João Maria Gusmão and Pedro Paiva
Museo Marino Marini, Florence, Italy
João Maria Gusmão and Pedro Paiva, Caw-fish (2010)
In his book Naturalis Historia (Natural History, 77–79 AD) Pliny tells the story of a famous contest between the Greek painters Zeuxis and Parrhasios as to who could paint the more life-like picture. Although Zeuxis’s painting of grapes was so realistic that birds flew down to eat them, he asked Parrhasios to pull aside the veil covering his work, only to discover that the veil was painted – so Parrhasios won. ‘A triumph of the gaze over the eye’, noted Jacques Lacan about this anecdote in essay The Line and Light (1964).
Horse of the Prophet (2011)
This exhibition by Portuguese duo João Maria Gusmão and Pedro Paiva at the Museo Marini Marini (the first hosted by an Italian institution, following their recent solo shows at Kunsthalle Düsseldorf and Le Plateau in Paris) revolves around a parallel desire to ‘feed’ the eye, as if it’s possible to somehow feel, touch and ‘eat’ images, instead of simply grasping them with the mind. But, of course, it’s the unsatiable craving for an object of desire that cannot be seized.
Installed in the underground basement of the museum, the exhibition (curated by Nuno Faria and Alberto Salvadori) is plunged into darkness, so that the works emerge like epiphanies. Most are mesmerizing silent 16 mm films (14 in total, all less than three minutes long); many were shot by the artists with a high-speed camera, which can turn a second of live action into slow-mo, calling to mind both Eadweard Muybridge’s photographs and Zeno’s famous paradox of the tortoise that will never be over-taken by Achilles in a race, ‘since the pursuer must first reach the point whence the pursued started, so that the slower must always hold a lead’, as Aristotle put it. In other words, no matter how many times a movement is isolated, whatever moves will continue to escape us. As a result, Gusmão and Paiva seem happy to apply a good deal of irony to their own hunger for visions.
Spaghetti Tornado (2010)
The theme of edibility resurfaces again and again here. One of my favourites films in the show is Peppeninu and the Enchanted Food (2010), which was produced by the Fondazione Brodbeck in Catania, which co-organized this exhibition and which is currently hosting a sister show by Gusmão and Paiva. Shot in a Sicilian puppet theatre in Catania, the main character – a starving Peppeninu – tries to eat an elusive, magic plate of spaghetti that a sorceress has placed in front of him; an armed chevalier finally rescues him. Spaghetti Tornado (2010), again shot in Catania, is the tongue-in-cheek title of a film about the production of wax candles and the bronze sculpture modelled after it. In Bread, Tea and Bao Game (2011) food and drink are transformed into unidentified flying objects, while in Solar, the Blindman, Eating a Papaya (2011), the protagonist’s inability to see results in such a sensual display of taste and touch that it was almost embarassing to watch. The oddest and uncanniest of all the moving images here was that of a live cowfish on a plate (Cowfish, 2011): with its eyes wide open, it flaps its fins as if it could miraculously fly away. We know it won’t, but we keep on staring and longing for the imposssible to happen.
The exhibition is titled ‘Non c’è più niente da raccontare perché questo è piccolo, come ogni fecondazione’ (There’s nothing more to tell because this is small, as is every fecundation) and the artists are keen not explain what this might mean. Instead, they prefer to quote the favourite motto of Alberto Caeiro – one of the heteronyms used by the great poet Fernando Pessoa: ‘Things have no meaning: they exist. And their existence is their meaning’.
Barbara Casavecchia
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