05/25 - 08/10/24
XEPA
The Beauty of Impermanence
Nati Canto looks at the absurd contradictions of our times, she makes invisible things visible and creates poetry where others see only mess and dirtiness. In her ability to open our eyes to things we usually don’t see – or don’t want to see – she raises questions about our species, how we share this life with other living beings, and how we deal with the unavoidable essence of being alive and destined to decay.
For her show XEPA1 the Brazilian artist Nati Canto (1982, São Paulo) presents several new works that underline her artistic practice of exploring the dynamics of living systems and their impermanence. As an artist who is working with organic products and adapting culinary processes as cooking, she is witnessing physical processes, transformation and aging, and how time in the end only leaves traces of its existence. Canto’s radical artistic approach confronts our collective endeavors of permanence and our ever-lasting desire of longevity.
Her works are multi-dimensional, some as Barriga (Belly) or Surf'nTurf are wall-based, appearing in a reddish and slimy, almost nauseating resemblance to animal intestines or skin. Other three-dimensional floor-works look like the slashed part of a gut with an extraordinary vivid inner life. Only when we get a closer look at the elaborately composed collage of gelatine fruit-like shapes, we return to the term XEPA. It feels like an accumulation of food products, being thrown away due to their imperfect appearance and half-rotten condition. Nevertheless, those fruit-like shapes have a unique sense of survival, something deeply and purely vivid. Canto’s use of natural pigments that she derives from foods such as spirulina, alumbark, urucum (annatto), açai , tucupi, or black cocoa give the works an even greater sense of earthiness.
Nati Canto works with food and natural materials as a substitute for working with her own body. As the human body, food contains organic physicality and is marked by alimentary processes. Our external and internal worlds are in constant exchange, deeply influencing the materiality of the body. In her work, she visualizes the body as an organism of constant transformation and ever-changing appearance, a continuous cycle of construction and deconstruction, a conglomerate of experiences, good and bad. And when the physical entity of the body-work will decay over time, only the memory of it will remain.
Even though Canto works with PU-foam and resin to protect the ingredients of the artwork, it is a biological artwork after all and nobody really knows exactly what will happen to the work in the long run, how will it decay? Will it change its color, shape or texture?
Deeply influenced by the writings of Brazilian author Hilda Hilst, Mikhail Bahktin’s Rabelais and his world (1965) as well as Julia Kristeva’s essay on the nature of abjection and the female grotesque Powers of Horror (1982), Nati Canto puts the finger on those uncomfortable, scary yet unavoidable and essential questions of our times. The concept of the female grotesque is about a body that is free and fluid and also a rebel ideologically. There is an erotica to that, when you don't bend over to the system.
Georges Bataille’s Solar Anus (1931) as an aphoristic reference to decay, death, vegetation, natural disasters, impotence, and frustration, refers to Canto’s practice on such a fundamental level that she names two of her previous works after his surrealistic writing.
The contradictions of living with the absurd inspire Canto to make poetry out of it. Using noble ingredients such as urucum, tucupi, açaí, alumbark, and adding the most discarded and disgusting material to this nobility, which is the gelatine – the end-product of kettle. This ambiguous play brings a certain level of irony to her body of work.
With her uniquely beautiful and thought-provoking art, Nati Canto not only sustains mystery and erotica, she reveals the beauty that lies in decay and transformation through time.
When we lose something or someone,
When we lose ourselves,
the only thing that remains is memory.
You have to know how to lose.
You have to accept the decay of all living beings, of us humans.
Why do you have to keep the body artificially from dying?
1 The term refers to street-food market vendors who sell leftover products at the end of a market day, when the food doesn’t look as fresh anymore and some decayed fruits and vegetables are lying on the street.
