Aislan Pankararu: mitocôndria ancestral: curadoria: Lisette Lagnado

Aislan's Canticle

Lisette Lagnado

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…

Translated by Alberto Dwek