OFLUXO

“Leaving No Trace” exploits an interpretative substrate where psychoanalytic concepts such as “sublimation”, “castration”, “repression” play undoubtedly a role and where at the same time the signified prevails over the signifier.

To share the words by the French philosopher Jacques Derrida, in his Voice and Phenomenon of 1967: “And it is precisely around this privilege of the now, from the now, that this debate ultimately takes place. A debate that does not resemble anything else, between philosophy, which is always a philosophy of presence, and a thought of non-presence – not necessarily its opposite, nor a meditation of negative absence, indeed, a theory of the original non-presence.” The theory of non presence is epitomised through the concept of “trace”, which is “a past that has never been a present”, that is, the dimension of an otherness that has never presented itself and will never be able to present itself.

However, the meaning of trace as investigated here has more to do with the original, etymological meaning of the word: legacy or hint. To put it in a more phenomenological way, inspired by the German philosopher Martin Heidegger, and therefore emerging from the vicious circle of an unpresentable non-presence, the most proper meaning coincides with that of revelation: the trace represents the hinted presence that paves the way to a possible connection joining together presence and non-presence.

Thus the line turns into a trace by sublimating the matter and revealing the unspeakable twist of being at each moment deprived of time.

The artistic research of the Danish Ditte Ejlerskov (born in 1982) is aimed at investigating the experiences and perceptions of her generation, with references to post-colonial and post-feminist ideas. Originally, her quest was strongly influenced by a wide repertoire of images extrapolated from contemporary visual culture, balancing between the liveliness of pop culture, the preponderance of World Wide Web and the questionable omnipresence of mass media. Until the moment when her works, quoting the artist herself, began “to implode and then destroy themselves.” Since 2015 the artistic practice of Ditte Ejlerskov has undergone an induced process of self-purification from the impervious general negativity, from materiality, from traditional culture, from politics, from fears and expectations, a moment in which the exploration of the potential of painting as the only means of expression, as a language continuously transforming and as a tool is deliberately placed at the centre to interpret the reality of current contemporary culture – a reality surrounded by dreams and hopes. In her most recent works, Ejlerskov has focused on the more formal aspects of her artistic practice,creating Dream Gradients, a cycle of paintings with delicate and refined hues, created through infinite superimpositions of colour layers. Challenging the pictorial medium as such, and well aware of the weight of the pictorial academic tradition, the artist uses colour, composition, structure and light as fundamental elements for the creation of works characterized by a palette that is at the same time soft and vibrant, thus giving life to an iridescent proscenium with a “chromotherapy” character.

The Portuguese Pedro Matos, born in 1989, chooses to explore lines, trying to emphasise the lyrical and suggestive beauty of their symbolic complexity and meaning, sinking their roots in the permeability present in the relationship between abstraction and representation. The artist intervenes manually with undisputed precision and careful visual subtlety, usually on linen canvases. Matos continually photographs and exchanges images, and the resulting selection brings about the raw material which is subsequently manipulated on software and then projected onto canvas. Metaphorically, studying the apex of human action on nature, which is both destructive and constructive, he intervenes with a gestural speed that distinguishes the transformation of the works themselves. Conceptually it can be compared to the urban culture and street style typical of graffiti and billboards cut-up. Through abstraction, he manipulates incorporeal and imagined forms with lightness, creating new semantic frontiers. The originated, cryptic image simultaneously experiences the diffusion and loss of information during each phase of the creative process, thus giving life to an art that transcends ordinary forms through abstraction, since each sign evokes a unique image whose texture reflects an abstract quality, a perception crumbling over time.