P_Inez Teixeira_Terra incógnita.qxp:21x26cm 21/03/17 16:19 Page 22
production of her works. As we can see in the picture, instead of a cumulative aggregation of elements on the support, the painting presents to us an explosion of tiny particles, like some kind of cosmic dawn in which dispersion symbolises an act of freedom or even an emotional nebula. It is interesting to remember that the 2013 exhibition drew inspiration from another historic interpretation of geography as a descriptive formulation of the Earth: a book by 1800s author Onésime Reclus, La Terre à vol d’oiseau (Portuguese edition: A Terra Ilustrada), filled with plates that convey to us the vastness of mapped-out Earth. Confronted with that incommensurable scale and differentiation, the artist decided to work on a visual atlas in which all possibilities suggested by her imagination could accumulate in a landscape that, without denying the book’s maps and wonderful prints, displayed the complexity of the world described there, while distancing itself from the metric rationality that supports it. Both the Terra Incógnita exhibition and the series after which it is named would seem to be diametrically opposed to the previous show. However, that is not the case. And this is because the literature and history mentioned at the start of this text continue to be Inez Teixeira’s sources of references and inspiration. Especially worthy of mention is a book by 1700s author John Milton, Paradise Lost, illustrated by John Martin. This work consists of ten chapters (or books) in verse and is a biblical, epic and political tale of the struggle between good and evil. Between the world of men and that other world, effectively unknown but conceivable and imaginable, like any terra incógnita. An existentialist, emotional and obsessive outlook is also at play here, similar to the one in Albert Camus’ Exile and the Kingdom, a book that certainly has influenced this series of works. These paintings on paper explore a dense, magmatic palette: a profusion of masses and drippings rises out of each painted image in organic, aqueous lines, as if an imagined corporeality had torn itself open over their endless internal geography, like a soliloquy of imperceptible words, phonemes, grimaces and convulsions that reside in the near-brutal structure of these paintings that now hold our contemplative gaze. The same can be said of “Le chercheur du temps”, a set of possibly timeless drawings somewhere between a fictional landscape and the apse of the skull, which holds the timelessness of the Other, the reflection on death and the ephemeral condition that holds sway over all of us. At this point, Inez Teixeira’s work becomes autonomous from the history of literature and visual representation, without however losing sight of that horizon, which seems to us ever more distant but in which human reflection still finds a place for contemplation, for the internal time of each individual who heeds that visual call to think ourselves as travellers across the terra incógnita of our imagination.
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