Time Hand
1/2/1998
 

There is a time, Del Pilar Sallum photographs hers hands-exclusively hers laborious hands. In them, the lines of the drawing follow the movement of the attach of the metallic threads faithfully that trap them and, soon after, they liberate them. In the registration of the picture the testimony of the rhythm course of the line registered in the skin   swelled  .The line, however, doesn’t show as movement, as expression gesture, but as integral registration of the revealed body. Gradually-specially in the most recent works-the identity of the photographic registration tends becoming more vanished, and, when losing the documental  reminiscences, makes more autonomous. 

In works immediately previous, the photographic negative multiplied in a amount of investments of itself own, to compose the positive image. Now, the creation of a new epidermis mass still gives starting from the duplication of a same negative, but the junction becomes done in the computer, resulting in a homonym shape coalition which eliminates any double vestige. The resulting abstraction doesn’t allow more the access to a direct information, being revealed as other body that is not there: the duplicated of image doesn’t give for the simultaneity of the perception, but through an internal rotation of a body  that comes undone so that another one can appear. The hand, the object photographed initially, start hide  its identity more and more: it retracts for to emerge as other thing, enigmatic, with an astonishing sensual density, reinforced by the luminescent coating for pigments applied on the hand, before even of to suffer the registration of groove provoked by the metallic threads, when then it is ready to be photographed. In the subsequent procedures, that is, in the mutations why the negative passes when being manipulated in the computer, the image finally positive it is reconstituted as fragments of a new hybrid, but, unitary body, that its  reelaborated own structures in the displacement of the references and  discontinue imposed by the explosion of scales. Furthermore, the monumental dimension of the images, provokes a granular implosion of the debility skin conferred it zones of dilatation density, with curves and hollows permeated by light and shade areas. In search of a sense that no longer it is possible to rescue in its own memory, this body is in search of a new equilibrium between desire and subjective, knowing ahead of time, the precarious is this rescue. The  materiality exacerbated of the flesh that engenders it request a glance, that can embrace the discontinuity  imposed by the displacement of the references, as well as the loss and dilution of the subject and of anonymity. The allusions of strong erotic intonation come across a contamination caused by a vertiginous loss individual. Barthes well knew that “ the vertigo is that doesn’t end: it removes the sense, sending it at a posterior time.1Before this impasse, of the impossibility of relate contends, it is only possible to appeal to the inner rearticulate, where the game that the decomposition shape implies in a confirm of another. Far away from reducing a body an other, even if precarious, the exasperated sensuality of the new body proclaims its autonomy. It would be said that these images oscillate between registration and forgetfulness, between life and death, among memories already vacancies and the announcement of the future, without at least to compress in the present: after all, the time is permanent uncertainty.

(1) Barthes, Rolaand. "Réquichot et son corps" in L’Obvie et l’obtus. Paris, Seuil, 1982. P. 192 
 

Stella Teixeira de Barros