On Dalton Paula’s “A irmã de São Cosme e São Damião” (The sister of Saints Cosmas and Damian) exhibit. Galeria Alfinete – Brasília, 2016.
A sister shadow holds and hides; it permeates the silence of the story told by Dalton Paula in basins that offer island images among which one navigates. A deep dive into the shadow transposed to space, the not-always-white white cube. The archipelago of clay floats in the shadow gallery where one must bend down for the eye to go ashore in each image. One must kneel before the solitude of the image, which reveals, under the gallery’s spotlights, children, street vendors and police officers: men slaves and saints, women slaves and saints. The sweet image is bitter. Deities undermined by the barrenness of daily life. And as if it were possible to transpose a sentiment to space, at a given spot in the gallery we are partially hidden by the columns that harm the undulating trajectory, hence intercepting the navigation – there where the basins arch the rough edges. Cosmos and dame. An arrangement of scale and opposition. From space to the support and its peculiar way of bearing the images. From the path in the gallery to the singularity of each image. The nest support carries the fragile memory, lulls the unofficial story, virtually without reference to a daily life that originated in the black diaspora. The image props up past and present. Dalton Paula displays his images by rearranging memory as a trajectory, for it is we who go ashore in them, it is they that lull their own origin. The support places its offering, but one must know how to receive the images as a means to glimpse that which representation is carrying. For a moment, the gaze needs to become its own support, to bear what it saw, to carry the image and measure out the comfort that lulls the pains of the world.
