For the “Transe” section, Marlan Cotrim presents a series of paintings that hover between writing and landscape. Constructed on an oil background overlaid with a flickering relief in pastel, charcoal, India ink, or oil, the compositions emerge from an intimate relationship between the brush and a disobedient body – one that carries years of study and practice in the field of dance, a craft to which Marlan has crafted more than a decade of her life. Refuting any suggestion of observational painting, her compositions more closely resemble an electrocardiogram: they record the cadences and interruptions of an organism as the surface of the support is marked. If there is any indexical relationship between meaning and signifier, it presents itself solely as the topography of an organism in transition and movement, turbulent and flowing.

The initial experiments with this technique emerged during the passage from dance to painting, when Cotrim began recording everyday movements using pencil and pen. Later, the rapid, irregular gesture no longer depended on external impulse, becoming the driving force of an insatiable impulse. The line conquered the pictorial medium in reverse, gathering the desire for inscription with the previous practice of fashion, which made Cotrim intimate with the composition and quality of the fabrics. In the fusion of dance, clothing, and painting, an interest emerged in textures and rhythms that find their source in the body and move toward the construction of their own surroundings, forming perishable worlds for the execution of a choreography.

Marlan’s work problematizes the relationship between image and gesture by crystallizing precisely in the interplay between these two appearances: while the identification of reliefs and horizons suggests the formation of an imagined, fictional landscape, of a body demanding the establishment of an environment for its sustenance, an observation of the paths taken in the making of each composition brings the artist’s practice closer not to the image, but to the writing of a score. The canvases defy a purely visual understanding, inviting movement: they are inscriptions made to be read like Braille, retracing the steps of a journey in continuity and change. For those who prefer to conserve the primacy of the gaze, color invites the remaking of the melody that accompanies the choreography, establishing analogies that hark back to the synesthetic uses of color in Giuseppe Arcimboldo (1526–1593) and the experiments of Louis Bertrand Castel (1688–1757).

In dissonance to earlier synesthesia theorists, Cotrim does not seek a universal scale in which color, sound, and movement can be translated into equivalences. Open to their own ambiguity, her works mimic the artist’s ethical relationship with her own body. The canvases destabilize the image precisely because they do not wish to be anything other than what they are: traces of energy, dissipated in the act of their creation, but still contained in the matter of each line that forms the shifting ground of the painting.

Lucas Albuquerque