MIRAGES in the Bottomless Sea

Enormous spaces without boundary, such as salt flats, deserts, or open sea, invoke the void. There is nothing as far as the eye can see. Someone experiences that emptiness, yet the immensity strips away the borders that define the individuality of one who is loose in vast space. We can confront the vastness for a few moments, asserting ourselves—I, I, I—but one of two things happens: either anguish sets in, or dissolution into the whole occurs. As the artist Fernanda Valadares wrote, "when the void is inevitable, better to be the void. The void is inevitable. I am-space." Valadares calls this sensation of being the immense void the "salt flat state" (estado de salar), the motto of her large encaustic paintings which, around 2012, suggested—through the evanescent appearance of mountains in the distance—an ebbing and flowing, passing from self-dissolution in space to a return to one's own contours.

The mountain provided the reference point within the infinite void; it was there for us to regain form, because to feel ourselves as well-defined individuals in the immense space of life, we need an other—a mountain that, standing firm in space, interrupts the void. The mountain is sometimes another person—though they vanish all too quickly—and sometimes it can be a work of art, which endures in a time closer to mountain time than to individual human time. Fernanda Valadares works with the extended duration of making and the permanence of encaustic, a technique that bestows upon painting the possibility of lasting for thousands of years. Slowly, the heat of the iron melts the wax, which blends with the pigment and establishes the play between the will of the wax and the will of the artist, materializing a dense surface—paradoxically homogeneous and sprinkled with tactile, sensual occurrences indifferent to the coldness of white tones and the asepsis of the empty architectures reproduced in the artist's works. The scrapes in the wax and the small bubbles that become tiny holes on the surface induce in the viewer a desire to lick that sober creaminess, stripping the painting of the familiar forms of walls and stairs, dissolving everything into the amorphous mass of the "salt flat state" to reach the flesh layer of existence.

In the Espejismo [Mirage] series, the mirage mentioned in the titles of the paintings is perhaps precisely the illusion that sustains daily life with rooms, stairs, passages, paths, concepts, and beliefs that disguise the lack of differentiation between us and the raw material of life, sparing us from direct experience with poignant immensity. On the walls, there are sometimes mysterious mountains forming a horizon that is also a tear, opening a crack of suspicion that an infinity lies behind the surface. In other paintings, the dark void of the window and the invisible room to which the staircase leads can be passages toward the oceanic feeling of submersion into the whole.

In the first chapter of Civilization and Its Discontents, Freud associates the oceanic feeling of communion with the whole to the origins of psychic life when, for the infant, no differentiation yet exists between the Ego and the world. The psyche, according to the father of psychoanalysis, is composed of overlapping, coexisting layers—much like an encaustic painting. Freud explains that just as excavating the soil of Rome reveals the Rome of other eras—and likely Roman encaustic paintings—diving into the psyche allows us to find the Ego of other stages in the mind's formation, coming into extemporaneous contact with the oceanic feeling of dissolution into the whole, feeling at one with the world, undifferentiated from it. And this can be as painful as it is intriguing, remembering that Freud ends the chapter on the "oceanic feeling" by quoting Schiller's lines: "Let him rejoice who breathes up here in the roseate light!", warning us that it is not easy to remain for long feeling dissolved and submerged in the whole.

In Fernanda Valadares's Subversos series, the mountains painted on paper using the encaustic technique mirror themselves in mirage and immersion. Could the subversos be subversions or submersions of the idea of the universe? Immersed and inverted, the mountains invoke an analogy between geological time and the time of the artwork: both are far longer than our individual lifespan. If we enter the "salt flat state" and dissolve into art, will we endure like an encaustic painting? Also on paper, the Mira.gem series pays homage to Mira Schendel, the artist-philosopher who exists forever. This is likely what we want from art: for it to be a silent mountain, the other of ourselves that provides contours in the beautiful and terrifying sea of existence.