O trabalho de Marta Wengorovius possui uma característica dominante que assenta no facto de, em si mesmo, constituir uma totalidade, um corpus de elementos que têm a particularidade de reconstruirem a complexidade do trabalho para a arte. Marta opera em diferentes níveis, mas com uma linha de investigação que faz da totalidade, ou da possibilidade de atravessar o pensamento (os temas, as questões, as hipóteses) e as formas (os media), o seu projecto fundador. Nesta totalidade inserem-se elementos e problemáticas diversos que se relacionam com a arte e com a vida, escondidas através de uma dominante característica comum: a fragilidade, a caducidade, a extrema falibilidade de todos os gestos criativos. É exactamente nesta conotação humana, a fragilidade, onde a ética e a estética se encontram, que o trabalho de Marta Wengorovius assume a sua maior originalidade. O caminho da fragilidade é um caminho que pertence aos domínios da filosofia e do pensamento. Raramente encontra espaço na arte que, na sua objectividade, propõe uma consistência mais sólida, sobretudo quando se concentra no objecto, entendido como produto da indústria, ou simplesmente enquanto trasliteração, no procedimento humano, de um curso processual da indústria (como na Pop Art). A fragilidade, pelo contrário, é aquele lugar onde as coisas nascem e permanecem na caducidade, deixando um rasto no pensamento e dissolvendo-se com ele. Como a vida, ou melhor, como a vida biológica que, diferentemente da arte, não persegue o projecto da Eternidade. Por este motivo, a criação, no caso de Marta Wengorovius, assemelha-se muito mais ao processo natural de vida e de morte, do que ao sentido eterno do fazer arte – sobre os quais se consolidam nos nossos dias os princípios de mercado e de economia. Enquanto pensamento, a arte é entendida, por outras palavras, na acepção de que existe para solicitar uma faculdade frequentemente considerada de reenvio, certamente uma segunda qualidade na escala dos valores do mercado, enquanto não adere perfeitamente ao princípio da troca, colocando-se, pelo contrário, no âmbito da investigação pessoal, onde habitualmente se encontra a investigação mais verdadeira, que mergulha na identidade e no ser.

A Natureza, neste sentido, como génese do fazer arte, apresenta-se de forma transparente, como espelho da vida: a fonte mais rica a alcançar, mas também o modelo criativo mais perfeito. No termo natureza incluimos, convencionalmente, um vasto horizonte de coisas que têm como característica comum o facto de existirem: desde o próprio universo até às partículas subatómicas, incluindo os animais, as plantas, os minerais, todos os recursos naturais e acontecimentos como os furacões, os ciclones e os terramotos. Incluimos, também, quer o comportamento dos seres vivos quer os processos relacionados com objectos inanimados.

A relação homem-mundo, na história do pensamento filosófico, foi delineada em bases diferentes, alternadamente, segundo termos dogmáticos ou idealistas. Natura naturans e natura naturata, ou criação prática e criação cristalizada na sua origem, são termos que pertencem à filosofia e à arte. A questão central de todas as reflexões acerca da natureza é a de compreender, pelo menos, o pensamento que a propósito dela se interroga. Do ponto de vista dogmático a natureza, perante o pensamento (e o pensamento dela), coloca-se como coisa em si, fixa na sua estrutura e no seu  funcionamento. O pensamento dogmático coloca-se, portanto, do lado de fora dela, observa-a a partir do seu exterior. Por este motivo, os acontecimentos naturais podem ser explicados apenas de uma forma mecânica, de acordo com a lei de causa e efeito. Todo o dogma constitui um fim em si mesmo, se não se puser à discussão no seu próprio procedimento de análise, e a filosofia da natureza, definida por Hegel enquanto ideia no seu alheamento de si própria, pode considerar-se o primeiro momento da manifestação da racionalidade conceptual que se analisa a si própria. «Visto que a filosofia da natureza é consideração conceptual, ela tem por objecto o próprio universal, entendido de per se; e considera-o na sua própria necessidade imanente, segundo a autodeterminação do conceito». De qualquer modo, que significa ideia que se alheia de si?¹ Hegel explica que, ao tornar-se natureza, a ideia é «a negação de si própria, ou seja, é exterior a si». Deste modo, pensar na natureza, por um lado, enquanto primeira realização da ideia, e, por outro, como a sua negação, como alteridade da própria ideia não denota um comportamento de análise coerente e unívoco. Não será por acaso que esta passagem foi considerada como o calcanhar de Aquiles do sistema hegeliano.

A arte, no entanto, pode intervir neste processo de análise para se propor como fenomenologia externa que espelha o processo natural na sua especificidade mais forte, o da criação, e, por conseguinte, propor-lhe uma representação objectiva, colhida na sua fase mais incontrolável: o de fazer-se, ou, então, o do movimento ontológico do pensamento. A viagem da arte (mitologicamente, mas também segundo os mitos mais modernos da energia eléctrica) tem o seu início no «fazer-se luz», ou no nascimento a partir de uma energia natural e na sua execução sob o olhar humano, modificando-se, misturando-se, exactamente do mesmo modo como geneticamente se dá luz a muitas analogias através daquele movimento difuso da mente que poderemos designar como a viagem do pensamento. A arte é luz que emerge do escuro e que se imprime no olhar.

