CASA TRIÂNGULO PROVIDES AN INTIMATE GLANCE INTO EDUARDO BERLINER’S WORK

A red light on the top of a building to avoid plane crashes. The dark of the night divided into equal parts. Shattered air. Breathing with difficulty. Looking inwards. Far from his mates, he feared becoming only a very communicative ghost. Judging by the number of dead insects, it was probably a country house. The morning light was of a bluish gray.

I took a mug and filled it with warm muddy water. I drank, and when I could see the bottom, I realized it was filled with moths. Some were dead and others flapped their soaked wings, disturbing the surface, while trying to escape. I was worried and asked myself: will I get sick? The last sound emitted by the concorde as it crossed the icy sky shares a space in memory with the noise produced by wool as it shrinks inside a washing machine.

Gentleness hurt his face. Guilt used to visit him at three in the morning. The only things remaining were two eggs and some tea bags.

My ducks had no name. They were ducks, and every day we needed to clean the tank where they lived. Where childhood lived, mattresses sleep in the dampness of the night and the plant life is overgrown. Today people burn trash and tear parts off the cars. They say it is better to stay away from this place. Outside the usual path, the body always expels the shard of glass. It could take days or years. Some fragments can be transformed into strangely deformed jars, others into sand or sound waves, but they will invariably be expelled. Will it come out through the eyes? Will it cut through the skin? It rarely comes out from the same place where it entered. It cannot be tracked except as a symptom.

He was seen performing mechanical movements with his head while waiting for the light to turn red. Who fired a shot into the air? Who started the summer? Every piece of glass longs to return to the liquid state. It wants to cut while it reflects.

In his work process, Eduardo Berliner considers drawing an independent outcome, however, it can also be an initial step towards painting, the materialization and mapping of his first thoughts. When shown in the same space they work as a guide to the group of paintings, not explaining but instead fortifying the complex associations amongst them, or in the artist’s own words: “the group of drawings can be thought of as the subconscious of the paintings; they are entrance doors but do not point out which way is the exit”. The accumulation of this material will open up a wide and hazy area of interest, something that will pave the way to the paintings. The starting point to the paintings can be variable, sometimes Berliner will take a simple drawing of lines based on memories, whilst other times he feels the need to work longer before getting to the canvas, evolving through photographs, small videos, the artist’s own relationship with materials in his studio, drawings, watercolours and by building objects and scenarios. Berliner’s paintings portray a state of uncertainty and doubt, in which the connection between elements on a same canvas as well as between the works themselves echoes the way information is absorbed throughout the years and how memory rearranges, connects and transforms the subject, even creating new relations that were not initially there. Berliner claims his intention is not to determine a specific meaning to each work or the whole group, but to make space to analyze the complexity of relations and its distortions produced in our memories.

“Painting is something that puts me in direct contact with my limitations and a deeper sense of vulnerability. It is a kind of membrane that helps me to perceive the world and create meaning. When I spend a long time without painting or drawing, I feel that my gaze loses intensity. When I paint, I keep the experience and memory of everything I see and think in every part of my body alive, in a very intense way. In this way, each daily experience finds reverberations in the other experiences built over the years”