“…raised water from the stream
in his cupped hands, and poured out this prayer to heaven”
Virgil^[1]

At one time, our planet was a crumbling stone and lava desert, later blanketed by the icy blanket of a still idle ocean. If dry land is formed of parts that engage in dialogue without relinquishing their autonomy, its absolutism lingered in this ocean. Once the limits were diluted, the smallest fraction in this monologue encompassed the whole – the water drop encapsulated the ocean itself, because nothing but water remained. Plato’s Beauty is also oceanic, perceiving all things as fallen debris from an undivided unity to which we yearn to return. His theory bears a resemblance to the water cycle, which, when liquefied, spills out onto the earth, returns as vapour to the ether and, in rain, condenses again into matter. Half a billion years ago, the first animal was formed from this marine absolute: a gelatinous medusa, known in Brazil as água-viva (living water, when literally translated into the English language). Born out of nothing, it burst through the totality, like a step that cracks the perfect floor. Out of this first crash came everything that is part of our splintered existence. Who knew there was so much abundance in a single lapse of this primordial water whose perfection we secretly crave?

Colourless, tasteless and odourless, water is of all materials perhaps the most abstract. Plotinus considered fire to be the pinnacle of substances, as it transforms everything into divine smoke – in water, which changes itself to maintain the cycle of life, he would perhaps have found a more striking example of metamorphosis. Anyone who attempts to hold it in their hands soon notices its unsurpassable fluidity: when Menelaus grabbed the sea god Proteus, he felt him morph into different creatures to break free of his grip^[2]. In countless cultures, the healing spirit provides the spiritual cleansing needed to purge earthly impurities and, as a universal solvent, it regulates the excesses of other materials to ensure their proper communion.

But would these qualities be the outcome not of their divine origin, but of our sensory shortcomings? Nothing physical is free from the ruthless chain of circumstances that makes all things unique. This doctrine was put forward not only by Plato but also by William of Ockham, whose metaphysical boldness rejected everything without substance: the word water would therefore be linguistic delirium, since what exists is a plethora of different waters – nothing repeats itself in this world: everything is singular. Even the drop is eroded by scars invisible to us.

Rita Gaspar Vieira’s exhibition Água Viva explores the drama underlying water, articulating its different facets to build objects whose circumstantial essence touches on themes such as memory and identity, fragility and transcendence, stressing the universal and the particular in works criss-crossed by essential absences, where purity harbours flawed qualities and the quest for perfection casts everything into a silent, burning suspense – it breeds águas-vivas. But no water is visible: like almost everything else here, it manifests itself through almost unnoticeable subtleties.

Water also comes from paper, the raw material behind her pieces. In the vast canvases-papers Um e outro mergulho, one can see the imprints of the floor on which they were moulded, the fine movements of the pulp and the different properties of clay and graphite. These errors, far from undermining the smoothness of the ideal paper, are natural imperfections that lend it expression, heightened by a manufacturing process that is not entirely supervised. It reminds us both of the post-minimalist approach, which revealed in the works the chance intrinsic to any artistic effort, and of arte povera, honouring both the power of neglected materials and the might of themes beyond our reach. But this is not about worshipping the minutiae of matter or scorning the uncertainties of the ethereal – the tension between the two is what fuels a tacit drama. If even water bears scars, then perhaps these works are intended to draw our attention to the physicality of what was once invisible. After all, how could anyone tell, except from the caption, that they are made of shredded Leiria newspapers? The proof of their origin is beyond the senses. To pulverise the newspaper, an encyclopaedia of mundane accidents, is to forgo the idea of dominion over the future and instead opt for a different sort of existence, one whose sensitivity transforms absences into presences. In this case, paper is not a void support waiting for words to grant it meaning. Its very texture forms another, more delicate and arcane language. Exploring the meaning of its scars is ambiguous, both archaeological and inventive, and does not provide the illusion of journalistic clarity. Between the hidden revealed and the obvious concealed, it is difficult to determine whether these hybrid works are drops falling or vapours rising. Maybe this is why they are suspended at half-height. The only canvas propped against the wall is longer and unfurls below, touching the gallery’s descending stairs – not coincidentally it is called Mergulho (Dive in English).