Este princípio justifica o recorrente uso que Marta Wengorovius faz da fotografia. O termo fotografia tem origem em duas palavras gregas: photos e graphia. Literalmente, portanto, fotografia significa escrever (grafia) com a luz (photos). A conjunção inerente à descoberta da fotografia propôs, no final do século XIX, graças às pesquisas de Joseph Nicéphore Niépce, a extraordinária possibilidade, muito ambicionada na Arte, de colocar questões estéticas substanciais no interior de um novo contexto científico. A pesquisa de Niépce faz convergir os resultados obtidos por numerosos ensaiadores, tanto no campo da óptica, através do desenvolvimento da câmara escura, como no da química, com o estudo das substâncias fotossensíveis. Nesta realidade bipolar, a fotografia colocou alternadamente a questão de se saber se os domínios da escrita (grafia e carácter manual) e da realidade (luz, automatismo) podem atingir uma síntese, resolvendo uma ideia final e composta do Belo, encarnado na imagem, ou abrir novas questões estéticas, enquanto complexidade renovada da Arte. A diferença entre o fotógrafo e o artista que opera através da fotografia reside na diferente interpretação em que se propõe esta resolução ou contraste. Também perante a tecnologia, o artista deixa por resolver a dialética porque a entende como o território electivo idealizado (e idolatrado) pelas vanguardas. Marta Wengorovius opera exactamente neste âmbito de dúvida, de tal modo que as suas obras nunca correspondem a imagens definidas e atestadas, segundo um ponto de vista, ou de acordo com um princípio de fidelidade da representação, mas na escolha primária de indagar o decurso da paisagem, dissolvendo-se na contemplação que dela faz.

Exactamente do mesmo modo como acontecia já nas origens da questão da fidelidade de representação, colocada pelo aparecimento da máquina fotográfica no tempo dos Impressionistas, no final do século XIX. Aquela primeira revolução é designada (não apenas, certamente) em torno de um quadro de Monet, Impression, soleil levant (1872) e constitui a síntese entre contrastes de luzes e de sombras, entre exteriores e interiores, cores fortes, vívidas recolhas em directo, en plein air (e a invenção necessária das telas portáteis e das bisnagas de tinta de óleo) e a velha retórica da inspiração no estudo dos pintores românticos. Contudo, àquela primeira atenção fundada no olhar seguiu-se uma outra assente na visão. Os últimos anos da vida de Monet são dedicados exclusivamente, à realização de quadros que representam os nenúfares do seu jardim, em Giverny. O naturalismo dos Nenúfares transforma-se numa espécie de simbolismo cósmico muito mais próximo da arte abstracta do que dos antecedentes impressionistas. No decorrer da sua meditação sobre os Nenúfares, Monet alcançou algumas inovações pictóricas completamente extraordinárias, nomeadamente a perfeita aderência ou equivalência entre a superfície da água e a superfície das telas. Monet ampliou literalmente as dimensões das suas telas, até preencher completamente o campo visual, arqueando os quadros e, por fim, mergulhando o observador, nasduas salas da Orangerie, em Paris, numa vegetação com um fio de água. Aqueles Nenúfares, portanto, possuem a totalidade que se encontra na Natureza e não apenas da Natureza: por outras palavras, produzem uma modificação da relação com o mundo, que se relaciona com o âmbito sensorial e perceptivo do artista e do observador. É deste modo, portanto, que a pintura e a fotografia de Marta Wengorovius, também na sua fusão contínua ou na sua dissoluçao em comportamentos autónomos, se nutre do mesmo princípio visionário. É filha de uma natureza que se alheia de si própria, que toma forma através da criação e prossegue através de um processo biológico individual. O artista aliena-se de acordo com uma faculdade primária: a de expor e de se expor, enquanto acto social. «Expor» significa, por um lado, distanciar, por outro, interpretar e explicar.

Estou envolvido num trabalho, num escrito em todos os seus detalhes e examino a sua disposição e explico-a. Expor-se significa distanciar-se, colocar-se numa situação crítica, sobretudo sujeitar-se a um perigo. Dito de uma maneira neutra: trata-se de se mostrar. Esta capacidade (exponencial) é, num primeiro momento, apenas potencial, não obstante os factos (ou seja, os acasos, nos termos de São Tomás de Aquino). A estes factos são coladas como etiquetas qualidades como as de bom e de mau, de belo e de feio que, por sua vez, se modificam conforme os lugares e as pessoas. De qualquer modo, o auto-distanciamento produz um efeito também na perspectiva e, por conseguinte, no estilo: não sou executado, mas participo na minha execução. Tudo isto se relaciona já com a transcendência. A parte exponencial nas gestas e nas obras determina o clamor que elas suscitam.»² Marta Wengorovius interpreta o expor-se, exactamente como uma maneira de dar vida a alguma coisa que tem autonomia em relação a si: um pensamento, uma forma, um comportamento.

O uso da fotografia, ou das telas emulsionadas, entra exactamente nesta relação de troca entre pintura (acção) e fotografia (imagem). É performativo na medida em que se constitui como motivo ao nível natural, na vida real, na sua fenomenologia de relações, que se encontram entre os alimentos naturais (reproduzidos também eles em instrumentos necessários à alimentação do ponto de vista convencional da vida), ou ainda mais em performance de contemplação do sol, como no caso de «Mise à nu par le soleil», que constituem para Wengorovius um sistema cultural que supõe uma biologia também para a arte. A referência a Marcel Duchamp, explicita nesta obra, acrescenta um elemento próprio da ciência, a alquimia, que é uma ciência do conhecimento da natureza. Química de fusão dos metais, hibridação dos metais, enquanto conhecimento com vista ao restabelecimento da vida. O quadro «La Mariée mise à nu par ses célibataires» (1915-23) propôs um ponto de partida fundamental para a leitura alquímica da arte de Duchamp e da arte contemporânea em geral.

