Goiânia, 24th August – Drought of 2018
My re-encounter with Dalton de Paula at the School of Arts of Universidade Federal de Goiás was astonishing – time inflected in its assumed linearity. Such inflection was like a lump in one’s throat, a crossroads of sensations anchored in a hug, in tears, and in awe. Dalton finished his speech and declared himself an instrument of this field of forces where he operates ethically, aesthetically, and politically. A student then asked him whether he saw himself as an Eshu-artist, i.e. as a messenger, gatekeeper, and entity of communication. To that he replied being only Eshu’s grain of sand and took care to report the prudence of his mãe de santo (“saint’s mother”) and to evoke only parts of this axé-exu. That was when it occurred to me to think of Dalton as a cavalo de santo (“saint’s horse”)-type artist, that densely material and carnal dimension, that vehicle of force and energy, that body-becoming-corporality-strength of the orixás. And it is to him that I dedicate these brief notes, touching on this feeling-receiving and on making contact with Zeferina, with the sisters of Cosmas and Damian, with his Paratudo installation, with the goats, ex-votos, the armadillo, and the tortoise.
You, an old man: there was an ancient time inscribed in your eyes, voice, gestures. A time that the body digests in order to grow hoofs and to toughen up while bowing. A time moulded on the barks of the ipê and the jatobá. I first met Dalton five years ago, having recently moved to Goyás from Baía de Todos os Santos; back then I talked about perches and pursued settlements of meanings here, while he had also recently arrived from the same place, a divisive immersion of waters and lands. We had been recommended to each other by common friends – they told me about Daltinho, a diminutive form typical of Bahia state which actually evokes a superlative affection. Yesterday, the succession of time billowed yet another meaning – it was no longer time as chronos, but rather as aikos, this dense and incommensurable temporality that is pure sensation-duration and contrary to all forms of counting.
Then Dalton, here akin to the image of the cavalo de santo, showed me the series entitled “My trip to New York” – and there were the armadillo and the tortoise as animistic and mythic self-portraits. A density of time and skins and carapaces, transmuting into another force: the cosmopolitical force, that tenses the focused Euro-modern-north-human gaze. These two cosmopolitical self-portraits dig a hole in space with the armadillo, a tunnel towards the centre of the world. There burns a magma, a thick mineral broth that stands as a witness to the fact that other worlds, other beings, other individuals and stories, all of which seek passage to this world, wish to irrupt in a sudden and unrestrained way. With the tortoise, the self-portraits grope the palimpsest time of passages, wanderings, and stops, in a halting flow. One refers to such a time as a sign of the steps of ancestry, whose feet are as heavy as the ground-wrinkled feet of elders – the story of wandering and resisting. The tortoise stands as the link between ancestry and longevity, a link that is necessary to transmutations which produce other shapes, stories, and ways through which the world is and becomes embodied.
The armadillo-space fitted with the tortoise-time merge to me now like a rare and valuable cosmos, since they are mutations of silences, abuses, pains, perversities. They evoke healing, that which makes its way through these mythical bodies – bodies devoid of resentment, but completely apocalyptic and unconstrainable.
