“When you see, the act of seeing has no form – what you see sometimes has form and sometimes doesn’t. The act of seeing is ineffable. And sometimes what is seen is also ineffable,” writes Lispector. Actually, the limitation of language only appears when it is conceived as ideal and pure, as if it could translate thoughts and feelings flawlessly. This would be a merely instrumental language, supposedly perfect and transparent. But language, particularly that of the poet and the artist, does not translate meanings, it is inhabited by them. Meaning is not outside the world, since it can be neither prior to nor outside of the word. It is possible to express the inexpressible because language is allusive and indirect. The artist does not copy or translate thoughts, but lets herself be made time and again by them. It is from the unspeakable and the invisible that speech and the visible emerge. It is silence that deems the expression and the invention of new meanings possible. In Lispector’s case, she does not need to invent new words because she wrings those that already exist so that they mean what in their strict sense, as defined in a dictionary, they did not use to mean. Words that exist can express that which does not yet exist, just as crude dye extracted from mangrove-root barks goes far beyond its own materiality and tells something of the untellable, making the invisible visible. A word not only translates meaning that is outside itself, it is meaning. The same happens in painting: rather than being an image or an idea that occurs outside the canvas, what we see is the means by which it represents. Paes Leme’s painting is like Lispector’s writing, it is done with a free hand, as if the writer and artist no longer interfered in what the hand had written and in what had already been painted. Expression flows directly as paint slides on the canvas according to the angle in relation to the floor. “This is the way to have no lag between the instant and I: I act in the core of the instant,” says the writer in Água Viva. The lag is in the second attempt; the second writing would change the meaning, deeming that genuine instant more artificial, like retouching a painting that no longer happens at that “instant-now” in which
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