A leitura lquimista do trabalho de Duchamp foi proposta nos anos sessenta por Ulf Linde, depois de ter encontrado uma ilustração no tratado de alquimia de Solidonius. Nesta figura, dois homens estão ocupados em despir um indivíduo de sexo indefinido (a pedra filosofal), com linhas compositivas que imitam perfeitamente o desenho de La Mariée. A primeira convergência encontra-se no título: «La Mariée mise à nu par ses célibataires» (A Esposa despida pelos seus solteiros) é homófono em relação a «La Marie est mise à nue pare ses céli-batteurs» (Maria é posta na núvem pelos seus batedores celestes). A segunda convergência é de tipo estilístico e compositivo: o mundo superior, celeste, dividido do mundo inferior, o moinho de água como sarcófago vazio, os nove modelos masculinos como «professores de barra», que assistem ao evento. Se aos três solteiros se juntarem as três testemunhas oculares, chegamos aos doze apóstolos. Em várias dezenas de Assumpções de pintores italianos, entre a Idade Média e o século XVII, é possível encontrar semelhanças iconográficas e compositivas com todos estes elementos: a influência da pintura sacra é verificável a partir do quadro juvenil Baptismo (1910). Nas palavras de Duchamp, «os solteiros, devendo servir de base arquitectónica à esposa, relevam-na como uma espécie de apoteose da virgindade […] assente em construção»: em francês, trabalho de construção é maçonnerie, com o duplo significado de trabalhos de construção e de maçonaria. A leitura alquimista da Assumpção tem origem na tradição hermética, a cuja pedra filosofal é assemelhada a Virgem e a sua descoberta é o desnudamento.

O tema agrícola encontra-se estreitamente ligado ao religioso (tal como já acontece na doutrina cristã): o dia da Assumpção (o 15 de Agosto) assinala o início das primeiras chuvas, que, «semeando» a terra, provocarão o «florescimento» da Esposa. No Grande Vidro, para além da simbologia da Assumpção, encontra-se a grande núvem da Via Láctea, com a região dos nove peixes que recupera as gotas de chuva. Na metade inferior do Vidro, a grande «máquina agrícola» do aparato dos solteiros contém todos os elementos figurativos e lexicais de uma debulhadora, enquanto que o «florescimento» se explica finalmente através das flores que crescem dentro do sepulcro vazio em muitas Assumpções dos séculos XVI e XVII. O método de Duchamp que Marta Wengorovius coloca na arte reside, por sua vez, no desnivelamento da visão através das suas componentes principais, entre as quais a cor: o caleidoscópio que objectiviza em termos naturais e industriais a biologia do olhar humano.

O caso das acções «Mise à nu – par le soleil, par la lune, par le dessin, par la terre» são particularmente demonstrativas do trabalho de Marta Wengorovius, enquanto trabalho da artista de Lisboa, que, através daquelas obras, assume e encarna facetas diferentes até da sua maneira de entender a arte. Um dos objectos utilizados para as performances mise a nu reproduz o arco-íris (na versão original, ou também uma só cor do arco -íris noutras versões). O arco-íris é um fenómeno óptico e meteorológico que produz um espectro (quase) contínuo de luz no céu quando o sol reflecte nas gotas que permanecem suspensas depois de um temporal, ou junto a uma cascata ou a uma fonte. Trata-se visivelmente de um arco multicolorido, vermelho no exterior e violeta no interior. Pode ser um fenómeno «lunar», ou seja, nocturno. Pode ser visto nas noites de forte luar. No entanto, dado que a percepção humana das cores, em condições de pouca luminosidade, é reduzida, os arcos-íris lunares são recebidos como sendo brancos.

No caso do trabalho na arte, onde qualquer escolha assume uma pregnância simbólica muito forte, o arco-íris contém em si também um profundo valor político, porque, através dele foram fundadas as diferentes interpretações do valor do olhar (nos seus aspectos fenoménicos e simbólicos) em culturas muitos diferentes entre si, no Ocidente como no Oriente. Alguns exemplos: em Génesis 9:13, o arco-íris é um simbolo da união entre Deus e a humanidade; depois de Noé ter sobrevivido ao dilúvio universal no episódio da Arca de Noé, Deus enviou um arco-íris para prometer que não voltaria a enviar um dilúvio semelhante para destruir a terra; na mitologia grega, o arco-íris é um caminho feito por um mensageiro (Iris) entre a terra e o paraíso; o lugar do esconderijo secreto do duende (leprechaun) irlandês com o seu panelão cheio de ouro encontra-se geralmente na extremidade do arco-íris; na mitologia chinesa, o arco-íris era uma abertura no céu selada pela deusa Nüwa com pedras de sete cores diferentes; na mitologia Hindu, o arco-íris tem o nome de Indradhanush – o arco de Indra, o deus do raio e do trovão; na mitologia nórdica, um arco-íris chamado ponte bifröst liga Ásgarõr e Miõgarõr, moradas dos deuses e dos humanos, respectivamente. «O artista é uma pessoa que produz coisas de que as pessoas não precisam, mas que ele, por qualquer motivo, considera boa ideia dar-lhes» (Andy Warhol).

