This journey could be seen as the beginning of a story, a tenuous story of what might be called manifest imagination. It's a journey about our condition of imagining beings, entities not governed by rules of science, reason or truth, but rather governed by the tribute of dreams and nightmares in setting up a world of expression. The tale of Jorge Luis Borges describes a time in which the creatures that lived in the mirrors, to seize the land space that belonged to the human being, are again imprisoned and condemned eternally to mimic and reflect the image of the "real world ". In this work of the Argentine writer, based on the Chinese myth of the Yellow Emperor and the fauna existing in the mirrors as alternate universe, we are confronted with the idea of restless "beings" - disobedient images - that moved here to our reality to start destruction and chaos. The history of beliefs tells us that, thanks to a powerful spell of Emperor Huang Di, the entities were controlled and defeated.
The story that we want to tell grows around the relationship between "real" ↔ "imaginary," reflection and image. Both concepts are considered moments that we consider important and that, through art, intersect or change places, producing shadows, terrorizing patterns of representation, reason or truth, melting and deforming symbolic relationships that we expect to be stable. Therefore, we shall observe the artist as one who throws fakes to the "real reality" and, vice versa, one that imprisons the same "reality" in the representations and objects he creates. The notion of parergon, exposed by Jacques Derrida as the space in between - the inside and outside simultaneously – introduces concepts like concurrency interpretations, ambiguity, permeability and contamination. The artist as demiurgic sinner, illusionist and forger, shaman and sorcerer, is aware of the strength of the images that have been created for millennia (and others renewed, replaced or kidnapped) and their eternal role in coincide with the imago of divinity. In his work Hyperion oder Der Eremit Griechenland (Hyperion or the hermit of Greece, 1797), Hölderlin presents a structured format for letters, nostalgic respect to secular dramas extolling the divine nature, emphasizing a set of invisible forces, conflicts, and ideals of beauty and hope. The notion that we have on reading some of his passages, is that this notion is perfectly illustrated by the Greek struggle for independence, is that, now, the question is about to be able to speak with the gods, to rise up to their level ("The first child of human beauty, the divine, is art. Here the divine man rejuvenates”, Hyperion). This means that man and the gods are together, none outshines the other, there is no challenge possible. Heidegger, interpreter of Hölderlin says in way of title in his complete works "Wege - Werke nicht!", "Ways - not works!”. Entitlements present around several of his writings, eg Off the Beaten Track (1935-1946) On the Way To Language (1950-1959). In his conference, Hölderlin and the essence of poetry (1936), Heidegger induces an approximation to an understanding of poetry quasi-instrumental, taking a kind of poetic word excellence of the word itself, the sense of rigor, from which the poetic appointment devotes a slippage of the ordinary for the transfigured, for the extraordinary (Paul Valéry about Mallarmé assert that even if the poetry conveys to a state prior to writing and criticism itself). We cannot, however, ensure that the poet or visual artist - as you want - dominates nature just because the name that he determines or through its representation, but that such an appointment is a sensitive listening from the creative subjectivity, ending in "paths of language", ie. the multiple bifurcations that Borges tells us about. One could would also say that in Borges we find what Paul Virilio has pointed out how as the "uselessness" of maps, references, or cartography, we would say so to speak, of the representation. Some of the lines of Borges also peer the utopian belief of Virilio, speaking of a possible future in wich we could face this possibility of "futility" in order to move away from the obsession with metaphysics and the virtual (virtual here understood as anything that is not here and now), walking on the path to value and testify before the reality in its immediacy. However, as seen in authors such as Kant, Heidegger or Zizek, for man is impossible to get a direct experience of that reality because there's always a tiny distance between our understanding of the world and the experience of being in the world. What Borges's story illustrates (and you can reread from Virilio) is that the distance between the cognitive apprehension of reality (the world) and reality itself was something worked by modernity and postmodernity as a sort of "desertification of the world "(eg described by Zizek in Welcome to the Desert of the Real). Let us then slide through the mirror, and there, let's face the viewpoint does not reflect, but let’s see through it. What will come in first while looking creatures: the mirror or what we see reflected in it? Perhaps as in Borges's story, these "reflexes-beings" may reemerge now from the "mirror-screen" as real presences.
Hence, and from poetry as a pretext, the exhibition THE AGE OF DIVINITY is an open reading frame that seeks to disappoint any hope of literalism, and asks each artist to submit a piece that involves and explores some of the daydreams described above.
Hugo Barata, Lisbon, november of 2012