Povo Pankararu [Pankararu People]
Aislan’s Canticle
Follow attentively
dot over dot on the raw linen’s surface
a point spreading
minute and obstinate
at first independent loose
readily multiplied
and absorbed
in the weave of crossed lines
speckled ducts
shambling hatches.
From the repetition of minimum units
in dozens of shades of white
proliferate luxurious cellular organelles
serpentine stripes
with no planned itinerary.
From the point and whiteness
to produce and activate a chain of waves
in invaginated forms — strange choreographies.
Now imagine circular stars
a germinating matrix
of ancestral grains
kara wã, in Tupi, a thorny stalk
from the bromeliad family
Gravatá or Caraguatá
Croás in a feast.
Aislan appreciates both
detail and reiteration
his practice is related
to the ethics of bacteria, fungi, algae,
complex enzymatic microorganisms
that constitute living things.
The pictorial system explains itself in Ancestral Mitochondria
letting numerous granules float
releasing enzymes into the intermembrane space.
“We are the plague that came to devour the world”,
stated environmental leader Ailton Krenak in 2020.
Desertified caatinga
Endangered Rio Negro, Rio Madeira, Rio Solimões
The climate crisis devastates
cosmological knowledge and organic knowledge.
See how
the outline of a multicellular organism
turns into aerial cartography
and suggests flying seeds,
stems, Dandelion pompoms,
blooms of a modern tropical garden
escaping a Burle Marx project.
— Extraordinary —
A cure transition
within each nuclear sheath,
a kind of essential existence
turning and pirouetting circles.
Do they obey an amoeboid movement?
Cytoplasm, metastasis or mandalas?
Non-narrative vertigo flirting with the Northeast artisanal embroiderers.
How to protect your relatives from further looting?
You, who filter dreams
and the labyrinths of undulating lines,
let the brushstroke vibrate and
the academics be confused
those formalists imbued with Pollockean expressionist abstraction.
Shifting borders
curves in art differ from the naturalism of landscape
and bleed on the upper and lower margins,
Your sinuous form also sustains a difficult balance
A kind of headdress around the flooded pupil
The iris receiving a shower of light.
Chilling bristling.
Dot paintings established the style of Aboriginal artists in Australia.
Their dotted lines on the sand or body paint
Mask religious designs
— showing without revealing, that is the technique
transmitting stories
keeping the sacred.
If secret stories simply don't belong in the public domain
how can we present a symbolic device whose integrity refuses to be delivered?
Writing about the works of Aislan Pankararu means to assume immediate
failure
the failing of that art critique
qualified to cover its object with external meanings.
The enigma shall abide.
One must
imagine these paintings dancing…
Lisette Lagnado, 11/03/23
Transalated by Alberto Dwek