O sentido político do trabalho de Marta Wengorovius, de acordo com a natureza, é o de se expor, fornecendo instrumentos de análise que não tenham como objectivo a Verdade, mas que se posicionem como instrumentos rituais a partir dos quais possa fundar o diálogo. Wengorovius recupera o sentido do optimismo do trabalho colectivo onde a arte se transforma num cerimonial de celebração da Natureza: natureza da forma e natureza do pensamento. A biologia da arte encontra-se exactamente nesta sua evolução contínua que transforma o fazer num fazer nascer, criar, construir, mostrar-se e mostrar. Um processo que se conclui no pensamento. O retrato da natureza é um retrato em progresso a par do autoretrato, na medida em que se encontra numa contínua transformação proporcionada pela biologia das coisas. Aquela natureza que se mostra é, portanto, também a natureza de ser artista e mulher no mundo, que Marta Wengorovius interpreta com o gesto político desarmante de uma flor na boca.

Angelo Capasso, 2009

¹ Para as frases de Hegel, cf. Enciclopedia delle scienze filosofiche in compendio, Bari,1954, p.102-103.
² Ernst Jünger, Prognosi, in Catalogo della XVL Biennale di Venezia, a cura di Achille Bonito Oliva.

A dominant characteristic of Marta Wengorovius’ work is to be a whole, a corpus of elements with the peculiarity of rebuilding the complexity of the work for the art. Marta operates on different levels, but with a line of research that makes the whole her founding project, that is the possibility to cross the thought (the arguments, the issues, the hypothesis) and the forms (the media). Elements and different problematics in this whole are inserted regarding both art and life, scanned through a common dominant: the brittleness, the transience, the extreme fallibility of every creative gesture. It is exactly in this human connotation, brittleness, where ethics and aesthetics meet each other, that Marta Wengorovius’ work assumes the greatest originality. The brittleness way is a proper life of philosophy and of the thought, it rarely finds place in the art that in its objectivity proposes a more solid consistence, specially when art concentrates on the object, understood as a product of the industry, or also simply transliteration in the human doing of a trial course of the industry (as in Pop Art). Instead brittleness is that place where things are born and remain in transience, leaving a trace on the thought and melting itself with it.

As life, or better as biological life, that unlike art doesn’t pursue the Eternity project. For this reason, creation, in Marta Wengorovius’ case, is a creation that assimilates itself much more to the natural process of life and death, rather than to the eternal sense of aking art – on which the economy and market principles are consolidated today. In other words, art, as thought, means art that exists to urge a faculty often considered in return, certainly a ‘second’ quality in the scale of market values, as it doesn’t perfectly stick to the principle of exchange but instead it places itself within the personal research, in which usually finds the truest research that sinks in the identity and in the being. In such sense, Nature, as genesis of art making, presents itself in a transparent way which is the mirror of life: the richest source to which obtain, but also the most perfect creative model. With the term nature we conventionally include a vast horizon of the existing: from the universe itself to the subatomic particles, including animals, plants, minerals, all the natural resources and events as hurricanes, cyclones and earthquakes. Moreover it includes the behaviour of the living ones as well as the process connected with inanimate objects.

The relation man-world in the history of the philosophical thought has been set up on several bases, alternatively in dogmatic or idealistic terms. Nature naturans and  nature naturata that is creation in act and creation crystallized in the first genesis, are terms that belong to philosophy and to art. The central matter of each reflection about nature is to understand or not the thought that is questioned on it. From the dogmatic point of view nature in front of the thought (and to the thought of it) is placed as a thing in itself, fixed in its structure and in its functioning. Therefore the dogmatic thought places itself outside of it, observes it from the outside: for which natural events can only be explained mechanically, according to the cause-effect law. Every dogma has a purpose to itself, if it doesn’t put in discussion its analysis procedure, and the nature’s philosophy, defined by Hegel as the idea of its alienation from itself, it can be considered the first moment in which the conceptual rationality appears and analyzes itself. ‘Since nature’s philosophy is conceptual consideration, that has as object the same universal, but taken for itself; and it is considered in its own immanent necessity, according to the self-determination of the concept.’ But what does it mean idea in its alienating from itself? Hegel explains that in becoming nature the idea is ‘the negation of itself, that is external to itself.’¹ Therefore, to think about nature, on one side, as first realization of the idea and, on the other side as its negation, as otherness of the idea itself doesn’t denote a coherent and univocal behaviour of analysis: not by chance this passage has been considered as the Achilles’ heel of the Hegelian system.

However, art can intervene on this process of analysis to propose itself as an external phenomenology that mirrors the natural process in it stronger specificity, the one of creation, and therefore to propose a cultured objective representation in its most uncontrollable phase: the making, that is the ontological movement of the thought. The art’s voyage (mythologically but also according to the most modern myths of the electric energy) begins by making itself light: that is to be born from a natural energy and to compose itself under the human look, modifying itself, hybridising itself, just as it genetically gives light to many analogies with that diffused movement of the mind that we could denominate the voyage of the thought. Art is light that rises from the dark and it engraves into the look. This principle justifies the recurrent use that Marta Wengoroviuos makes of photography. The term photography has origin in two Greek words: photos and  graphia. Literally, photography means to write (graphia) with the light (photos). The conjunction inherent in the discovery of photography, has proposed at the end of the XIX century, thanks to the researches of 110 Joseph Nicéphore Niépce, the extraordinary possibility, and rather aspired in Art, to put substantial aesthetical matters inside a new scientific context. Niépce’s research makes converge the results obtained from several experimenters in the optics field, with the development of the dark room, as well as in that of the chemistry, with the study of the photosensitive substances. In this bipolar reality, photography has alternatively set the issue if the context of writing (handwriting and manuality) and the one of reality (light, automatism) can come to a synthesis, resolving a final and composed idea of Beauty incarnated in the image, or to open new aesthetic issues, as renewed complexity of Art. The difference between the photographer and the artist that operates through photography is in the different interpretation in which it is proposed this resolution or contrast. Also in front of the technology, the artist leaves unsolved the dialectic because he intends it as the elective territory that is idealized (and idolized) by the avant-gardes.

