Of a wound, what matters is the scar.
Jacques Lacan
Painting incarnate: a way of writing a body
The inaugural text of Painting Incarnate, by Georges Didi-Huberman, verses on the demands of the flesh in painting and touches upon the span of the skin between depth and surface.
Thiago Honório’s Wall Painting speaks directly to a question summoned by the notion of incarnation in Didi-Huberman: within the form and folds of its construction we also find blood and flesh as spectral substances of desire. Through the disfiguration and reconstruction of the lacerated body and conscience, the artist roams over the thoroughness of a dwelling under perpetual construction.
A body-house is drafted. It is a way of inhabiting that is present in the work since its inception: abrasive sandpaper sheets used in the process of reforming the artist’s house form now a pictorial body erected through the gesture of trimming the rags of what is left. Mended and flayed the sandpaper sheets retain the filigrees of a wound.
Small patches of sandpaper sheets build a painting and a body in an act of restoration that destitute the object of its functionality, replacing it in the scene, by posing a symbolic question: from the abrasive surface we walk into the tactile skin-surface – encounter and frontier between the limited in the body and the unlimited in the world. In the repeated gesture of sanding to find a kind of focal point of the wall painting, a new world emerges from remnants. The sandpaper, the matter resulting from this operation, is the remnant of an intimate landscape that reverberates something already said by Jean-Luc Nancy: “What’s left of art? Maybe only a remnant.” A testimony of presence and absence, addition and subtraction, of a singular geometry of pain that shelters the abrasive act of flaying the wall’s layers or the body, until shedding the skin.
What is at stake in this restorative gesture? A sacrificial rite that overcomes the torment by injecting life into the body-wound, the body-house, the body-work. The cross is the repeated sign in the folds of the sandpaper sheets and it is in this repetition that a geometry is sustained, that a lexicon is manifested. From the prospection window created within the painting itself we can see the loss of matter and the forging of an improvised reconstruction, as well as, with a structural rigor, the sore and the wound as a form of archeology of the sensible revealing the inside out and the outside, combining image and thought, visible and invisible.
Thiago Honório devises a language between the domesticable and the strange, from where the real erupts. The painting is this body traversed by the peeling of unutterable layers, a violation erected from the sandpaper and its colors – red, black, ochre – as well as the most abrasive wet paper that needs to be moistened. What results is an effect of these remnants, of the remaining sandpaper sheets with their already worn colors and matter, generating new effects and colors: stains that emerge like abscesses in the body or lichens on stone.
In the urgency to excavate the world with one’s hands – a tactile and convulsive urgency – the artist returns to the body under another perspective: he collects, from the fragments and laceration, a poetic possibility of reparation. In the parts of the work where the loss of matter is visible, another pictorial element is created. A drive body writes itself between muscles, flesh, viscera, establishing a symbolic order. Between the opening and the closing, the pure and the impure, the traces left to solve a crime.
In some texts, Walter Benjamin uses the term “crime” as irruption and transgression in the course of an idealized normality, a rupture in the continuum of time, that creates deviations of certainties, of what is known or expected. Such idea is also present in the work of Georges Bataille, for whom the transit between form and inform, pleasure and pain, beauty and horror, purity and obscenity, attraction and abjection, can incarnate an invention of life, of celebration.
Thiago Honório carries out a metamorphosis of matter that produces a “defacement” to build a body. The stains, gaps or wounds are present to emphasize that the image is presence and not mimicry. The color, the crux, the trimmed sandpaper sheets become flesh, and the elements of the image become the drive body. The wound, the blood, the flesh, the substance, the matter, all take part in Wall Painting as elements of a drive body.
It is Jacques Lacan whom takes up the notion of drive body from Freud, showing that the drive presupposes above all an articulation of the continuous and the discontinuous, a kind of binding of the unlimited and the limited. The source of the painting is announced, before it even becomes visible, in the artist’s gesture – the act of roaming through the details of a house under construction, with an abrasive sandpaper sheet in hands. Then, the painting incarnates, bearing the trace of the unrepresentable, a point of the impossible, a real around which it structures itself. That is what Didi-Huberman has called “the wretched part of the picture:” the emergency of presence, the outside of representation. This particular role of the stain – a salience in the ceiling, a crack in the wall – may testify to something of the body that is household, but that also evicts, like in the Freudian dream of Irma’s injection, that Lacan names the “dream of dreams,” in which the exact dimension of the unconscious subject is manifested. Lacan says: “There is a terrifying discovery, that of the flesh we never see, the bottom of things, the face’s inside out, the excreted par excellence, the flesh from which everything rises in the most profound mystery.”
A body-house-painting. Opacity and transparency, interior and exterior. The writing of a presence that needs to be read in touch with our foundational wound.
— Bianca Dias
Rio de Janeiro: Philos, 2022.
Translated by Yudi Rafael