As Insubordinadas #2 (60x60x3cm)

AS INSUBORDINADAS #2

Mixed media (2022)

60 x 60 x 4 cm

Oxidação em cobre

Natural wood frame in tobacco tone, with glass back.

**Não há vidro na frente da obra**

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My growing interest in transitive states, the passage between things and ambiguous processes of construction; led me to the oxidation of matter. THE INSUBORDINATES arise from the very vibration of the metal, the investigation does not start from a previously established formal program. It is negotiating with time, with air and humidity. It is resisting the frustration of ephemeral successes, the melancholy of seeing a colour or texture disappear. 

I am interested in dilemmas about the irreversibility of time, the complexity of life. I try to explore the possibility of existing on the edge. Where, in a certain way, accumulation is also absence. The more the plate oxidizes, the less it resists and the thicker it becomes. The charred result that the work possesses was achieved in a slow, unhurried way. There is in the desperate fragility of the fragments and drops that peel off and fall from the metal, the certainty that we were wrong; that the completeness was only apparent. We have the nostalgia of lost continuity. There is something brutal, something painful about seeing the end. We ill bear the perishable individuality that we are. And this dynamic can be applied to art. If there is no permanence associated with a given work, we keep blowing life.

The metal plate was subjected to successive corrosion processes with ferric oxides. Each work takes around one hundred days to get its wooden box and leave the studio. It is a living organism, which will continue to wear out slowly, depending on the climatic conditions to which it is exposed. To be aware of the passage of time is to watch the transformation of the work in its "ever disappearing" nature. It means to train one's gaze to wait, without anticipation. To resist the curiosity of accelerating the natural oxidation of matter in excess, shortening its existence and losing the alchemical beauty of the process.

Patricia Borges