It ascends from the Earth to the Heaven and again it descends to the Earth
and receives the force of things superior and inferior

(Hermes Trismegistus, The Emerald Tablet)

Edmund Burke argues that words affect us in a more considerable way than painted images^[1]. Their impact is not merely representational – they are symbols whose distance from the sensitive permits us to approach abstract ideas and general concepts without running the risk of diminishing them to the specificity of experience, while retaining their potency. This vagueness, inherent to poetry, softens all the contours in an evocative ambiguity banned to the plastic arts. Poetry is beyond representation: it is not a description, but a surrogate for reality. As a typical feature of the Enlightenment and its taxonomic accuracy, theories such as Burke’s were called into question in the romantic atmosphere, which was more interested in interdisciplinary syntheses that would free the visual arts from visual imitation.

Henry Fuseli painted countless literary scenes by Shakespeare, Milton and Chaucer throughout his career. His intent was not to illustrate poetry, but to make painting more poetic, sublimating its formal plasticity into a visuality which went beyond the realm of the sensitive, becoming more ambiguous and metaphorical^[2]. Pedro Moreira also rehearses similar relationships in Perpetual Motion Machine. His apocalyptic mythopoeia, in which four tripplesapiens creatures – representing the ideals of Truth, Neutrality, Chaos and Order – live in the parallel reality of Domain, is presented here as both literature and visual art. A free appropriation not far from being a pastiche, it combines a plethora of mostly philosophical, esoteric and theological references to allegorise some canonical conceptions of metaphysics. While the plot is authentic with great accuracy, the narrative sometimes appears more like a collection of aphorisms and symbols without much digestion, retaining too much of its original state and only partially accomplishing the vision of a cosmology of its own. As a matter of fact, fragmentary convergence is one of the most popular practices in contemporary culture, which has grown wary of cohesive classical composition. This conflict between synthesis and collapse, the ancient and the current, the literal and the abstract also permeates Pedro’s work.

Notwithstanding the more exhibition-like dynamics of the tripplesapiens, the abstract nature of the narrative allows us to daydream about the very nature of its reality. From the astral world suspended between death and resurrection, where spiritual residues interact in absolute ignorance, all the way to our own planet in a post-apocalyptic setting inhabited by mysterious life forms, Domain‘s evasiveness offers us multiple interpretations. And, whilst their story is told in literary realism in the third person, the all-knowing divine eye that relates the events to us, their sculptures were created – as the story tells us – by the strange subjectivity of the tripplesapiens, elusive beings with almost no relation to us. A fruitful opportunity, then, to empty oneself of the human artistic tradition and consider the possible expression of other creatures, creating a new iconography that questions our artistic understanding. Is it possible that the abstraction of his literary narrative, brimming with strange clay creatures and sublime architectures, may evoke in his sculptures something similar to Fuseli’s painting, which sought a renewal of our visual repertoire through poetic metaphor? However, his works rely on traditional variations of canonical signs from human iconography.

How can such creatures express themselves through quirks so typical of our culture? They construct human anatomy armour for their fleeting bodies with a sun-faced helmet, although we have been told that there is no sun in Domain. After all, the brief contact with humans seems to have been fatal for the tripplesapien Tlön, who embrace our culture in order to transform their reality, driving a hybrid expressiveness. Or perhaps the story is set in our own psychic landscape, from where deformed impulses arise like monsters and where the dynamics of the tripplesapiens form the archetypes of humanity – our different facets dealing with an elusive real and endeavouring to extract certain aspects of culture from our collective unconscious, such as alchemical symbols and Nietzschean quotations. Thus the cave, present in the plot, becomes the Platonic tunnel to the truth of past lives where Tlön retains the scraps of yesteryear and through which one of the humans managed to access our psyche. According to this interpretation, its more conventional plastic representations do indeed achieve a greater degree of narrative coherence.

