by Cecilia André
A collaborative work of poetry and art by Cecilia André and Kátia Gerlach
Artists’ Statements
In these times when hate seems to be filling our daily lives, the writer Kátia Gerlach and the painter Cecilia André have struck up discussions on love and art, upon reflecting on Cecilia’s artwork of the last four years. After having sliced up a previous oil painting of a heart, a new version “Hear Heart” was made despite a destructive (or re-constructive) impulse, one filled with love rather than hate. The title begs the viewers to listen to their aching hearts.
Kátia, a writer who is a constant fixture at the friend’s painting studio, saw Cecilia’s paintings with amorous eyes and wrote the poem “The Art of Amorous Poetics”. Cecilia’s paintings reflect the woven possibilities of love, the rawness and delicacy of warm colors and the meeting of souls like in the painting “Two Suns”. The synergy between Cecilia’s paintings and Kátia’s poem forms a new ensemble where abstract thoughts can find new meanings.
Editor’s note: Three artworks from this collection, “Hear Heart”, “Two Suns”, and “Echo Maze” are featured here. Further pieces of art from this series can be found throughout this issue of FERAL.
by Cecilia André
The Art of an Amorous Poetics
Koch wrote about the two Arts:
The Art of Love & the Art of Poetry.
Why not then throw a rock
in a landscape by John Cage?
To place two bodies together,
To form an embrionary being in verses
Epic boldness to fascinate
Like the power of oceans
Tranquil in the distance, ferocious in their intimacy
Of waves and currents.
To put together meaning assigned to fuse
two bodies in a world without metrics,
nonetheless, placed in a pendular rhythm.
To love not to love to love not to love, say you love!
He bends down to tie the knots
She breaks in half because she is made of cobalt blue biscuit.
Pongé left to the sky with oranges, shells
and other objects of inspiration in his suitcase,
Haroldo de Campos took to the galaxies,
Jarry went up on a bike.
How many elevated poets, carrying
concrete things and words
with themselves,
so that there is nothing left to the Poetics but to
transform itself in auras of the earthly plain
Abstract words will be confronted
in a clash by someone who errs in unexpected battlefields,
having left the weapons home.
There will be rediscoveries in the Imago Mundi,
also new prophecies by Cassandra,
the spiders weave the web from you do not know what.
The Art of the Amorous Poetics rises from there.
You swim in nothingness, I swim in nothingness, we swim in liquids,
seasalt water, with soft chances of solidifying.
Euridice regressed to a statue of salt and Orpheus
fit in the hands of Giacometti,
a man as thin as a thread.
Shells will flourish
roses, orchids, carnations
thrown relentlessly by spiral turns.
Nature exists out of fantastical mechanisms.
To resuscitate ammonites, peoples, mollusks and miracles
and they will ask about Memory under the carapace.
Bachelard recommends to remedy it with daydreams
in homeopathic dosage
Is it not that the present is located in the hard disk
between past and future?
Reality is easily mistaken with Etherity,
the most advanced human beings will come
with iridescent eyes and superpowers,without Zarathustra’s ability
to inhibit divine growth of greying hair.
They will feel one another upon descending from the mountain.
The metamorphosis will not be the one by Kafka.
Imagine the transmigration of souls,
The instant transmutations,
the very touch and sensations,
verses not only undressed but transparent
in the heat of desire’s flame
burning yet unseen,
devastating this belittled planet,
by the conjunction of Jupiter and Saturn at 0.1 degrees
joined in one, with their contraries summed up,
Such as in love and poetry.
by Kátia Gerlach
by Cecilia André
Cecilia André is a NYC painter descendant of Lebanese immigrants to Brazil. The poetics of intuitive colors guide her dynamic art production. In this series of oil paintings, stitching and weaving explore and breakup the traditional backgrounds. Currently color interplays with light in her installations at the Queens Botanical Garden Gallery. @cecilia_andre_art www.ceciliaandre.com
Kátia Bandeira de Mello Gerlach, is a Brazilian fiction writer, poet and illustrator residing in New York City. An English/Spanish bilingual publication of her book Collisions in Particles, a Bestiary/Colisiones Bestiales was published by Diaz Grey Editores @ McNally and Jackson, Soho, New York. Kátia is a frequent guest writer at US universities and has her work published in various literary magazines. www.katiabandeirademello.com