Marta Wengoroviuos operates exactly in this context of doubt, such that her works are never defined images and attested according to a point of view, or according to a principle of fidelity of the representation, as in the primary choice to investigate the elapsing and the melting of the look on the landscape. Just as it already happened at the origins of the matter on the fidelity of representation set by the appearance of the photographic machine by the Impressionists period, at the end of the nineteenth century. That first revolution, nominally (and obviously not only) it borns around a picture of Monet, Impression, soleil levant (1872) and it is the synthesis among contrasts of lights and shadows, among outsides and insides, strong colours, live vivid harvests, en plein air (and the necessary invention of the portable canvases and of the oil colour tubes) and the old rhetoric of the inspiration in the study of the romantic painters. But to that first attention founded on the look, another one has followed based on the vision. The last years of Monet’s life are exclusively devoted to the realization of pictures that represent the Nymphs of his garden in Giverny. The naturalism of the Nymphs turns into a sort of cosmic symbolism much nearer to the abstract art than to the impressionistic antecedent. During his meditation on the Nymphs, Monet come to some extraordinary pictorial innovations, among which the perfect adherence or equivalence between the surface of the water and the surface of the canvases. Monet enlarged laterally the dimensions of his canvases, up to fill entirely the visual area, bending the pictures, and finally, dipping the observer in a vegetation by the surface of water in the two rooms of the Orangerie at Paris. Therefore those Nymphs have the whole, that is in the Nature, and not only in the Nature: in other words they 111 produce a modification of the relation with the world, that concerns the sensorial and perceptive range of the artist as well as of the observer.

Here’s that Marta Wengorovius’ painting and photography, even in their continuous melting or dissolving in autonomous behaviours, they feed themselves of the same visionary principle. She is daughter of a nature that alienates from itself, that takes form through the creation and continues with its own individual biological process. The artist alienates herself according to her primary faculty: the one of expose and of exposing herself, as a social act. «Expose» means on one side to leave, on the other to interpret and to explain. I am busy with a work, a writing in all its details and I examine its disposition and I explain it. Exposing oneself means to leave, to put oneself on a critical situation, above all to be subjected to a risk; said in a neutral manner: it is a question of showing oneself. In a first phase, such ability (exponential) is just potential, despite it creates facts (or rather accidents, in Thomas of Aquino’s sense). Quality labels are hanged to these facts as good and bad, as beautiful and ugly that change themselves according to the places and to the people. Anyway, the self-leaving has also an effect on the perspective and consequently on the style: I am not executed, but I take part of my execution. All this already concerns transcendence. The exponential part in the deeds and in the works determine the clamour that they provoke.’² Marta Wengorovius interprets the exposing herself as a way to give life to something that has autonomy as itself: a thought, a form, a behaviour.

The use of photography or of emulsified canvases reenters in this term of exchange between painting (action) and photo (image). It is performative as it enters at full title in the natural circle, in the real life, in its relation’s phenomenology, made among the natural food (from the conventional point of view of the civil way of life, even those are reproduced on necessary tools for nourishment), or more, in the sun’s contemplation performance, as in the case of ‘Mise à nu par le soleil’, where for Wengorovius they also are a cultural system that hypothesizes a biology for art. The reference to Marcel Duchamp, explicit in that work, adds a science proper element, the alchemy that is a science of the nature’s knowledge. The metals fusion’s chemistry, hybridization of metals as knowledge for life’s healing. ‘La Mariée mise à nu par ses célibataires, même’ (1915-23) has proposed a fundamental starting point for the alchemic reading of Duchamp’s art and of contemporary art in general. The alchemic reading of the duchampian’s work was already proposed in the ‘60 by Ulf Linde, after discovering an illustration in the Solidonius’ alchemic treatise. In this image, two men are intent to strip bare an individual from the indefinite sex (the philosopher’s stone), with constituent lines that perfectly traces the sketch of La Mariée. The first convergence is in the title: 112 ‘La Mariée mise à nu par ses célibataires, même’ (The Bride stripped bare by her bachelors, even) it is a homophonic of ‘La Marie est mise à nue par ses céli-batteurs, même’ (Marie is laid down on the cloud by her celestial beaters, even).

The second convergence is a compositive and a stylistic form: the superior world, celestial, divided by the inferior world, the water mill as an empty sarcophagus, the nine mould males as ‘coffin masters’ that assist to the event. If we add to the nine bachelors the three eye witnesses, we have got the twelve apostles. From the middle age to the XVII century it is possible to find some compositive and iconographic similarities with all these elements in several Italian painters’ Assumptions: the influence of the sacred paintings can be found from the juvenile painting Baptism (1910) onwards. In Duchamp’s words, ‘bachelors having toserve as architectural base to the bride, she becomes a kind of apotheosis of the virginity […] with plinth in masonry’: in French, masonry is maçonnerie, with the double meaning masonry-freemasonry. The Assumption’s alchemic interpretation has roots in the hermetic tradition, in which the philosopher’s stone is assimilated to the Virgin, and its discovery it is the denudation. The agricultural theme is strictly interweaved to the religious one (as in Christian’s doctrine): Assumption’s day (August 15th) marks the beginning of the first rains, that ‘inseminating’ the soil will provoke the Bride’s ‘flowering’.

