The arrow of time

About the exhibition A moment that is repeated over and over

Águas Águas Gallery, 8 in Lisbon

Manuel Valente Alves

Time is not seen or heard. It is situated in a mysterious way below and beyond perceptions and sensations. It has no smell or taste, does not touch, is neither hot nor cold, neither dry nor humid. However, his passage almost always leaves marks on things and beings, in the tangible reality of the world. And there are signs of time that are constructed by the human being, such as artistic and technoscientific artefacts, architecture, streets and city squares, which evoke historical times. Also the days and nights and the seasons, natural phenomena that are repeated in an infinite circularity, are the origin of many of our ideas about time. The inner time, impossible to measure, reflects aspects of human subjectivity, such as thought, love, passion, hatred ...

But time itself is also an object of thought. As in this exhibition by Carla Rebelo, “A moment that is repeated continuously”, a pause in time, a kind of still that is repeated endlessly. A stop of time to reflect on it, looking at the infinite that is before and ahead of us. During this interminable pause, time becomes an object, a body that Carla Rebelo gradually dissects. Reversibility and irreversibility, finitude and restlessness, sky and earth, water and fire seem to converge in the discovery of the anatomy and physiology of time, a universe of endless and visual, semantic and other relationships and webs. In spite of the passing time, the ever faster acceleration of all kinds of speeds, this genetic work is both frozen time and time in motion, “a moment that is repeated continuously”, an archeology of knowledge, experiences, experiences and feelings.

Carla Rebelo creates a totality from fragments, a time out of time that inhabits the materiality of her sculptures, the beauty of her drawings and books. There are lines that intersect and interweave, fabrics, leaves, bark… The moment that Carla Rebelo's art calls for is both an interior time, lived and eternalized, and an exterior time, delimited by history, which looks to the past and protrudes into the future. No discontinuities. As in parallel mirrors in which the self-between-mirrors multiplies into reflected images that dissolve in an endless perspective.

Carla Rebelo's art is a science of continuity. Everything connects to everything. It is a slowly woven web, through which we rediscover the infinite complexity of the world, the timelessness of art. Many of the ideas made about time, nature, life are dismantled here. Like the ideas of birth and death. Birth and death do not exist in the natural world. They are pre-concepts designed to make the world intelligible, to adapt the infinite complexity of the world to the limitations of human thought. There is an infinite before us and after us, generations that succeed and connect with each other. Without being able to reveal, even in the confines of time, any cell, molecule or atom that we can designate as matrix. And death, what we call death, will only be a mere transformation of matter, a change of state.

In criticisms of the big bang theory, genetic theories are often compared with myths. Which is understandable. Both genetic theories and myths seek to go back, to go back through the flow of time. Some and others try to reach the zero degree of a knowledge process that aims to make the birth of the universe, of life and of the human being intelligible.

In the absence of mathematical models, myths feed on intellectual speculation. Classical science, on the other hand, focuses attention on continuous variations. Genetic processes will only begin to be addressed with the birth of embryology. As embryological processes cannot be reduced to continuous variations, given their extreme complexity, science, unable to theorize them, will, for a long time, be confined to its description. Today, genetics and problems of complexity are at the forefront of scientists' concerns, and inspire research that goes very far in the knowledge of phenomena, often linking science to art, the finite to the infinite.

Life is metamorphosis, eternal metamorphosis. Between mirrors, projections of space, leaves that slowly change in texture and shape, books and sculptures, Carla Rebelo's work evokes a subjective time that projects beyond the limits of the ruler and the compass, nature and the senses, and proposes a reflection on temporality. Yours, ours, the world. An arrow of time that flies both ways, without zigzagging.

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Manuel Valente Alves