Paisagem-fuga
Paulo Ávila

Imagine a game, and, following the usual assumption that every game has a beginning, take, for example, a material: how does a piece of fabric come to be? First, there is a diagram — a network of simple lines and their relationships still suspended. Then, a mechanical process imitates it, laying down loosely woven fibers, fragile and exposed to the erosion of time. At first, there is the idea of rigor, a sense of discipline. Then comes the concrete fact, with all its immeasurable complexity. The game takes place in the in-between, when the plan itself becomes sensitive to the unpredictability of matter.

When the game is reversed, the real spills into the abstraction of the scheme. The future eruption of a stain has already been dreamt in the diagram of a fabric. The apparent rigidity of the rule reveals the formula of its openness: it multiplies channels, weaves webs, anchors points — without fixing any destination. One day, the ink bursts through the weave, no longer confined by the rule. It yields to gravity, gathers in a damp patch, seeps along a crease, and covers the abstract monotony with sidereal tones. The outside floods the surface prepared by the rule. The stain bears witness to the fabric’s being-in-the-world. The game awakens, rekindled by chance.

With the same mechanical calling as the loom, the hand draws a pencil grid across the fabric, restoring the diagram in vivid strokes through a cartographic gesture. A new system of coordinates is established across the heterogeneous terrain, giving it structure, reinscribing chance into segments — each section, a recaptured landscape. The gesture that sets escape in motion is followed by one that crystallizes it. The rule absorbs chance, sketching the alternation of a breath. One could say that the game breathes, that it has a life of its own and becomes pure movement. To inhabit the game is to uncover the gesture that sustains its breathing.

The hand now cuts, on another plane, a series of identical windows. Guided by the rhythm of the grid, it lays the pierced plane over the fabric. The stain begins to fill each opening with its own instability. The repetition of the outline heightens the uneven vibration of the stain, like a window generating its own landscape. The entire plane is imbued with movement in a latent state. The gesture becomes cinematic, architectural, without leaving the surface. It animates the cut-outs like characters. It hints at depths, flickers, and shifts. It reveals while concealing imprecise phenomena, thickening the fabric of the game through the layering of its alternations.

O jogo é um rito de suspensão. Desativa a imposição na regra e faz dela uma máquina de produzir desvios. Desvincula a repetição da cópia e converte-a em estratégia para convocar a diferença. A disciplina do jogo revela-se assim, como uma janela, um método premeditado de ausência. Segue dispondo vazios para a inscrição do mundo. Um dia, outro olhar percorre a arqueologia do jogo, indiferente à ordem dos seus estratos, ignorando o que veio antes ou depois, maquinando a superfície do jogo com as suas próprias imagens. O jogo liberta-se da mão que faz e atravessa a distância irredutível que a separa de outro olhar, abrindo a via do seu prolongamento indefinido. Por oposição ao hábito, que tende sempre para a fixação do mundo, o fascínio do jogo afirma-se pelo seu hábil adiamento.

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APOIO: FLAD – Fundação Luso-Americana Para o Desenvolvimento, Programa FLECHADA