In The Large Glass, beyond the Assumption’s symbology, we can also find the great cloud of the Milky Way, with the region of the nine shots that gets back the rain drops: in the inferior half of the Glass, the great ‘agricultural machine’ from the bachelor instrument contains all the lexical and figurative elements of the threshing machine, while ‘flowering’ finally expounds itself in the flowers that grow inside the empty sepulchre in several Assumptions of the XVI and the XVII centuries. Instead, the duchampian’s method that Marta Wengorovius sets in her art is to unveil the vision through its main components, among which the colour: the kaleidoscope that in natural terms objectify the reality through the human eye. In the case of the action ‘Mise à nu par le soleil’ it is particularly significant Marta Wengorovius’ work, as the Lisbon’s artist, through that piece embodies different facets, characteristic of her way of intending art. The object used for the performance reproduces the rainbow (in its original colour or also in other versions).

The rainbow is both a meteorological and an optical phenomenon that produces a (almost) continuous spectrum of light in the sky when the Sun reflects itself on the drops remained in suspension after a storm, or near a fall or a fountain. Visually it is a multicoloured bow, red on the outside and violet on the inside. It can be a ‘lunar’ phenomenon that is a nocturnal rainbow: it can be seen in the nights of strong lunar light. But, since 113 human perception of colours is scarce under little brightness conditions, the lunar rainbows are perceived as white. In the case of the art’s work, where every choice assumes a very strong symbolic pregnancy, the rainbow has also by itself a deep political value, because through this and in very different cultures, from the West to the East, are founded the different interpretations of the look’s value (in its phenomenal and symbolic aspects). Some examples: in the Genesis 9:13, the rainbow is a sign of the union between God and humanity: in the story of Noah’s Ark, after Noah have survived to the Flood, God sends a rainbow as a promise that He will never again send such a deluge to destroy the earth; in the Greek mythology, it is a path between earth and heaven made by a messenger (Iris); it is the secret hiding place of the Irish elf (leprechaun), where at the end of the rainbow he hides a big pot full of gold; in the Chinese mythology, the rainbow was a fissure in the sky sealed by the goddess Nüwa with seven different coloured stones; in the Hindù mythology, the rainbow is called Indradhanush – Indra’s bow, the god of lightning and thunder; in the norse mythology a rainbow called the bridge bifröst connects Ásgarõr to Miõgarõr, respectively, abode of gods and humans.

‘An artist is someone who produces things that people don’t need to have but that he, for some reason, thinks it would be a good idea to give them.’ (Andy Warhol). The political sense of Marta Wengorovius’ work, in conformity with nature, is to expose itself in furnishing analysis’ tools that won’t have as objective the Truth, but that will be set as a ritual instrument on which dialogue will be found. Wengorovius recovers the sense of the optimism of the collective work where art turns itself into a ceremonial of the Nature’s celebration: nature of the form and nature of the thought. The biology of the art is really in this continuous evolution that transforms the making in making to be born, to create, to build, to show oneself and to show. A process that concludes itself in the thought. The nature’s portrait is a portrait in progress like the selfportrait, as it founds itself in a continuous transformation given by the biology of things. That nature that shows itself, is also the nature of being artist and woman in the world, that Marta Wengorovius interprets with the disarming political gesture of a flower in the mouth.

A dominant characteristic of Marta Wengorovius’ work is to be a whole, a corpus of elements with the peculiarity of rebuilding the complexity of the work for the art. Marta operates on different levels, but with a line of research that makes the whole her founding project, that is the possibility to cross the thought (the arguments, the issues, the hypothesis) and the forms (the media). Elements and different problematics in this whole are inserted regarding both art and life, scanned through a common dominant: the brittleness, the transience, the extreme fallibility of every creative gesture. It is exactly in this human connotation, brittleness, where ethics and aesthetics meet each other, that Marta Wengorovius’ work assumes the greatest originality. The brittleness way is a proper life of philosophy and of the thought, it rarely finds place in the art that in its objectivity proposes a more solid consistence, specially when art concentrates on the object, understood as a product of the industry, or also simply transliteration in the human doing of a trial course of the industry (as in Pop Art). Instead brittleness is that place where things are born and remain in transience, leaving a trace on the thought and melting itself with it.

As life, or better as biological life, that unlike art doesn’t pursue the Eternity project. For this reason, creation, in Marta Wengorovius’ case, is a creation that assimilates itself much more to the natural process of life and death, rather than to the eternal sense of aking art – on which the economy and market principles are consolidated today. In other words, art, as thought, means art that exists to urge a faculty often considered in return, certainly a ‘second’ quality in the scale of market values, as it doesn’t perfectly stick to the principle of exchange but instead it places itself within the personal research, in which usually finds the truest research that sinks in the identity and in the being. In such sense, Nature, as genesis of art making, presents itself in a transparent way which is the mirror of life: the richest source to which obtain, but also the most perfect creative model. With the term nature we conventionally include a vast horizon of the existing: from the universe itself to the subatomic particles, including animals, plants, minerals, all the natural resources and events as hurricanes, cyclones and earthquakes. Moreover it includes the behaviour of the living ones as well as the process connected with inanimate objects.

