Before getting to know the Maré de Matos of the instigating art-things that are situated, or rather, move in the midst of intersign spaces that the artist continually brings together and tensions, I met Mariana de Matos of thunderous and overflowing speech-thought, without half words or “half pictures”.

It’s been about 5 years since this happened, seeing her/hearing her in a video in which her thought-speech is accompanied by an interrogation-gaze so intense and firm that I was immediately certain that that artist person was someone, at the very least, very interesting.

And it was. IT IS. Maré distinguishes himself from most artists who emerged in Brazil in the last decade for dealing in a very peculiar way with the difficult question of possible connections between poetry & art & between these & the innumerable layers of the immediate real.

With her fine sensitive intelligence, fluid and meandering like the Rio Doce of her childhood and until a few years ago, the artist offers us a set of objects-concepts that, by making crucial issues of this era tangible, which may be the last for the only species that names itself and all other forms of life (and death), reaffirm the ethical dimension of the work of art, as they go beyond the mere “beautiful” and predictable physiognomy of most of those “pieces” devoid of of soul power (and imagination) that flood the artistic environment, today, and not only in Brazil.

More than just denouncing what is rotten and unrecoverable in the here and now of the world, someone, it seems, wants to start a conversation about other hypotheses of the world. The ancients called this gesture poetry.

Ricardo Aleixo
Poet, artist and researcher of literature, other arts and media.
Doctor in Letters from UFMG, by Notório Saber.
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Berkeley, USA
feb 22