The tearful orchard
Opium! Dread agent of unimaginable pleasure and pain!
Thomas De Quincey
All things spring to life in a single line. It revolves over and over again in Plato’s cosmic spindle[1], made of adamant, or is begotten from the bile of Brahma Upanishad’s solar spider, whose web encompasses all things. This initial thread is the start and the end of sewing, because Penelope, with her silver pointer, pulls it at night to unravel the fabric she has sewn all day long, daring the suitors who are waiting for the loom to end and find out who will marry her. This is how she keeps her widowhood alive while hoping that Odysseus, her husband, victim of a thousand setbacks, will return home.
Could it be possible to perceive the storyline of this poem not as the tale of the hero rescuing his passive wife, but as the divine intervention of the weaver who, through the threads of her endless loom, forms her husband’s own adventure? Homer also uses a similar device in the Iliad, writing that Helen, out of the marble freshness of her room, weaves the battle scenes unfolding on the Trojan plains.
Many cultures regard weaving as a sacred, creative craft. Often the upper and lower beams of the loom are referred to as the heaven and earth beams – the weaver knits all existence between them, using plant and animal fibres. Her steady gestures along with the slow accrual of knots give it a divine quality, as it is secure and peaceful. She then contemplates the astonishing harmony of her work, where all the stitches are interlaced in a structure. Eastern tapestry is known for its esteem for a mystical mathematics that brings everything into order – the monarch Khosrow I commissioned the famous Baharestan Carpet in the sixth century, perpetuating a perfectly spring-like garden with precious stones and gold and silver filaments. The flawless splendour of its patterns resembles paradise itself stretched out at the devotee’s feet, an ephemeral temple of the eternal rescuing us from mundane happenstance and entropy. This wholeness barred to matter is like a divine window to the world, where the goddess is opening her pearly frame to let us behold the constructive logic of the other side.
Carlos Noronha Feio’s carpets harbour visions of a different sort of paradise, whose gate is kept by the poppy plant: its analgesic sap is the foundation of opium, the drug responsible for providing the conflicting transition between the metaphysical poles. Its heavenly ecstasy holds ‘the keys to paradise’, as the renowned opium-man Thomas De Quincey wrote, drawing ‘out of the fantastic imagery of the brain, cities and temples, beyond the art of Phidias and Praxiteles’[2].
Whilst his carpets are from Arraiolos and use Islamic-influenced techniques, his pictorial skills are primarily Western. His elements feature a naturalistic robustness typical of European realism – their shaded bulk prevails over the typical flatness of Muslim art and, instead of conforming to the general geometry, they are agents articulating the work’s spatiality. They also renounce the vital revolutions found in island and Scandinavian carpets, derived from the Asian jewellery of nomadic peoples, less geometric than the Islamic ones but still aware of the essential nature of tapestry, whose weaving appears to require this kind of bonding philosophy. Closer to European tapestries that have imposed the painting rationale on tapestry, Noronha Feio adopts a different metaphysical perspective: not a superior glimpse of the god who allows us to behold the sacred archetypes of the universe, but the inferior observation of the mortal who, anchored to worldly flesh, studies the fascinating anatomy of this sublime plant – whose effect, not coincidentally, is more of a rational awakening than an impaired numbness. De Quincey writes that, instead of inebriation, opium introduces ‘order, law and harmony of the highest degree’[3] into the mental faculties, but not a transcendent harmony forced upon them by the sacred compass, but one felt by the individual in perfect sync with their mental abilities – a paradise entirely immanent in sensation.
These tensions between East and West are indeed typical of present-day opium geopolitics. Noronha Feio’s major influence is the recent Afghan war rugs which, following the Soviet occupation, have added images of tanks, rifles, helicopters – as well as the poppy, a flower whose narcotic sap funds the Taliban. How can the drug of reason, the flower of beauty, offer paradise but promote war? Noronha Feio’s work is laced with criticism. Idyllic images such as opium milky drops and the sun’s ochre ecstasy stand in sharp contrast to nuclear explosions and military textures, a tragic irony between utopian longing and atomic reality. If Eden was once an orchard, the moss-green patterns here have adopted the military camouflage. Between the spiritual and the political, we squander the tender opportunities given to us. In the Iliad, Helen, the epitome of beauty, is the one weaving the warlike barbarism that razes the countryside to the ground. That is perhaps why the wise Islamic craftsman, when reflecting on how transcendence is always beyond our reach, has been weaving the tiniest mistakes into his faultless composition.
