The Part That Supports the Part

Three works make up A parte que suporta a parte, an individual exhibition by Nydia Negromonte, whose title suggests a potentially infinite sequence of relations, despite being installed in a specific time and place. There, nothing seems to exist autonomously, as would be the case with a work of art (at least since the end of the 18th century), or one of the definitions of drawing: a project of an ideal world.¹

In fact, what exists are parts of a whole that can never be fully grasped, which are constituted materially and transiently.

After all, according to the artist, “to draw is to act on a support […] [and] with space, to perceive its potentiality and to dialogue with it.”² In this process, the “support” also changes, offering resistance and shifting the meanings of what was once stable or predictable: the projection of a shadow, a gallery wall, or any vegetable. The shadow alters the object and consequently its representation, which in turn seems to “represent” nothing but itself. It’s as if Umbra — one of the works, made with gouache on paper — were an embodied drawing, not the melancholic graphic notation of an absent reference.

The wall, imbued with humidity by the artist, will reveal over the days older layers, like fragments of time, traces of other exhibitions that have already been presented in the space. On the other hand, who has never seen a peeling wall? An archival photograph, enlarged in large dimensions, refuses its use as a personal memento and becomes almost a mirror for the observer: who hasn’t carried a handful of fruits when they were a child?

Campo aberto (Open Field), in addition to the clay placed on the wall and the similarly sized photograph, is completed with overlapping layers of “rice paper”³, weighing only 6 g/m². The fibers, however, are resistant, and over time, we will know the result of this clash: dried clay contracting into plates, old paintings on the wall joined to the clay, the weight of gravity, the obstacles formed by the wires, filled with water and white glue. Although predictable, the final form of the work remains open, different from itself with each new installation.

In the days leading up to the opening of the exhibition, Negromonte invited a few people to cover dozens of kilograms of fresh vegetables with clay. In the gallery’s garden, a table served as both a support for the collaborative work and a catalyst for encounters and casual conversations. Posta was placed just below Campo aberto, on the light gray floor, a color similar to wet clay, which over time loses water and pigmentation. The vegetables, once so familiar, become strange bodies, transformed by (or despite) the clay that enveloped them. Some sprout, others wilt and rot.

Posta, like Campo aberto and Umbra, is both a new and not-new work. The first was shown on several occasions, such as in the group exhibitions A iminência das poéticas at the 30th São Paulo Biennial (2012) and Afago at Sesc Quitandinha (2022), in addition to the solo show Lição de coisas at the Pampulha Art Museum (2012). However, the work transforms with each installation, starting with the vegetables that will inevitably be different. In addition, some contingencies must be considered: in this case, Posta is not presented on a table and is not covered with black clay; after all, the part that supports this part — both the space and the other works — are also different.

Campo aberto participated in the solo exhibition Desenhos são como sementes debaixo de tudo at the Unimed-BH Minas Cultural Center (2024) and was shown on a single wall, without the “fold” that supports it in São Paulo. The sheets of paper, in this case, are also more numerous, providing greater resistance to the weight of the dry clay. In both cases, a project would not only be useless but also conceptually wrong.

The Umbra series, of which the artist also presents a part, was conceived during the Solanas Art Experience residency in 2024 on the Uruguayan coast. Affected by the pinecones, which were a prominent presence in the area — an unintended consequence of planting trees to mitigate wind action —, Negromonte collected several of them and began drawing them as an exercise in observation. However, before the process, they were also affected by dramatic lighting, which ultimately transformed the very act of drawing: not as a record of a specific object (though it can rigorously be defined as such), but as a tangle of relations. The color fields affect each other, the shadows distort the view of the object, the paper receives the brushstrokes but sometimes allows them to “bleed.” Not to mention the wind’s action, which somehow initiated the work decades ago — after all, if it weren’t for the wind, the pines wouldn’t have been planted, filling the ground with thousands of seeds. The series of drawings continued its course beyond the residency space. In some cases, alongside the pinecones, the artist placed aruá-do-mato shells collected in the Pantanal, creating a kind of dialogue between spirals.

A parte que suporta a parte is fundamentally about displacements. Not only regarding the uses and meanings of common objects — as artists have forcefully, humorously, and critically done since at least Marcel Duchamp — but it also promotes a displacement of the perception of things themselves. In other words, the subject, their personal identity, and their worldview are built in constant relation. Affected and supported by all the other parts, in a process where beginnings (and ends) are always unpredictable.

¹ Or even as a manifestation of the divine, as suggested by the acronym for disegno proposed by the painter and architect Federico Zuccaro (c. 1540-1609), segno di dio in noi.
² NEGROMONTE, Nydia. Lição de coisas. Belo Horizonte: Museu de Arte da Pampulha, 2012, p. 86 (exhibition catalog). The full passage is: “To draw is to act on a support. The only certainty I have when I draw is that I want friction. I don’t like to draw, for example, with a felt-tip pen on coated paper where there’s no friction, no resistance. I’m interested in resistance, friction, and the perception of that. To act with space, to perceive its potential, and to dialogue with it, that for me is the state of drawing.”
³ Despite its established name (and commercial use), so-called rice paper is rarely made from rice. In this regard, see HUNTER, Dard. Papermaking. The History and Technique of an Ancient Craft. New York: Dover, 1978.

Mariana Leme