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Armanda Duarte: Sopro Frio nas Orelhas [Cool breath on the ears]

The title sets the tone for this exhibition: a soft, cool whisper in the ears, sending a

quick chill down the spine: tenuous, momentary, and yet provoking a bodily response.

For some years, Armanda Duarte has worked with materials that have traditionally

been associated with the feminine: wool, thread, flour These materials, in turn,

allude to forms of making that are frequently anonymously authored: knitting,

embroidery, pastry-making. She approaches these materials not with an aggressive,

theoretical feminism a stance that would declare itself against classifying, naming, or

the making of monolithic objects that the more strident forms of feminist theory

identify with patriarchy but with a finely tuned intelligence and a subtle sensibility.

Her objects, usually made in situ, are only just there: they hover between presence and

absence.

Flour, shaped into heart-forms on a wooden shelf, teasingly makes up Snow Whites

Game. Nodding to Brancusi, nesting thimbles extending up into a line 190cm tall

constitute Small Endless Column, while Large Cinnamon Heart is a lace tablecloth on the

ground, its checkered fabric made of individual rice grains. The artist provides a pair

of tweezers for the clumsy spectator who might perhaps expecting to find more

familiar works of art tread on and destroy the works in the show. Ive got you under

my skin is a series of transparent, coloured handkerchiefs, where the entire surface has

been removed, leaving only the hem as the feint, ghostly outline of these squares on

the floor. Magically, Initiation B is made up of dried splatters of oil paint painstakingly

removed from the tables and easels of Armanda Duartes students at the art school

where she teaches (the title of the work referring to the name of the course). Positioned

with utmost care on laboratory glass plates that are neatly arrayed against a whitewall, these tiny specimens, remnants of painterly activity, throw delicate reflections

onto the wall, becoming in themselves paintings of shadow and light.

Disconcertingly, this body of fragile work energises and activates the huge space of the

exhibition hall as few shows before it have done. In taking care not to stampede the

works, simply allowing them to survive, the visitor is invited to pay close attention not

only to the works, but also to the smallest cracks on floor and wall. Armanda Duartes

work is paradoxical: entirely ephemeral, with its butterfly-wing beauty, teetering on

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the edge of non existence, it provokes the viewer into a rare concentration, unsettling

the expectations of durability and quiddity that we often bring to works of art.

Ruth Rosengarten

Armanda Duarte: Sopro Frio nas Orelhas (cool breath on the ears), Sala do Veado,

Museu da Histria Natural, Lisboa.

Viso, 28 January, 1999.