I think this frailty is addressed in the exhibition with the element of the loose thread. With its independence reinforced by colour, could it be the alien factor that evades the fabric, the unfathomable future? Or is it perhaps simply our freedom before a still shapeless future, therefore open to new threads? These works, always digested by human figures, contain this element as our intake of reality’s raw thread – which is sewn into a new interpretation within us, ultimately giving meaning to the world’s raw material, a process similar to the demiurgic nature of weaving.
The change is traumatic. Whoever consumes opium experiences the delightful devastation of a mental fragmentation that softens the patterns of a mind hooked on its false harmonies. In the work A twin, born first: A droplet of milk, oh so sweet so sweet (weaver), the opium sap can be either a droplet of divine milk or a pale meteor whose diagonal line divides the carpet between the arid mountain peaks and the beams of divine energy coming from the newly enlightened human head. Similarly, the Raw Bloom sculpture focuses on a mental blossoming, segmenting the blooming of the poppy. The spherical volume of its bud almost resembles a head, and it can be interpreted as the slow psychic opening that welcomes (expands?) radial beams of cosmic power. This work stands apart from Wild Bloom, based on the same motif but with a different material. Its white, ossified sculptures are in sharp contrast to the infinite loop of the plant GIFs whose fruits are nuclear explosions, reminiscent not of organic growth but of the dormancy of death – or the cadaverous pallor of the corals destroyed by the Anthropocene.
In A restless beauty – Opium poppy of Adraga (fertility), the poppy is in full bloom, its pictorial realism portraying it leaning against an awe-inspiring sun. As in the majority of the exhibition, this has a discreet Neoplatonic slant: contrasting the lavishness of the plant with the radiating simplicity of the star, this is almost a monistic commentary on the multiplicity of the physical yearning to ascend to the oneness of the absolute, the cosmic source of all being. The work poppy – flower: milk and honey (Eye: ward off the evil eye) is another uplifting symbol – a subtle ziggurat soars blue in the sky like a platonic stairway to the beyond. In the milk of nature; a bond of peoples from many lands (weavers), the loose thread provides a communion between the estranged, connecting two typically oriental human figures, as used by weavers to embed us in the perfect weave of their carpets. In Noronha Feio’s works, they take on greater solidity without sacrificing their traditional simplicity, tapping into both the oriental idea of the individual who attains transcendence by sublimating into total harmony, and the western urge to nurture the individual’s singularity. As such, they almost resemble the graffiti aesthetic – the fringe individual asserting their voice over the polis’ disregard.
On the other hand, the work milk dew of haze, sustaining life liquid of Other worldliness (weaver; running water; star) borrows from all this legacy through the permissive repetition of the sap droplets falling from the poppy bud cuts. Whilst realistic, the dizzying proximity of the scene is almost absurd to the untrained eye. The spirit of tapestry is also signalled in one curious detail: the disrupted unravelling of the simplest Greek meander, a pattern used in ancient times to depict the continuous flow of harmonious life. Its motion is similar to the needle sewing together the once torn fabric, bringing together the different natures – or perhaps the perpetual weaving of cosmic energy also found in the sinuous motifs of Scandinavian and island tapestries, whose slow contemplation affords a calm numbness that unlocks the doors of metamorphosis. For paying heed to the flow of time is also to transform it. The weaver engaged in the tiniest revolutions of the loom inhabits every moment with the same divine tranquillity. The needle pierces its own void created by the thread’s curvature and this recurrent dive ushers in another world, like the mystic who ingests opium to enter a renewed glow that may not comply with expected standards.
Carlos Noronha Feio’s Milk and Honey is at 3+1 Arte Contemporânea until November 10, featuring a text by Corina L. Apostol.
[1] Plato. (2003). The Republic, Book 10. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
[2] Thomas De Quincey. (2011). Confessions Of An English Opium-eater. Lisbon: Alfabeto, p. 111.
[3] Id., ibid., p. 92.