Poli Pieratti: a invenção da maré: Texto crítico: Veronica Stigger

Poli Pieratti and the Triumph of Galatea

Veronica Stigger

Poli Pieratti usually conceives the works to be shown in her solo exhibitions by considering not only the physical particularities of each space but also the symbolic and conceptual universe suggested by the place’s very designation. The name of the Galatea gallery, where this exhibition is being held, evokes the myth of Pygmalion, as stated on its website:

This myth tells the story of the artist Pygmalion, who, when sculpting Galatea in ivory, a female figure, falls in love with his own work and begins to adore it. The goddess Aphrodite, moved by such devotion, transforms the statue into a woman of flesh and blood so that the creator and creature can, at last, live a true relationship.[1]

The statue sculpted and adored by Pygmalion remains unnamed in the earliest versions of the myth such as in Ovid's Metamorphoses, a text that serves as the foundation for many literary and artistic adaptations of the narrative. It was only more recently that she came to be called Galatea, a designation said to have first appeared in the play Pygmalion[2]by philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau which was staged in 1770 and published the following year in Mercure de France. In this brief one-act drama, Pygmalion exalts the beauty of his creature as follows: “O Galatea! Receive my homage. Yes, I was wrong: I meant to make you a nymph, and I have made you a goddess.”[3] By stating that he wished he had made her “a nymph,” Pygmalion subtly alludes to the origin of the name he gave his sculpture: that of the nymph Galatea, daughter of Nereus and of a sea deity. Passionate for Acis, the nymph was pursued by the monstrous Cyclops Polyphemus, who loved her. Upon catching her with Acis and consumed by jealousy and rage, he hurls a piece of rock at his rival, crushing him. Galatea then transforms her beloved into a river, restoring to him “his ancestral form” (his grandfather was a deity who personified a river).[4] In Ovid’s Metamorphoses, she herself narrates the conclusion of her misfortune:

The purple blood ran out on the warm rock, and (wonderful!) after a little while the crimson color faded, and it took the look of water troubled by a shower, and in a moment it was clear; from out the stone a reed, a slender-leaved green reed, was growing, and from underneath the rock a gush of water came, and babbled loud. And—marvellous to tell!—a youth arose, his horns just budding, with a wreath of reeds about his new-formed brows. Yet though he now was taller and his face was deep sea-blue, still, as before, he was Acis, changed into a river, and his name remains.[5]

Drawing inspiration from the name of the Galatea gallery and the seaside location of its Salvador headquarters, Poli Pieratti summons the image of this nereid by presenting previously unseen paintings that, on the one hand, bring elements that could compose the setting of the mythical narrative under consideration—such as the seabed, waves, corals, rocks, and reefs—and, on the other hand, depict the nymph herself as seen in Galatea I, based on Venus or Galatea Supported by Dolphins (c. 1590–95) by Agostino Carracci. This latter work, in turn, is a reinterpretation of the theme made classical by Raphael Sanzio under the title The Triumph of Galatea (c. 1514). Galatea I is not the only painting on display here that engages in dialogue with iconic works from art history: Onda II [Wave II] clearly references The Great Wave (1831) by Hokusai, while Onda e ventania III [Wave and Windstorm III], to cite another example, revisits certain aspects of The Wave (1915) by Anita Malfatti, which had already served as the starting point for Onda e ventania II [Wave and Windstorm II]. That painting was shown two years earlier in Pieratti’s solo exhibition A Terra do Mar [The Land of the Sea], held in the building on Libero Badaró Street in downtown São Paulo that once hosted Malfatti’s landmark 1917 modernist exhibition.

If the gallery’s name led Poli Pieratti to conceive this exhibition around the figure of Galatea, that contingency ultimately found deep resonance in her work: water has been present from the outset in much of her production. Her first solo exhibition was titled Submersa [Submerged] (2023) and one of her early series, Família água [Water Family], stemmed from another contingency: the discovery of a photo album filled with images of relatives in swimming pools, rivers, or the sea. In an interview, Poli shares how she created based on these photos:

When I brought the scenes together in a drawing, I began filling the sensations of emptiness with the reflections of water that tinted the pool. That water slowly took over everything, as if all the scenes were submerged, as if there were no longer any notion of surface, as if freedom had prevailed.[6]

The description of the creative principle behind this series of works—which Poli considers as “a matrix for all the others”[7]—is at once technical (“I brought the scenes together in a drawing,” “I began filling the sensations of emptiness with the reflections of water”) and poetic (“that water slowly took over everything”). It reveals how, for her, water is not only a theme but also a medium and, above all, a way of thinking and painting. A keen reader of Gaston Bachelard’s Water and Dreams: An Essay on the Imagination of Matter, a book from which she has already drawn epigraphs for more than one of her projects, Poli Pieratti would likely agree with the French philosopher when he states that water “should rule over earth.” After all, as he adds: “It is the blood of the Earth. It is the life of the Earth. Water draws the entire countryside along toward its own destiny.”[8] Water, in short, sculpts the landscape. We may infer from this that water—the liquid, fluid, and therefore dynamic element—is the force that gives form, meaning, and no less importantly, life to matter that was previously inert.

It was this transformative and life-giving power that Poli Pieratti found in water. In her paintings, the artist works as though dissolving into liquid the elements and figures she seeks to represent (including works by the “great masters”), as if submerging and thus diluting them in an effort to erase what once gave them definition. Even the brushstrokes themselves— typically short and fluid, spreading across the pictorial surface in alternating shades of blue and red ochre—invoke the flow of water. It is as if only through water one could see the truth (or perhaps the depth?) of things, or to recall once again Poli Pieratti’s own description of her creative process, as if only through water’s intervention could a “notion of surface” cease to exist. As we have seen, for the artist this notion must be overcome for freedom to prevail.

The myth already foreshadowed this victory. Upon seeing her great love crushed by a rock, Galatea transforms him into a river. This is the triumph of the nymph over the giant Polyphemus. It is as water that Acis frees himself from his fate. As water, he becomes flow itself and lives again. In this image we might glimpse a synthesis of one of Bachelard’s propositions drawn from Heraclitus and cherished by Poli Pieratti—that we too are made of impermanent matter: “One cannot bathe twice in the same river because already, in his inmost recesses, the human being shares the destiny of flowing water.”[9]

VERONICA STIGGER is a writer, curator, and art critic