This is not to say that we cannot weigh up the relevance of a premise that fits in with the literary narrative but restricts plastic autonomy, which even ends up stripping away the evocative tone of the written story – because, instead of the artist resorting to the poetry present in the story to develop a more open plasticity, he opts to illustrate some of the book’s key scenes. This may be the major challenge of taking on the role of both writer and artist. An interpreter finds it easier to keep his critical autonomy when he himself was not the author of the model work, to whom an objective reality was first confronted and then modified. The creator is never permitted such an immediate impact with the work, given that he himself has chaired all the stages of its becoming in a slow process that ends up solidifying his understanding, making subsequent revisions difficult. Underneath the intelligible difficulty of separating from oneself to look at other things, the reference and the rereading are ruptured – even though a certain level of contradiction is preferable in any practice that aims to escape from a complacent self-parody. If there were more inconsistency between the two practices, perhaps his work would possess a vital contradiction not at all far from the rivalry suggested in his own book as a vehicle for truth. And could it not be the most fertile rivalry that the subject has with himself?

As Joseph Campbell puts it, myth is nothing more than the symbolic manifestation of our energies in permanent conflict^[3]. William Blake wrote that all the deities dwell in our chests^[4], echoing the Chandogya Upanishad: the light emanating from the sky is the same light that gleams in the human heart. As mysticism holds, such a seam between the particular and the universal perceives our innermost being not as a closed pathway, but as a channel to the infinite. Like the wind that only sounds when it is played on the flute, the universal vastness is manifested by the sharpness of the particulars – concreteness allows for, and does not prevent the beyond. As Blake said, the world only unfolds for us when we cultivate the poetic imagination capable of gazing at the contrasts of existence. Perhaps only art can find the perfect point between the realised and the mysterious, encountering the universal through the singularities of his works: the theatrical figure is more real than the spectator, because it is closer to the archetype present in the fabric of each individual. The magnum opus must be found in the net stretched between the higher and lower planes, and also between eternity and the present moment – even the mystic, by combining inside and outside, moves between the sephiroth, sewing together all the cosmic planes: ‘as above, so below’, Trismegistus himself wrote. Only to find wonder in alternative realities is to consign this reality to a state of spiritual exile. If Blake once remarked that true perception sees the infinite in everything, Borges places himself as the lead character and sets his short story Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius on the outskirts of Buenos Aires, looking at the uncanny reality of a fictional planet, keeping fantasy in the mundane. Indeed, the modern subject dismisses the idea of an unblemished intimate, understanding spiritual progress as a constant dialogue with the external world, so as to gain immanent access to more exquisite planes according to circumstances.

Enhancing the vast in the singular while keeping it confined to the outlines of the mundane is perhaps the most difficult artistic alchemy. Pedro Moreira expresses this understanding not only in the modelling nature of the tripplesapiens, or just in the engaging relationship between their spectral bodies and their clay world, but above all in the key plot of his tale: the experience of death and the hard maturing that comes with it. Generally speaking, however, he seems to prioritise the abstraction of allegories, rooting himself in a reality that is separate from what we experience, a timeless territory full of platitudes. Some surrealists also found in such forlorn landscapes the perfect backdrop to explore the oneiric and the unconscious, and so perhaps they broke contact with the fantastic within the mundane – or perhaps they just clarified the eternal within us, delimiting better the different planes of our experience, from the ordinary to the quiet chimera.

The end of Orbis and Tertius is violence. The end of Tlön and Uqbar is passion. The misunderstanding of both relationships drives distance between the lovers, only united in their absences. If the story opens with rivalry and then flirts with synthesis, by the end the fragment takes its toll. And if the dynamics of Domain hint at an immanent spirituality, where cosmic energy flows from clay through the labour of the tripplesapiens, the unquestionable demands of Programa de Profecias evoke the temperament of an Old Testament god, transcendent and solitary. This paradox is masterfully dealt with by the arc of the Bible, which is emulated here – the change from the cyclical time of naive eternity to the linear time of the inescapable apocalypse is the fruit we all bite into to finally start living, realising what was once only a possibility.

Pedro Moreira’s Perpetual Motion Machine is on show at Galeria da Boavista until March 30, curated and written by David Revés.

^[1] Burke, Edmund. (2016). A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful. Edipro: Part V, Section I.
^[2] Argan, Giulio Carlo. (2010). Fuseli, Shakespeare’s Painter In. A Arte Moderna na Europa. Companhia das Letras, p. 131
^[3] Available in: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KULwoop94cQ
^[4] Blake, William. (1991). Poems And Prophecies. Everyman’s Library, p. 47.