According to Tolkien’s cosmogony in The Silmarillion, the world went forth into existence by the choir of the Ainur spirits, manifesting all things. “And the music and the echo of the music went out into the Void, and it was not void” ^[1]. The Music of the Spheres, the most delightful symphony written by planetary motion, was also acknowledged in the ancient centuries as the beacon of a perfect all-acoustic universe whose dancing, from stars to worms, follows the beat of this melody, unknown to our meagre ears. “For the Pythagorean tradition, the soul and body of humans are subject to the same laws that determine musical phenomena, and these same ratios are found in the harmony of the cosmos,” Umberto Eco has written^[2]. Da Vinci may have captured this harmonic melody when he sensed the dust patterns, like “valleys and small mountains”, laid out on the table struck with his own hand. He was also exploring the underlying patterns of nature, perhaps melodic, in his sketches of storms and hair. Later, Robert Hooke, who sprinkled flour on a glass plate vibrating at the edges with a violin bow, contemplated how each sound frequency produced a specific design.

These patterns show us how music shapes the matter of an entire curved universe: sound frequencies vibrate like waves to arrange existence in an entanglement of complex designs. Surfaces, when hit, throb in line with their vibratory stimuli – as in Leonardo’s table, only the unmoving parts collect dust, drawing the so-called valleys and mountains: the revealed is exactly the absence of energy, which crosses the empty spots in the drawing. Perhaps if the Greeks considered the cosmos to be a closed phenomenon of parts in absolute harmony, they would enthusiastically accept the symmetrical patterns Hooke devised in flour, whose structure appears to reflect the structural composition of a range of natural phenomena, from the filaments of bacteria to the planetary distribution of galaxies. Are all things merely material residues on the edges of sound waves? If Hooke’s figures indicate that energy is just the voids between fine flour lines, Plato believed that energy, which generates matter, is itself immaterial: Khora, the original substance poised between the sensible and the intelligible, where everything passes through but nothing is retained.

Claire de Santa Coloma’s cut-outs also preserve the pierced as their essence – in her exhibition entitled Eclipse, at 3+1 Arte Contemporânea, just as in the universal model, the invisible shapes the visible. In the series Sem título, the pores and the paper fibres stretched between them underpin the overall shape of an undulating composition reminiscent of the cosmic sound’s interweaving of fundamental frequencies. According to Hooke’s figures, the higher the resonance, the more complex the pattern. As structures with too-high frequencies for our ears, the complexity in Santa Coloma’s composition nevertheless maintains an overall picture of perfect transparency: its assertive harmony stands in stark contrast to the brittle asymmetry of the paper threads between the voids – the disappointment born of our misunderstanding is atoned for in the wonder of the perfect forms. Throughout the series, these vaults soon intertwine into more blurred and open forms. If Beauty builds impeccable forms, Sublime shatters them in favour of an endless expansion – even the most solid world coexists with the frailty of its constructions. This compact and scattered cosmos of forms is like the breath of a Neoplatonic god, who first exhales the whole as far as the edge of chaos goes and then inhales it back to formal perfection. Likewise, the sound waves shaping the phenomena sway between order and debris. First a promise, then a ruin, beauty invariably dies: it is far too rigid for a real whole of moving energy.

Chaos Theory also views every natural process as one with a perfect beginning and a chaotic end, as it imagines a universe based on an infinite number of smaller factors, the slightest alteration of which has massive consequences, making any exact prediction of the future unviable. Reality, although harmonious, is too complex to be understood – its cohesion never retains the constancy necessary to let us calculate. Entropy taxes every instant of existence, and the orgy of circumstances soon overturns the immaculate beginning. This awkward feeling of being lost in an orderly house is, nevertheless, tempered by a humble joy that at least dazzles with the distant idea of perfection. The Music of the Spheres, never heard before, sweeps over us without disrupting the silence of our anguish. As in Chaos Theory, Santa Coloma’s works would be ruined by the breakdown of the smallest paper fibre, the delicate sturdiness of her compositions, in a cosmic catastrophe not entirely dissimilar to a planetary eclipse, whose dramatic nature has represented the disruption of celestial harmony in so many cultures. Is this a critique of the brittleness of our interpretations, whereby we think we see perfect arcs in a cosmos of twisted lines?

However, rather than being an unexpected upset, perhaps eclipses are part of the predictable cosmic cycle: the sun god is plunged into darkness only to be reborn in fresh brilliance. This event is the quintessence of the friction found even in the most mundane of encounters, in Santa Coloma’s works as represented by the electrified lines between the pores, or in the tensioned horizon of Untitled (Touch). This contact between spheres is the very lifeblood of our vibrant cosmos of desire: in every slightest touch, it completely destroys and recreates itself, since the whole is just the final sum of small chain interactions – the solar eclipse shattering the faultless astral arc to instruct each and every gesture on how to reinvent life.

Santa Coloma’s series thus explores the shock containing the universe’s entire history, from the opening surge to the final burst – from its vulva-shaped apex, in Untitled (Flower), rises possibly the primordial egg Pebble, resting on the gallery floor opposite it. If contemplating is to journey back from the present variety to the original absolute, we are invited to take a seat and explore our roots, glimpsing the forces formalizing the visible in Untitled. The silent blossoming of all things, however powerful, is only manifest when it is at last perceived by the consciousness it generates: the worth of the cause is bestowed by the consequence, validating its effort. Are humans not just aimless creatures, but rather the flower of the universe, the restricted lucidity that admires, if not the whole, at least the fibre of this dazzling project? Although its awareness is small, it is nonetheless true, and contains enough space to try out the redemption of all that is. Silent is the Music of the Spheres, but in the most striking moments of inspiration we may capture single notes or even a brief phrase that may contain the aria of our awakening.

Beach offers us the peak of cosmic solidity as a delicate symphony of different forms. If the Untitled series introduces us to the beginning of life with a suppleness so typical of Beauty, the phenomena it creates are here asymmetrical and crude because they are influenced by the entropy that blurs everything into pure energy, or the Platonic Khora – in fact, the artist’s process seems to involve sanding down the objects not to rethink their natural forms but just to make them explicit: they are nothing more than energy based on this weak instant between construction and destruction. In evoking the threshold between trust in the known and the tumultuous wealth of the future, the name Beach also reinforces that its alleged stability will persist for no more than one moment. Or is all time to be found in this tenuous point of perfect balance? Like in this oeuvre of different objects in eternal rotation, the cosmos too never has one phenomenon like another – each thing is in itself a universe spawned by countless variables lasting less than an instant. Nothing ceases to change: the cosmos recreates itself in the vibrating interweaving of each second, as if the violin bow were vibrating in the glass plate that holds all things, from beginning to end, only successive dust and emptiness patterns.

Claire de Santa Coloma’s Eclipse is at 3+1 Arte Contemporânea in Lisbon until January 11, 2025.

^[1] Tolkien, J.R.R. (1989). The Silmarillion. Ballantine Books, p. 4.
^[2] Eco, Umberto. (2022). History of Beauty. Editora Record, p. 82.