For anything meaningful to occur, an empty space must be formed. This void allows a new phenomenon to develop, because anything to do with content, meaning, expression and language can only exist if the experience is new and original. However, without a pure, pristine space ready to welcome it, no new and original experience is possible^[1].

Maria Laet’s Infinite Measure is based on the quest for contour, its absence and the “intercession of territories and timeframes”^[2] created through gestures which open up or take up ground. The artist draws on nature and matter to deal with the fleeting passage of time. In her artistic work, natural and ephemeral elements are active agents during the dialogue between body and space, generating a narrative that calls for a reflection on measuring (which is defined or yet to be specified). Laet is known to do this in a poetic and apparently subtle way, but I also recommend that we recognise a force, an imposing, restless gesture, tied to the will or need to be present. An intuitive gesture aimed at opening up, but also at bounding, grouping and transforming.

Often bringing her body into direct relationship with natural elements such as earth, water and air, the artist establishes a visual and conceptual connection through the marks and paths she prints. Infinite Measure is a group of works whose footprints are the traces or signatures of an ephemeral, fragile presence which has been immortalised here. A memory of the body’s movement and action in space, a reminder of life’s transience, the body’s fleetingness, mirrored here in nature.

Body and gesture as tools of expression and body and gesture as a bridge, as a metaphor representing the complexity, vulnerability, connection and the cyclical nature of all things. But her research also contains an urge to fill gaps. Maria Laet embodies the intangible and shapes the absent. In Entre Elas (Alguma coisa concreta capaz de se deixar quebrar) (2020) – a title taken from a poem by Paulo Henriques Britto – she provides a real form to the space, fills it and occupies it with a moulded porcelain mass (which then becomes a yardstick) that not only absorbs the void, but also establishes a connection between the two independently growing trunks. Her gestures are “always subtle but steadfast in their forward-looking intent to explore the possible connections between things and movements (…), drawing them closer together and making them more connected, if only for the brief instant that the work is made”^[3].

In Sem título (Ausência) (2011), the mark left in the sand, filled and washed away by sea water, represents the continuous creation and destruction cycle. The marks left by the artist’s feet, gradually effaced by the tide, reveal the body that was once there no longer is, but will now be forever eternalised in photography, in the gesture archive and in memory (private and collective). Her work is at once individual and universal. Maria Laet is recording and sharing a time that is her own, heartfelt and intimate, but one that is equally shared, in an eternal return loop. Her lively, restless action, with its poetic and resolute will, expands and transforms space. In Caminho sobre a maré (2022), Laet opens a gap in a beach made of stones and skin^[4]. She creates a passage towards the sea with an intuitive but also anxious movement that wishes to intervene, alter, inhabit and transform matter and emptiness. The body is not the protagonist – “the action is subtle and the body is withdrawn from the scene”^[5] – but it is the way to give birth to a “secret that will be covered up”^[6], to discuss how absence can be measured, the permanence that comes from absence and the measure that is extinguished.

“Each piece of matter conquers its own space, its power to expand beyond the surfaces by which a geometrician would wish to define it. Apparently, its ‘immensity’ is the reason why the two spaces – those of intimacy and the world – become one.”^[7] Maria Laet achieves this by discussing the fleeting nature of existence, how time inevitably wipes out all traces. She speaks of how presence and absence are interdependent concepts. She explores them organically, gradually, allowing us to revisit and remember by recognising what has been left behind by previous actions, but which is infinite. Be it through the edges of the stones (Infinita medida, 2024), two people joining them and testing the limits of the elastic band (Limite mole, 2023), or through the clay drawing looking for its shape (Ainda estamos sem forma, 2021), the perpetual cycle of continuity and absence is made symbolic, the temporary which comes back, that which is limitless and in continual movement.

Maria Laet deals with the natural world as a sign of infinity, reminding us of continuity through proximity, the body and emptiness as a specific measure, capable of being broken.

“I would love to see stable, immovable, untouchable, unspoilt and almost untainted places (…) Such places do not exist, and this is why space is called into question, it ceases to be evident, it ceases to be embodied, it ceases to be appropriated. Space is in doubt: I must incessantly define it, designate it; it is never mine, it was never given to me, I must acknowledge it (…) to meticulously try to retain something, to make something survive: to pluck out some specific fragments from the emptiness that is being dug, to leave somewhere a trace, a line, a mark or some other signs.”^[8]

The exhibition is at Galeria 3+1 Arte Contemporânea until June 29.

^[1] BROOK, Peter. (1999). Empty Space. Lisbon: Orfeu Negro, p. 4.
^[2] Artist commenting on the exhibiton.
^[3] Exhibition text.
^[4] Artist regarding the work on the video tour Infinite measure by Maria Laet | video tour.
^[5] Exhibition text.
^[6] Infinite measure by Maria Laet | video tour.
^[7] BACHELARD, Gaston. (1979). The Poetics of Space. Translated by António da Costa Leal and Lídia do Valle Santos Leal. São Paulo: Abril Cultura.
^[8] PEREC, Georges – Espèces d’espaces (Paris Éditions Galilée, 1974) pp. 122 and 123, translated by Mariana S. da Silva.