On the gallery floor, below the canvases, is the work Ensaio para inventário hidrológico, a series of vessels made with pages from the 1975 “Inventário Hidrológico de Portugal”. With their chaotic disposition, could they be a trial of the randomness that rules the physical? Their shapes breathe an oblique yet flaccid, sagging and almost hostile character into them. On canvas, the shredded newspaper was the obliteration of routine. We have here the near-intact evidence of a cartography whose historical tangibility is enhanced by the clay inside the vessels, perhaps coming from the soil they represent, thereby descending yet another step in the Platonic fall – such an individuation is also worked out in the Outras águas series, where leaves assume their own densities and volumes when leaking out of books where all paper is just flatness perfectly repeated.

Between the inventory and these watersheds, a metamorphosis takes place that is both linguistic and interpretative. As they are empty, they fulfil what maps can only describe – the barren collapse of natural landscapes as fragile as paper vessels. Or are these works more subjective? Leiria is the artist’s hometown, and 1975 is the year before her birth. Are they the result of the circumstances that shaped her as a singularity, hoping to forge her own destiny? No longer vessels, but open skulls hoping for a mental solidity forbidden to those who live in the wandering of the mysterious – again, those who search for their origin stumble upon the tragic revelry of memory, making every foray into yesterday the invention of a new past. Like a parade of different vessels deprived of a paradigm. If no two drops are ever the same, why would these vessels be, as they are lost in the worldly commotion, where only fragments persist?

But a vessel is not judged by its casing, but by the emptiness it contains. According to Laozi, “Mix water and clay into a vessel; its emptiness is what makes it useful.”^[3], finding its purpose not in its usefulness as a support, but in an absence which is only full when empty – we also burn in melancholy, unfulfilled by the preservation of the unknown. If the bodies of these vessels are forays of the present into a past depicted by old maps, would their emptiness be a wait for the future? Or could each one have its own absence as specific as its physical form? Empedocles believed that even nothingness is something, observing that a vessel plunged into water is not filled by it, as it is already infused with invisible matter^[4]. An interesting symmetry can be found here with the canvases, whose torn edges reveal past gestures while the voids in the vessels imply future events – having expressed the decline, the expected rise is still to be seen.

On the canvases-papers, there are holes with diameters matching the voids in the vessels. Who knows, perhaps they are their model and destiny? In the tension between the wealth of the unique and the longing for communion that also guides our anguish, they crave to return to the one that begot them, ending the metaphysical cycle. But longing implies a previous intimacy that has not been forgotten – how can I long for that which I do not know exists? St. Augustine said that those who pray already possess what they seek, “You have made us for yourself O Lord & our heart is restless until it rests in you”^[5]. Perhaps this is why the clay inside them appears damp: they also long for the original water from which they came.

This flood will be the end of all paper. The vessels would crumble under the weight of a specific water – the part cannot sustain the whole, even though it strives for it in absurdity. But their weakness is their force: a suicidal or transcendent drive, their destruction lays the foundations for a new stage where the resulting pulp will be the raw material for a paper able to bring order out of chaos. Augustine fulfils a liquid-god who turns the absent into his essence – “the things you fill by containing them do not sustain you the way a vessel sustains liquid. Even if you were torn to pieces, you would not flow out”^[6]. And, after shattering its singular forms, the water would remain solid in the air, transformed by the void like the spirit of someone who has learnt to see wealth where others encounter nothing.

^[1] Virgil. (2018). Aeneid. São Paulo: editora 34, Book VIII, vv.69-70.
^[2] Homer. (2013). Odyssey. São Paulo: editora 34, Book IV, vv. 455-60.
^[3] Laozi. (1987). Tao Te Ching. Madrid: Ediciones y Distribuciones Alba, Aphorism XI, p. 37.
^[4] Russell, Bertrand. (2004). History of Western Philosophy. London: Routledge, p. 61.
^[5] St. Augustine. (2015). Confessions. London: Penguin Random House, pp. 4-6.
^[6] Id., ibid., Book I, act 3.