As devices generate more and more image in a regularly accelerated pace, the social noise and confusion (fusion of contexts) increase and dull one’s senses, and therefore, in this period of my life, I think like Nietzsche: «only art saves us!».

 

Which art, though, when everything is presented as such by the media nowadays? When I face this dilemma - and a better criterion doesn’t exist - I apply Ockham’s Razor (or the principle of parsimony) i.e., from everything that the system offers me to consume as art - I ignore everything that isn’t simple. I do this filtering because simplicity conveys peace to me.

 

Based on this temporary certainty of what art is (to me), I am led to praise those who produce something which conveys peace to others. Those who do this I call artists, because being an artist is an attitude towards existence, which makes humans express physically the contents of their conscience.

 

A person is an artist in two opposite ways:

• Through integration.

In this case, the individual chooses the academic route, submitting itself to the institutional authority, to the identification with a style, according to a supposed historical evolutionism of the art occurred in an illusory area of psychological comfort, supported by the artificiality of the categories, of the chronologies stipulated by the History of Art and by the contingency of interests.

• Through irreverence.

In this case, the individual wonders about the meaning of reality and - in a sudden impulse - assumes one’s right to be different and emancipates itself from the conventions, supporting the materialization of thinking in nothing else but his own (a)perceptive conscience, reflecting and marking his personal position against the evanescence of time.

I think that Adália Alberto belongs undoubtedly to the second way described above, because she does what she feels and what she feels flows from her in a simple way -without beating about the bush - as in a practical exercise of her thinking-made-matter.

 

Her sculptures do not follow a single typology. On the contrary, each piece - even when it is part of a series - represents a single thought. However, while observing a group of her art pieces, we infer the uniqueness of separate creative moments, which give way to figures whose bodies show:

• The harmonious and nude simplicity of childhood.

• The irony of imposed social roles.

• The elegant iconoclasm of the female gender.

• The introspection – bent upon itself.

• The complexity of human relationships.

 

To conclude, the artistic work of the sculptor Adália Alberto shows us her meditation about the diversity of human condition, working the stone with the mastery characteristic of someone who has a conscience propelled - by the deep sarcastic doing - that comes from experience. And only that lively pressure allows the freeing of feelings into matter.

 

José Neto

Philosopher