of We’ll feed the dream as long as we can and the tiny gestures already experienced in Scratch. This continuity reassures us and lets us know that we are dealing with a mark.

There is no representative will. There is no physiognomic, taxonomic or descriptive reference to the rose. Throughout this mournful sleep, time oozes from the black candles, flows and pools in the gaps between the objects and the floor. It is feverish, fictitious – the artifice of a myth, or the apparatus of collective memories condensed into a single area.

The construction’s detail and thoroughness demand attention to reach the astonishment of discovery. The works’ plasticity alludes to an obscure aspect, as if art were a cryptographic exercise that requires decomposition, imagination and culture to reach the core of its truth. Cement, epoxy, latex and silicone form part of this construction that stipulates a different nature – O Novo Futuro peppered with thorns, shining with liquid Vaseline coating: the beauty that industrial materials offer, the life injected into synthetic composites.

Lea Managil’s Rosas is on show at Zaratan – Arte Contemporânea until March 16, with a text by Tomas Camillis.