(…) Poppies are very sensitive wildflowers. Their red tulle skirts, which used to cover the fields, are disappearing. In France, an ecological movement (Nous voulons des coquelicots) warns about this danger. The representation of the shape of the poppy, with an emphasis on its center, is used, in the graphic materials promoting actions of awareness of the eminent environmental catastrophe, as an emblematic symbol of an attentive and vigilant community. The farmers, who are responsible for their disappearance, deny what is an observable fact and dissociate themselves from the relationship between the toxins pulverized in the fields and the diseased reproductive organs, which lead to the sterilization of the poppies. (…)
In 2011, Clara Batalha participated with a poster in an exhibition entitled Flor Infinita [Infinite Flower] (at Navio Vazio, Porto), giving it the same name. In the drawing, there is a morphological correspondence between a (generic) flower and the human body or, otherwise described, it makes a body fully coincide over another body, the human over the vegetable. In this process, the artist, who plays with similarities and correspondences, stresses the importance of those that aim at the integration of the human in the nature, in a process of harmonious interdependence. And it is for this very reason that she takes as a disturbing fact the disappearance of the poppies (that she knows are finite) of the fields.
At the Poveiros Square, where Sismógrafo is located, a small white graffiti, made with a stencil, which almost disappears when the square is full, stand out two attached spirals – what meaning occurs to us, in our daily interception, in the encounter of such an archaic image? We see – possibly – an image of an ancestral unit, repeated, inscribed in anonymity, without therefore considering to what extent we are involved. Language is always the mark of a body and this one, no doubt, is provoking us. (…)
Clara Batalha is the result of a work of naming a fictitious authoral identity, determined by age, gender and geography, with thematic and stylistic autonomy. It is a name composed of two complementary words (an adjective and a noun), which in themselves constitute a connotative sense of a presential state of high and tumultuous vitality. The self-referentiality of Clara Batalha's work is, in turn, the work of displacement and edification of a section of Isabel Carvalho's work. On its edge, the center of the exhibited is the confirmation of the action of naming an identity-shaping process.
In 2011, Clara Batalha participated with a poster in an exhibition entitled Flor Infinita [Infinite Flower] (at Navio Vazio, Porto), giving it the same name. In the drawing, there is a morphological correspondence between a (generic) flower and the human body or, otherwise described, it makes a body fully coincide over another body, the human over the vegetable. In this process, the artist, who plays with similarities and correspondences, stresses the importance of those that aim at the integration of the human in the nature, in a process of harmonious interdependence. And it is for this very reason that she takes as a disturbing fact the disappearance of the poppies (that she knows are finite) of the fields.
At the Poveiros Square, where Sismógrafo is located, a small white graffiti, made with a stencil, which almost disappears when the square is full, stand out two attached spirals – what meaning occurs to us, in our daily interception, in the encounter of such an archaic image? We see – possibly – an image of an ancestral unit, repeated, inscribed in anonymity, without therefore considering to what extent we are involved. Language is always the mark of a body and this one, no doubt, is provoking us. (…)
Clara Batalha is the result of a work of naming a fictitious authoral identity, determined by age, gender and geography, with thematic and stylistic autonomy. It is a name composed of two complementary words (an adjective and a noun), which in themselves constitute a connotative sense of a presential state of high and tumultuous vitality. The self-referentiality of Clara Batalha's work is, in turn, the work of displacement and edification of a section of Isabel Carvalho's work. On its edge, the center of the exhibited is the confirmation of the action of naming an identity-shaping process.
2018