The relation man-world in the history of the philosophical thought has been set up on several bases, alternatively in dogmatic or idealistic terms. Nature naturans and  nature naturata that is creation in act and creation crystallized in the first genesis, are terms that belong to philosophy and to art. The central matter of each reflection about nature is to understand or not the thought that is questioned on it. From the dogmatic point of view nature in front of the thought (and to the thought of it) is placed as a thing in itself, fixed in its structure and in its functioning. Therefore the dogmatic thought places itself outside of it, observes it from the outside: for which natural events can only be explained mechanically, according to the cause-effect law. Every dogma has a purpose to itself, if it doesn’t put in discussion its analysis procedure, and the nature’s philosophy, defined by Hegel as the idea of its alienation from itself, it can be considered the first moment in which the conceptual rationality appears and analyzes itself. ‘Since nature’s philosophy is conceptual consideration, that has as object the same universal, but taken for itself; and it is considered in its own immanent necessity, according to the self-determination of the concept.’ But what does it mean idea in its alienating from itself? Hegel explains that in becoming nature the idea is ‘the negation of itself, that is external to itself.’1 Therefore, to think about nature, on one side, as first realization of the idea and, on the other side as its negation, as otherness of the idea itself doesn’t denote a coherent and univocal behaviour of analysis: not by chance this passage has been considered as the Achilles’ heel of the Hegelian system.

However, art can intervene on this process of analysis to propose itself as an external phenomenology that mirrors the natural process in it stronger specificity, the one of creation, and therefore to propose a cultured objective representation in its most uncontrollable phase: the making, that is the ontological movement of the thought. The art’s voyage (mythologically but also according to the most modern myths of the electric energy) begins by making itself light: that is to be born from a natural energy and to compose itself under the human look, modifying itself, hybridising itself, just as it genetically gives light to many analogies with that diffused movement of the mind that we could denominate the voyage of the thought. Art is light that rises from the dark and it engraves into the look. This principle justifies the recurrent use that Marta Wengoroviuos makes of photography. The term photography has origin in two Greek words: photos and  graphia. Literally, photography means to write (graphia) with the light (photos). The conjunction inherent in the discovery of photography, has proposed at the end of the XIX century, thanks to the researches of 110 Joseph Nicéphore Niépce, the extraordinary possibility, and rather aspired in Art, to put substantial aesthetical matters inside a new scientific context. Niépce’s research makes converge the results obtained from several experimenters in the optics field, with the development of the dark room, as well as in that of the chemistry, with the study of the photosensitive substances. In this bipolar reality, photography has alternatively set the issue if the context of writing (handwriting and manuality) and the one of reality (light, automatism) can come to a synthesis, resolving a final and composed idea of Beauty incarnated in the image, or to open new aesthetic issues, as renewed complexity of Art. The difference between the photographer and the artist that operates through photography is in the different interpretation in which it is proposed this resolution or contrast. Also in front of the technology, the artist leaves unsolved the dialectic because he intends it as the elective territory that is idealized (and idolized) by the avant-gardes.

Marta Wengoroviuos operates exactly in this context of doubt, such that her works are never defined images and attested according to a point of view, or according to a principle of fidelity of the representation, as in the primary choice to investigate the elapsing and the melting of the look on the landscape. Just as it already happened at the origins of the matter on the fidelity of representation set by the appearance of the photographic machine by the Impressionists period, at the end of the nineteenth century. That first revolution, nominally (and obviously not only) it borns around a picture of Monet, Impression, soleil levant (1872) and it is the synthesis among contrasts of lights and shadows, among outsides and insides, strong colours, live vivid harvests, en plein air (and the necessary invention of the portable canvases and of the oil colour tubes) and the old rhetoric of the inspiration in the study of the romantic painters. But to that first attention founded on the look, another one has followed based on the vision. The last years of Monet’s life are exclusively devoted to the realization of pictures that represent the Nymphs of his garden in Giverny. The naturalism of the Nymphs turns into a sort of cosmic symbolism much nearer to the abstract art than to the impressionistic antecedent. During his meditation on the Nymphs, Monet come to some extraordinary pictorial innovations, among which the perfect adherence or equivalence between the surface of the water and the surface of the canvases. Monet enlarged laterally the dimensions of his canvases, up to fill entirely the visual area, bending the pictures, and finally, dipping the observer in a vegetation by the surface of water in the two rooms of the Orangerie at Paris. Therefore those Nymphs have the whole, that is in the Nature, and not only in the Nature: in other words they 111 produce a modification of the relation with the world, that concerns the sensorial and perceptive range of the artist as well as of the observer.

Here’s that Marta Wengorovius’ painting and photography, even in their continuous melting or dissolving in autonomous behaviours, they feed themselves of the same visionary principle. She is daughter of a nature that alienates from itself, that takes form through the creation and continues with its own individual biological process. The artist alienates herself according to her primary faculty: the one of expose and of exposing herself, as a social act. «Expose» means on one side to leave, on the other to interpret and to explain. I am busy with a work, a writing in all its details and I examine its disposition and I explain it. Exposing oneself means to leave, to put oneself on a critical situation, above all to be subjected to a risk; said in a neutral manner: it is a question of showing oneself. In a first phase, such ability (exponential) is just potential, despite it creates facts (or rather accidents, in Thomas of Aquino’s sense). Quality labels are hanged to these facts as good and bad, as beautiful and ugly that change themselves according to the places and to the people. Anyway, the self-leaving has also an effect on the perspective and consequently on the style: I am not executed, but I take part of my execution. All this already concerns transcendence. The exponential part in the deeds and in the works determine the clamour that they provoke.’2 Marta Wengorovius interprets the exposing herself as a way to give life to something that has autonomy as itself: a thought, a form, a behaviour.

