During the residency, which took place between March and April this year, the artist noticed the silver shine on an image of an olive tree reflected on seawater. Like it happens in the gorges between image and language, questions come up wildly and endlessly, piercing any idyllic place of subjectivity.įrom questions that arise from a dense experience, in counterpoint to the speed and volatility of the contemporary gaze, new works derived from one source image: an oil painting made in Italy during an artistic residency at Vila dei Pini in Bogliasco, in the province of Genoa. The inflection point the artist asks is precisely the ambiguity of the sentence. “Asking questions does not quieten the heart” – sentence taken from the book “Obscena Senhora D” (The Obscene Madame D) by Hilda Hilst – is the title of Ana Calzavara’s exhibition. The rebellion consists in looking at a rose A deeply metaphysical, formally radical one-of-a-kind book from a great Brazilian writer.To see once again the tremulousness of the visible – the appearing and disappearing image Hilst, whose father was diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia, has created a lacerating, and yet oddly hopeful, portrayal of a descent into hell-Amos never makes sense of the new way he sees things, but he does find an avenue of escape, retreating to his mother's house and, farther, towards the animal world. Written in a fragmented style that echoes the character's increasingly fragile hold on reality, With My Dog-Eyes is intensely vivid, summoning up Amos's childhood and young adulthood-when, like Richard Feynman, he used to bring his math books to brothels to study-and his life at the university, with its 'meetings, asskissers, pointless rivalries, gratuitous resentments, jealous talk, meglomanias.' He calls it 'the clearcut unhoped-for,' and it's a vision that will drive him to madness and, eventually, death. Most difficult of all are his struggles to express what has happened to him, for a man more accustomed to numbers than words. Something has changed in Amos Keres, a university mathematics professor-his sentences trail off in class, he is disgusted by the sight of his wife and son, and he longs to flee the comfortable bourgeois life he finds himself a part of.

A short, stunning book by a Brazilian master of the avant-garde.

The Obscene Madame D by Hilda Hilst