Meditation, Trance

The work of Deyson Gilbert, one of the artists in “Meditation, Trance”, group show at Mendes Wood gallery in São Paulo, speaks of the intangible and noisy contours of what stitches together identity, belief systems and symbols.

In a sense, all artists in the exhibition tread an introspective path, against form and towards experience, in works that border on disintegration, like ice melting under the gallery lights. Bas Jan Ader’s Nightfall, film in which the artist lifts a heavy rock and smashes the light bulbs surrounding his feet, seems to ritualise, not without much pain, the passage from light to dark.

Enlightenment seems to be the common quest of this group. In a video, Terence Koh takes a profane detour and gold plates objects in a ritual that evokes Buddhist aesthetics, creating a shortcut from banal to divine while impregnating everything with his own bodily fluids.

Maya Deren reflects on the choreographed violence of martial arts, the twists and turns of men in combat that resemble delicate ballerinas, translating assault and the jaunts of faith into pure beauty.