SHADOW AND MULTIPLICITY:

Nair Kremer honours Clarice Lispector

Those who know the work of Nair Kremer understands the meaning of the tribute that she pays to the writer Clarice Lispector, many are the connections that bind them. We begin with the creation process. In both, the construction work is done by adding, i.e. migration fragments taken from the original place, reinstalled in the composition of new textual and visual objects, and are asked to be reinterpreted.

According to this constructive principle, it is observed, for example, in Nair Kremer´s work, the same female figure represented in a two metre sculpture, in an installation, in a painting and after cropped in a miniaturized metal sculpture, hold by a support that reduces its size even further, romantically pointing to the modern world oppression. We can also see the same tiny figure, hidden in an intimate space, which forces the viewer to change the pace to reach it closely.

There's in this combination process, beyond the constant dialogue within the physical space, the searching for something that, however, it is not there, since the joining and re-joining of the fragments, there’s no conclusion reached on a single object that carries the entire meaning. Thus, the female figure that diachronically runs through Nair’s work, placed in different positions and in different sizes, is a shadow that reaches the unsaid.

In both, Nair and Clarisse, there’s this indirect path, the deviation established as a working method that requires the returning to the initial point. The restless breath made of "twists" that casts objects in layers of meanings, and at the same time it pushes the stimulus for a constant restart.

In the comings and goings, the dialogue that Nair takes is not only inbreeding or facing her own work. There are ranges of references, whose origins are linked to a modernist tradition that dates the beginning of the Century, with the collaged sculpture of Picasso, Gonsalez, Tatlin or Rauchenberg. The paintings of fantastic cities and robotic figures bring to the scene the dialogue with the Surrealists and especially with Max Ernst. Partner of Jackson Pollock in the gestural painting, Nair prints her personal rhythm to the images that deepen and escape from the surface of the frame. The "pop" art is presented, for example, in Clarice´s multiples displayed on the newspaper. An allusion to "optical art" can be caught in the impossible geometries, where the boundaries between internal and external space are puzzled.

The dialogue in different directions creates circular effects and echoes voices that haunt both Clarice´s fictions and Nair’s visual work. In both cases, paradoxically, the images always multiply, deny, enhance, increase, incorporate, decrease, go drift and seek.

In Clarice Lispector´s fiction, the limits, the imprisonment that is bound to the human condition and the desire for unlimited freedom that pursues her is always exposed to the success and failure. Failure is the stigma that the writer carries. Between reality - her raw material - and language. The way she goes searching without finding it- her effort is to seek, but returning empty-handed. With the unsayable. “The Unspeakable can only be given to me by the failure of my language. Or when the construction failures in getting what it wants.”(The Passion According to G. H., p. 178).

While points and designates, the word gives rise to its shadow, the multiplicity of what has no name. It betrays what is said and it’s faithful when mute. So it´s needed to polish the lines, hit the line and increase the silence around the word. Scattered and mangled, the language reflects the emptiness of the subject looking for its image and from a lost totality of the living world.

It can be assumed from the prolixity of the expressive forms that Nair Kremer touches with her hand - collage, woodcut, shape, or using the emptiness of the form where she also searches restlessly for something that tries to flee from her, that doesn’t allow to be touched or represented, signing up herself in this kind of "aesthetics of failure", betraying what it achieves to be represented.

“What I cannot say”, said Clarice Lispector, "is more important than what I say. /.../ Each time I write fewer words. My best book will happen when I do not write at all’’ (Olga Borelli, Clarice Lispector: Sketching for a possible portrait, p 85).

Although the aesthetic program of Clarice Lispector has the silence as a horizon - the non-book, she is excessive in the writing exercise that redoubles and pushes to be to the limit of her expressiveness. Nair also meets Clarice there, because her art experiences the most impressive oppositions: the ambivalence between "poor" material resulting from richly coloured vision; the expression that unites joy and the sense of disaster, lyricism and apocalyptic images, all in the record of the excess, marked also by the objects that the artist removes from her work (one mermaid, a vase, a tree branch), signalling something that is not represented, and, of course, to propose a reinterpretation by the proximity game.

With this parallel, I justify the legitimacy of the tribute that now Nair Kremer is due to Clarice Lispector, many years after of the writer’s death.

Berta Waldman

Campinas, June 1996.

São Paulo, December 2013 (revised text)