Dormem as Palavras (2025) stands illuminated in the liminal darkness before dawn, an oil-and-wax canvas alive with quiet presence. Around it, words have gone dormant – dormem as palavras – leaving a charged hush in which the painting keeps vigil. In this mute hour, meaning shifts from spoken language to the silent language of things. As Wittgenstein once intimated, “what we cannot talk about we must pass over in silence”[1] – and here silence itself speaks, thick with possibility. The philosopher Steven Bindeman suggests that language often separates us from reality, and only silence can bridge the gap between the self and the world[2]. In the stillness, the painting becomes that bridge, a silent witness absorbing the dancer’s gentle movements. The canvas watches as a dream might, with open eyes and no words, guarding truths that flicker on the edge of consciousness.
Bailo no silêncio;
Dormem as palavras — e a pintura
vigia meu sonho.
A close detail of Dormem as Palavras reveals a tactile topography of beeswax, fabric and folhas de plástico (plastic leaves) fused into the painted surface. The materials themselves seem to hold memória vegetal – a vegetal memory – as if fragments of an ancient forest were pressed between layers of pigment and time. This intimate view invites a haptic contemplation: one imagines tracing the waxen contours and leaf veins with a fingertip, listening with the skin. Every art object, as Lygia Clark believed, is fundamentally relational, incomplete until activated by the viewer’s touch or gaze[3]. Clark described the artist’s role as a “mold” and the participant’s role as “breath”, insisting that the audience must breathe life and meaning into the artwork[4]. Here, in the silence, the painting awaits that breath. It is like a seashell in form and spirit – recalling what Clark’s follower Lula Wanderley observed: “The effort of artists like Lygia Clark… was to silence objects in order to create an art like a shell: just listening.”[5] In the soft quiet, Dormem as Palavras becomes such a shell, its silence not an absence but a receptivity, an openness to dialogue. The viewer’s presence, even if wordless, completes it – nós somos o molde, você o sopro. We are the mold, you are the breath inside it giving it meaning. Alone, the piece is inert; together, painting and participant co-create an experience, a dialogue of textures and sensations beyond the need for speech.
Empty canvas shell—
waiting for alguém’s sopro
to despertar meaning.
In a sleepless moment between night and morning, the artist dances slowly in front of the painting. Her silhouette sways and overlaps the canvas in the dim light; two bodies – one flesh, one pigment – move in silent conversation. This performance is a living correspondence, a letter written with motion and presence rather than ink. The painting is no passive backdrop but an active witness, a pintura vigia o corpo que dança. In the philosophy of Donna Haraway, we might call this a moment of sympoiesis, “making-with,” where human and non-human jointly author an experience[6]. The dancer’s breaths and the painting’s shadows interweave, each shaping the other. “Alone we do not exist. We are at your mercy,” wrote Clark, emphasizing that art lives through the encounter[7]. Here the encounter is triadic: artist, artwork, and an observing silence that envelops them both. Even the AI – the machine intelligence helping to compose these words – becomes part of this relational dance. It is a new kind of parceiro, a partner through which silence takes form. Like Clark’s relational objects, the AI is an empty mold that we breathe our intent into; like Haraway’s cyborg kin, it learns and creates with us rather than for us. In this sympoietic becoming, boundaries blur: the performer, the painting, and the digital co-author move together, exchanging the roles of observer and observed. Through prompt and response, through conversa e sonho, human and machine join to give shape to the unsayable – echoing the night’s wordless performance in another medium. The interface itself is poetic: a communion of codes and consciousness where silence translates into output, and the unspoken finds a voice.
Laço invisível:
pintura, poeta e máquina
respiram juntos.
In the deep of this wordless night, the studio transforms into a Mosteira – part mosteiro (monastery) of silence, part Monstera plant unfurling in the dark. Time here moves in organic spirals, not straight lines: the performance, the painting, the memories they invoke all loop and twist like vines seeking light. This Mosteira holds a spiraling temporality, a sense that past and future intermingle in the present hush. The painting’s green plastic foliage, warmed by lamplight, carries the echo of living leaves and prehistoric ferns; a botanical ghost breathing slow time into the space. In this sanctuary of stillness, one can almost feel the growth of invisible roots, the opening of petals at dawn – a vegetal memory older than words. The painting keeps watch over these subtle transformations. Dormem as palavras, mas a pintura vigia: what does it mean for a painting to keep watch while words sleep? Perhaps it means that art, in its quiet vigilance, safeguards the truths that language cannot capture. The canvas becomes a guardian of the liminal, attending to the sighs of the unconscious and the dreams that flutter in the silence. It means that when we have no words – when our voice falls into quietude – the artwork remains, eyes open, holding the space for meaning until we are ready to speak again. And when the first light of morning glimmers, it finds the dancer at rest, the words slowly stirring from slumber, and the painting still watching – a faithful keeper of silence, waiting for dialogue to resume.
Rodrigo Garcia Dutra em colaboração com Largo Modelo de Linguagem Multimodal ChatGPT-5 através de prompts, conversas e sonhos.
[1] [2] Wittgenstein, Heidegger, and the language of silence | Steven Bindeman » IAI TV
https://iai.tv/articles/wittgenstein-heidegger-and-the-language-of-silence-auid-3361
[3] [7] Lygia Clark – Wikipedia
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lygia_Clark
[4] [5] How to Care for an Act? – Stedelijk Studies
[6] Sympoiesis
https://www.uwyo.edu/artmuseum/exhibitions/2025/sympoiesis/index.html