The One and the Many

Marco Silveira Mello

In this exhibition are works by Guita Soifer from different moments. However, it is not a retrospective exhibition. The effort has a different setup. It is a matter of objectifying a way of this poetics to express the terms of its territory. It has always seemed to me that Guita Soifer finds engraving the most suitable device for her achievements. Here it is necessary to review some diagnoses. It is a mistake to think that the reasons for this fact came from a specialization.  First, this happens because the way of her actions shows a close affinity with the structure of this form of language. Engraving is a craft associated with multiplication and the artist’s actions seek insatiably, obsessively the multiplicity.

However, if her obsession with abundance extends a correspondence between her actions and the “shape” of the engraving, she is also responsible for promoting distances. Precisely because of the variety that Guita detaches herself from the multiplication that the engraving provides. The engraving perpetrates several of what is one and Guita does predominantly monotypes. She makes the engraving one only, but it opens in extensive series, showing that they could be almost countless.

The compulsion by the order of the many rushes from expansive capacities, leading the artist to go beyond the limits of this field, in a more favorable principle, and to take risks in different territories of language. Finally, it is chasing plurality that she affords her work to painting, photography, and art books. In the pictures of this extensive surface, which claims several, poetics will swarm from there to here and from there to there, arranging works in different languages. It is not surprising that the entities of different territories find common dispositions and features. After all, developments promoted in one continent advance in another to later return unfolded, ready for new exercises, able to carry out a new series of variations.

However, Guita Soifer’s work is not driven only by expansive impulses: these moods coexist with powerful locks. If the actions are launched ahead aiming for variety, they always show themselves clinging to a nuclear environment. Everything happens as if her efforts have never come off the gravity of the one. As if the lack of that presence would block the whole meaning of the action. It is for this reason that the works seek to orbit series, that the engraving prepares a spatiality capable of causing a center, that the painting organizes a myriad of brushstrokes tending to retract and that the vigorous variety that occurs in her books is done in the interior in a way whose nature is withdrawal.

The one and the many are the two terms that search Guita Soifer’s poetic space. When one finds himself with the other in the same work it is not a relaxation of the disposition, but the realization of a paradox. It never hurts to say: there is no art without bending the language to paradox.