Within the “history” of representation, the founding moment of each form of defining and reproducing reality was a response to the hierarchy of the arts, in which painting and drawing were prioritised over sculpture and ceramics, which were in turn “heirs” and “disciples” of the ensuing urge to model that which was only intended to be traced. In the Natural History, Pliny the Elder (23 AD – 79 AD) describes the “myth of the origin of painting”, but apparently the narrative is only on the origin of ceramics and drawing: “Butades, a potter of Sicyon, was the first who invented, at Corinth, the art of modelling portraits in the earth which he used in his trade. It was through his daughter that he made the discovery; who, being deeply in love with a young man about to depart on a long journey, traced the profile of his face, as thrown upon the wall by the light of the lamp. Upon seeing this, her father filled in the outline, by compressing clay upon the surface, and so made a face in relief, which he then hardened by fire along with other articles of pottery.”^[1] Pliny’s myth is essentially centred on the origin of the portrait and the artistic enshrinement of drawing and ceramics through mimesis.

In Terracotta, Marta Castelo dismisses hierarchy, division, history and even representation in the arts by exhibiting (modular and) modelled drawings in clay. On the four walls of a room in the nineteenth-century Valada-Azambuja mansion – which now houses Biblioteca Camões -, there are geometric volumes harmoniously arranged and statically hanging from them. Meanwhile, the walls become the white sheet of paper dotted with the clay modules in a way so evenly balanced that it harks back to theosophical and theological pictorial projects – from Francisco de Holanda’s illustrations in De Aetatibus Mundi Imagines to Hilma af Klint’s mystical artistic research -, as well as some of Wassily Kandinsky’s picturesque compositions guided and paced by music. Once this comparison comes to light, it should be pointed out that – apart from the obvious and unique modelling predisposition -, the compositions in Marta Castelo’s exhibition are built on a single chromatic expression – terracotta -, unlike the previous examples where the abundance of pigments is an elementary component of the mise-en-scéne in charge of guiding the project to be represented.

The artist reverts to pre-mimesis clay modelling – in other words, pre-representational – but also returns to a pre-utilitarian state. She goes all the way back to the basic nature of creation through modelling, or ceramics through itself, in other words, clay for clay’s sake. Her respect for the material is palpable at several levels: from the choice of an unfired glaze, to firing at lower temperatures (within the possible range) and closer to primitive kilns, to the production of a range of moulds in the most elementary shapes allowed by the bare minimum of material handling – Marta Castelo is as much an accomplice of the clay as it is of her. As she retreats to the material’s archaic and primitive essence, she takes it both naturally and ferally, ensuring that, just as we recognise human agency over clay -, taking as an example the modules in which extremely geometric, irregular but harmonious shapes warrant human manipulation, whereas, in the other modules where this rigour and precision does not exist, there are instead traces, indications or marks from the artist’s fingers, underlining and showing the material’s memory and reciprocity, both autonomous and submissive -, we also grasp the “agency” of the clay over the artist. It arises under the sole condition of being – there is nothing to support the choice of clay for modelling a drawing -, but this is what happens and conceptualises this installation, simply because the material can. This analogy between drawing and clay modelling lets us revisit the most primal aspects of artistic creation and open up pathways sealed off by the art industry’s modern axioms.

Salomé Lopes Coelho, a researcher at Instituto de Comunicação da NOVA, in her Ph.D. thesis O gesto da travessia e o contacto com o ritmo vital: Sobrevivências do ekstasis no cinema, explained the complicity between human initiative and rock, or stone, in producing cave paintings during shamanic ceremonies of the South American indigenous peoples: “the paintings start from the rock surface itself, from its reliefs, in order to draw [an image]” ^[2]. I mention this because it is also evident in Marta Castelo’s creative process, respecting the material’s layout, “agency” and essence. This “post-modern” exercise that breaks with divisions, dualisms and conventions provides a liminal space for drawing with modelled material. Likewise, it also plays with our perception, where the three-dimensional mise-en-scéne converges into what it has always simulated – the possibility of reality.

Marta Castelo’s Terracotta is on show at Biblioteca Camões until July 31, 2024.

^[1] Pliny The Elder. Natural History. XXXV, p. 151.
^[2] Lopes Coelho, Salomé. (2020). O gesto da travessia e o contacto com o ritmo vital: Sobrevivências do ekstasis no cinema. Ph.D. Thesis in Artistic Studies, Faculty of Social Sciences of the University of Lisbon, p. 144.