[YH-P.001]
Luisa Brandelli: Animais Domésticos
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[Luisa Brandelli: Domestic Animals]
Reason pursues truth, truth seeks the universal, but desire always turns toward the immediate and the possible—and it is from this disjunction that conflict is born: what pleases the senses rarely coincides with what reason recognizes as beautiful. If Luisa Brandelli’s work were a part of the body, it would be that inner skin of the mouth, a territory between the visible and the invisible; if it were a moment, it would be the precise instant when a solitary tear hesitates at the corner of the face before falling, or when the face blushes. Her objects are not the work itself; they are pretexts for a labor that happens entirely in the act of looking. What matters is not in the curve of the lid or in the glint of the thread shimmering on the fabric, but in the gesture of taming the gaze that these materials provoke. Brandelli does not seduce—she trains. There is an obsessive, almost compulsive repetition here: each object returns, each gesture remakes itself, as if the artist were caught in a cycle of attempts to freeze something that insists on escaping. This obsession with repetition is not accumulative but erosive—it wears down the very act of looking until only the skeleton of desire remains. A mysterious yearning inhabits the logic of these works: to hide beauty only to reveal it later, to guard it as one waits to devour it. Her creatures deliberately blur the line between painting and sculpture, refusing classification not out of excess, but through a calculated absence disguised as sensuality. The materials—cardboard, glitter, fabric—speak of fragility, but also of a gesture that mocks the very notion of preciousness even as it claims it. There is tension between structure and disintegration, between the impulse toward the transcendent and the refusal to abandon the surface. As if the soul here delighted first in lesser goods, mistaking shine for light, repeating the mistake until it becomes method. For a year she observed this photograph of an unknown couple, found in the street. For a year she observed love—and it is this love that domesticates her work, these inanimate, wild, and solitary animals.
— Matheus Yehudi Hollander