Much like the small room that houses Conversation Pieces, the exhibition by Ana Jotta and Jorge Nesbitt at Brotéria in Lisbon, conversations may always involve the narrowing of a space, precisely because they open up places, cross thresholds, pierce walls and reorganise or requalify territories. The almost administrative, spare or cool vocabulary I deliberately adopt here – an aim I both regret and relish, for I believe a critic should seek the most strictly dispensable words in the face of a work of art – serves to signal the impassable limit with which criticism inevitably struggles. That limit points, above all, to the individual experience of aesthetic emotion. I therefore grapple with a desired difficulty, an effort at once agonistic and passionate, as I try to write about a particular exhibition, Conversation Pieces, a loving exhibition if we recall Emil Cioran’s idea of love: “Love is a form of communion and intimacy; what could express it better than the subjective phenomenon of dissolution, the collapse of every barrier of individuation? Is love not, paradoxically, both the universal and the supremely singular?” We enter the exhibition as though determined to join a conversation begun centuries ago and yet always inaugural, in which one object and another both arrest and suspend their relation with time. Conversation, sound, a word-element forever to be articulated, slices through and synthesises like a sigh finally heard amid the cacophony we summarise as “the everyday”: the lazy vertigo in which certain words signal thought renounced, the idea of language as relational semantics. Several dialogues unfold in Conversation Pieces: Ana Jotta speaks with Jorge Nesbitt, both converse with Giorgio Morandi and, by way of a particular made emblematic – the Cioranian-loving trait – everyone, from a Christian tradition, converses with the value of poverty and its unmeasurable dignity, shifting its ground. There is indeed an impulse not so much redemptive as amplifying or empowering in the simplicity of the forms on display, essentially vessels yet also a book, a piece of bread and a candle, set in rectangular frames and a single circular one that recalls a vertical halo, revealing a simple object useless for any obvious practical purpose and devoid of the aura that halo of sacred light usually conveys.

If Giorgio Morandi’s painting grants the smooth melancholy charm of the everyday—lovingly subsumed into a simplicity that is at times the visually and ethically hardest refuge to reach -the sculptural forms here acquire the status of shelters to be won, that is, to be deserved. The sculpturisation of the pictorial form from which these pieces apparently arise – many look like paintings that have slipped free of the wall to form a stage, a house, a prayer nook v- strips them of an initially iconographic value, not to turn them into useful objects with a practical end but certainly to endow them with human warmth and tangibility, closer to the body, its song and decline, its possible epic, its underlying elegy. The aim is therefore not to reproduce the shapes that make up the map of every day, but to reveal a representation, an idea of the everyday, of painting and art as the passage from one perspective and medium to another. What is sublimated exemplarily in this exhibition lies in yielding to the empty space through which a body, a volume cut in time, becomes touchable and, before and after everything, visible: first as a mirage, a letter to be learned, then as a body, a temple, a text to inhabit. Empty space between wall and objects, between the objects themselves, between us and the objects. Empty space for imaginative investment: of love and faith. Frugality, expressed in the use of muted, sandy colours clinging to the earth we all tread and so often forget, carries no censorious austerity and bears no stamp of moral mandate. Poverty, in Conversation Pieces, is a way of being consonant with what precedes us, whether in nature, in clay beaten and beaten again by wind, sea water and rain, or in the artists who form a private artistic tradition. The conversation culminates, like choreography turning the body into incarnate fantasy, in the simple principle of immobility fulfilled in time, which declares time an agent of change, a runner of intent, a shroud passed from hand to hand.

In any case, this is a return to objects as representative elements of the nameable, contrary to things – who can forget Georges Perec? – about which there would be nothing to say, for they are subsumed under a merely commercial, circulatory value. Ana Jotta and Jorge Nesbitt converse from the same antechamber from which Morandi once observed, and later painted, certain objects. It is a conversation between times and an invitation to return to an origin seen as a communal prism, a playground of dialogue, ultimately a place of resistance.

If the addressee is unseen – present everywhere and nowhere, of uncertain abode yet sensed – then conversation becomes prayer. Prayer addressed to God is, indeed, a verbal sheet stretched across uncertain geographies of uncountable, unlocatable points, made in charged fragments under the belief they will yield heartfelt expression. Prayer is, at bottom, a fragmentary conversation, a conversing-verse, a silence turned dialogue: with verses and with conversion. Prayer, like art, like a conversation, is that salvation tablet on which to rest one’s arms, that charm carried in the pocket, borne for who knows how long. Dates, time and places are, after all, metaphors for what may be said – or not.

Conversation Pieces, by Ana Jotta and Jorge Nesbitt, is on show at Brotéria until May 7.