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LINE BETWEEN US [KNOTS]

2023

Solo exhibition in the context of the project balão (baloon), at the gallery of Sociedade de Instrução Guilherme Cossoul (Lisboa, Portugal).

Curated by Andreia César. 

The geometric line is something invisible. It is the trace made by the moving point, that is to say, its product. It is created by the movement — specifically through the destruction of the point’s intense state of repose. Here, occurs the leap from the static toward the dynamic.¹

Wassily Kandinsky. Point, Line, Plane

          Artistic making has been the subject of reflection in the visual arts since ancient times. Its reasons for being, processes and realizations, have been questioned, revised, and reinvented over and over again, without reaching a satisfactory conclusion. Artists have continuously walked this path, problematizing its practices, decomposing, analyzing, and transforming the most essential elements of the works of art in their various categories and modes of presentation.

This voracity of art for the sake of art, attached to that of art as a means of insertion and action in the world, is, naturally, also the case of Inês Nêves. In line between us [knots], the artist presents a passage from her research on artistic practice, in which the graphic element of the line, the gesture of the drawer, and the transposition from drawing to space are given a notable protagonism.

Kandinsky, W. (1979) Point and Line to Plane, Dover Publications, p. 53.

Its intelligibility is marked by the understanding of artistic production as stemming from a rooting in the body and from the experience of the creator. Referring to the intimate relationship with dance, Inês is concerned with the experience of the lived body: its sensibility, its mannerisms, its memories and its stories, its limits and its aptitudes… Movement emerges thus as a foundation and a creative process, allying itself to drawing — the so evident intermediary between the drawer and the tangible world.

Drawing, in Inês Nêves, presents itself as a beginning and an end: it is with it that one experiments, operates, transforms, and reflects… More than a simple pictorial code, drawing represents a consubstantiation of an intentionality and an event. It is made through the trace and the thread, freeing itself from its graphic circumscription and gaining an objectual presence. The lines that compose it express an intimate and personal nature, easily identifiable in the production of the track.

The track, this result of the being in movement, is, therefore, here considered according to the corporeal, dynamic, and spatial dimension that is so characteristic of it. It is in this sense that line between us [knots], and in the body of work by Inês Nêves, results the symbiotic relation between drawing and performance. Because, as pointed out by Merleau-Ponty, “visible and mobile, my body is a thing among things; it is one of them. It is caught in the fabric of the world”, these two categories are thereby brought together to translate an order of holistic experience — the one established between body, mind, and surroundings.

Merleau-Ponty, M. (2009) The Eye and the Spirit, Veja, p. 21.

Rooted in the place of dialog between action and production, in line between us [knots] we then witness the expansion of drawing towards a dimension compatible with the one of the body through the accentuation of the movement that is implicit in the act of drawing. Its lines are liberated from the expected bi-dimensional condition to develop in other spatial dimensions. Having as their point of origin the artist’s action, the lines extend, therefore, through the vectorial space, unfolding over the three observable dimensions. They express the duration of the gesture in space, and introduce the fourth dimension They become more than just drawn as they become constructed: in their transposition from trace to thread, and to textile object, they gain volume and texture.

In her master's dissertation intitled Traces & Threads, Exploring the transversality of lines through drawing and crochet (2021), and referring to Tim Ingold (in Lines: A Brief History, London: Routledge, 2007), Inês Nêves indicates the existence of two classes of lines: the traces and the threads. Traces are any marks left on a solid surface by continuous movement or repetition. The in other hand thread exists in three-dimensional space connecting two points.

Due to this being and happening through space and time, as well as to the tactile quality that the textile comprises, line between us [knots] proposes an intersection with the sphere of the spectator. The artwork and exhibition that come under this title present, then, a metaphoric line “made public, that can be interacted with, earning an identity that is not only attached to its material or how it was made, but also how it changes.”⁴ Taking the shape of an immersive space, inhabited by different components and materials, the spectator’s agency is thus invokedand the consequent transformations are assumed.

Line between us [knots] opens, hereby, the door to the common and shared space of non-verbal communication, relational art, and multisensoriality in the visual arts… In the artist’s own words, “anyone who walks between these lines can become therefore the agent: not by making, but by acting.”⁵

Ibid.

Text: Andreia César, April 2023 

(English translation:
Inês Nêves and Sara Felício)