Lygia Clark: Oublier le corps...

Curatorial Text

Rolando J. Carmona

Have you ever reflected on the vital time we dedicate to the discomfort of our bodies, struggling to free ourselves from those psychological or biological layers that obscure or distort our existence? Lygia Clark (Belo Horizonte, Brazil, 1920 – Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, 1988) did. After establishing herself as a leading figure in Brazil’s Neo-Concrete vanguard, Clark devoted the final phase of her career to creating a form of art that lay somewhere between experimental sculpture and psychoanalytic therapy. In 1957, by signing the “Neo-Concrete Manifesto”, she officially broke away from Cartesian rationality and transformed her practice, considering the artwork as an experience or a body that interacts with the viewer.

This approach transcended all previous notions of art, where the drawing of a line in space became a path toward therapy and an excuse to forget the traditional body, even that of the artist. A creative strategy still difficult to fully comprehend, it heralded the possibility of a collective body or even an experience rooted in the body’s ghosts, where the viewer’s unconscious is activated and liberated through contact with an aesthetic device.

Profoundly transgressive experiences emerge, in which the art object shifts from being an “end” to a “means.” Clark described it as “borderline work, because it is neither psychoanalysis nor art. I remain on the border, completely alone.” Clark embarked on a deep and mystical journey into the unconscious, transcending the material, and proposed a process that we call in this project “Oublier le corps” (Forget the body). At the height of her experimentation, she invited us to think about the body, or its phantasmatic form, that is, the sensory perceptions that “tear it to pieces”.

The exhibition’s title refers to this process initiated with her students in Paris in 1974, during which she developed a series of propositions titled “Corpo coletivo” (Collective Body), involving various groups of participants in psychological exchanges. “This exchange is not pleasant at all: the idea is that one member of the group vomits their experience while participating in a proposition, vomit that will be swallowed by others, who will then immediately vomit their internal contents as well”.

This concept also refers to the “objetos relacionais” (relational objects), which functioned as therapeutic practices within a system she called “Estruturação do Self” (Structuring of the Self), developed between 1979 and 1988.

These works leave behind Eurocentric abstract painting to take shape as soft sculptural devices made of worthless materials, which, when touched, activate what she called a “stimulating trauma.” In this dynamic, traditional roles of artist, viewer, and individual disappear, liberating psychological and biological layers that allow the self to dissolve and align with a kind of synergy formed by dynamic experiences operating beyond reason.

This dynamic practice is evident in the project “Red Elástica” presented in this exhibition, where the modern grid is weakened like an amorphous magma over the bodies of a collective that tries to escape or swim within a viscous atmosphere generated by elastic bands.

This exhibition is merely a breath within the hurricane that makes up Lygia’s world. It is a gesture that consolidates a friendship with the Clark family that began 20 years ago and also marks the beginning of an ambitious challenge: to offer new interpretations and market strategies for a body of work that is central and widely recognized in the history of universal art.

The goal is simple: to make the artist’s most radical investigations accessible to the general public through institutional collections.