The use of photography or of emulsified canvases reenters in this term of exchange between painting (action) and photo (image). It is performative as it enters at full title in the natural circle, in the real life, in its relation’s phenomenology, made among the natural food (from the conventional point of view of the civil way of life, even those are reproduced on necessary tools for nourishment), or more, in the sun’s contemplation performance, as in the case of ‘Mise à nu par le soleil’, where for Wengorovius they also are a cultural system that hypothesizes a biology for art. The reference to Marcel Duchamp, explicit in that work, adds a science proper element, the alchemy that is a science of the nature’s knowledge. The metals fusion’s chemistry, hybridization of metals as knowledge for life’s healing. ‘La Mariée mise à nu par ses célibataires, même’ (1915-23) has proposed a fundamental starting point for the alchemic reading of Duchamp’s art and of contemporary art in general. The alchemic reading of the duchampian’s work was already proposed in the ‘60 by Ulf Linde, after discovering an illustration in the Solidonius’ alchemic treatise. In this image, two men are intent to strip bare an individual from the indefinite sex (the philosopher’s stone), with constituent lines that perfectly traces the sketch of La Mariée. The first convergence is in the title: 112 ‘La Mariée mise à nu par ses célibataires, même’ (The Bride stripped bare by her bachelors, even) it is a homophonic of ‘La Marie est mise à nue par ses céli-batteurs, même’ (Marie is laid down on the cloud by her celestial beaters, even).

The second convergence is a compositive and a stylistic form: the superior world, celestial, divided by the inferior world, the water mill as an empty sarcophagus, the nine mould males as ‘coffin masters’ that assist to the event. If we add to the nine bachelors the three eye witnesses, we have got the twelve apostles. From the middle age to the XVII century it is possible to find some compositive and iconographic similarities with all these elements in several Italian painters’ Assumptions: the influence of the sacred paintings can be found from the juvenile painting Baptism (1910) onwards. In Duchamp’s words, ‘bachelors having toserve as architectural base to the bride, she becomes a kind of apotheosis of the virginity […] with plinth in masonry’: in French, masonry is maçonnerie, with the double meaning masonry-freemasonry. The Assumption’s alchemic interpretation has roots in the hermetic tradition, in which the philosopher’s stone is assimilated to the Virgin, and its discovery it is the denudation. The agricultural theme is strictly interweaved to the religious one (as in Christian’s doctrine): Assumption’s day (August 15th) marks the beginning of the first rains, that ‘inseminating’ the soil will provoke the Bride’s ‘flowering’.

In The Large Glass, beyond the Assumption’s symbology, we can also find the great cloud of the Milky Way, with the region of the nine shots that gets back the rain drops: in the inferior half of the Glass, the great ‘agricultural machine’ from the bachelor instrument contains all the lexical and figurative elements of the threshing machine, while ‘flowering’ finally expounds itself in the flowers that grow inside the empty sepulchre in several Assumptions of the XVI and the XVII centuries. Instead, the duchampian’s method that Marta Wengorovius sets in her art is to unveil the vision through its main components, among which the colour: the kaleidoscope that in natural terms objectify the reality through the human eye. In the case of the action ‘Mise à nu par le soleil’ it is particularly significant Marta Wengorovius’ work, as the Lisbon’s artist, through that piece embodies different facets, characteristic of her way of intending art. The object used for the performance reproduces the rainbow (in its original colour or also in other versions).

The rainbow is both a meteorological and an optical phenomenon that produces a (almost) continuous spectrum of light in the sky when the Sun reflects itself on the drops remained in suspension after a storm, or near a fall or a fountain. Visually it is a multicoloured bow, red on the outside and violet on the inside. It can be a ‘lunar’ phenomenon that is a nocturnal rainbow: it can be seen in the nights of strong lunar light. But, since 113 human perception of colours is scarce under little brightness conditions, the lunar rainbows are perceived as white. In the case of the art’s work, where every choice assumes a very strong symbolic pregnancy, the rainbow has also by itself a deep political value, because through this and in very different cultures, from the West to the East, are founded the different interpretations of the look’s value (in its phenomenal and symbolic aspects). Some examples: in the Genesis 9:13, the rainbow is a sign of the union between God and humanity: in the story of Noah’s Ark, after Noah have survived to the Flood, God sends a rainbow as a promise that He will never again send such a deluge to destroy the earth; in the Greek mythology, it is a path between earth and heaven made by a messenger (Iris); it is the secret hiding place of the Irish elf (leprechaun), where at the end of the rainbow he hides a big pot full of gold; in the Chinese mythology, the rainbow was a fissure in the sky sealed by the goddess Nüwa with seven different coloured stones; in the Hindù mythology, the rainbow is called Indradhanush – Indra’s bow, the god of lightning and thunder; in the norse mythology a rainbow called the bridge bifröst connects Ásgarõr to Miõgarõr, respectively, abode of gods and humans.

‘An artist is someone who produces things that people don’t need to have but that he, for some reason, thinks it would be a good idea to give them.’ (Andy Warhol). The political sense of Marta Wengorovius’ work, in conformity with nature, is to expose itself in furnishing analysis’ tools that won’t have as objective the Truth, but that will be set as a ritual instrument on which dialogue will be found. Wengorovius recovers the sense of the optimism of the collective work where art turns itself into a ceremonial of the Nature’s celebration: nature of the form and nature of the thought. The biology of the art is really in this continuous evolution that transforms the making in making to be born, to create, to build, to show oneself and to show. A process that concludes itself in the thought. The nature’s portrait is a portrait in progress like the selfportrait, as it founds itself in a continuous transformation given by the biology of things. That nature that shows itself, is also the nature of being artist and woman in the world, that Marta Wengorovius interprets with the disarming political gesture of a flower in the mouth.

Angelo Capasso, 2009

1 Hegel, Enciclopedia delle scienze filosofiche in compendio, Bari, 1954, p.102-103.
2 Ernst Jünger, Prognosi, in Catalogo della XVL Biennale di Venezia, edited byAchille Bonito Oliva.