Desire in the work of Thiago Martins de Melo – out of the symmetry between voyeurism and exhibitionism - only has analogy in Brazil in the work of Maria Martins (L’impossible), Flávio de Carvalho (Nossa Senhora do Desejo) and Adriana Varejão (Filho bastardo). Two examples of the energetic system existing in visible desires: Alair Gomes’ photography is the vouyeur’s rapture and Antonio Dias’s pieces in the 60’s constitute the voyeur’s violence. Nonetheless, in Martins de Melo’s painting, self-exposure is the priority. Hence, the quality of the explicitness can’t be compared to the prudish Louise Bourgeouis. Only Georges Bataille - Histoire d’O, Madame Edwarda, L’Érotisme – would handle so much complexity. Bourgeois Fillete is the men’s genital (“the absolute fragile”, according to her) as exposed as the women’s in Courbet’s L’origine du monde and Rodin’s Iris. The hyperbolical exposition, direct and intimate, is not mechanic’s rawness but the affective and violent relationship with a goal (the sexual drive is under the domain of an erogenous zone). Courbet’s painting predates Freud – science was only beginning to understand desire’s psychism. Thiago Martins de Melo places Courbet, Rodin and Bourgeois in his pictorial scene. Bourgeois sculpts after confronting herself with Sigmund Freud’s doubt (the one questions he says not to know the answer to is “what desires a woman”) and Lacan’s statement (Woman does not exist), comprehending both at her own way. Martins de Melo’s painting unravels these limits.

Matins de Melo’s pieces, as Antonio Dias’s or Tunga’s work, is a phantasmatic field. It incorporates carnality as the sexualized body of the painter is transported into the painting. Without this apparently redundant recurrency of the carnal aspect, one can’t understand desire and body’s instances, as well as the physical sing of painting and the phenomenological relationship between painter and painting, described by Paul Valery and conceptualized by Merleau Ponty. According to their ideas, the painter lends his body to the painting[1]. The body that Martins de Melo lends is the body without organs, the desiring machine[2]. Desire embodies itself in material longings. These intricated works conceive a history of the eye, in a certain way. Nonetheless, didn’t L’origine du monde belong to Jacques Lacan? And also, didn’t Lacan marry Batille’s ex-wife, Silvia? So, Thiago, a painter and psychologist that doesn’t believe in moralism and decency in painting, can he be in Jacque’s place or George’s? Maybe Both? There is no way to classify the unclassifiable. There is no unmentionable, or unsaid out of social modesty, privacy, or morality. But there is no egoic self-exposure: phantasmatic’s territory doesn’t come in mental or verbal images but embodies in painting. What you see is the possible’s epiphany. It comes with devastating violence, a visibility’s urge capable of leading to aphasia as a reaction to a look. Without dissimulation strategies (Venus de Milo’s robe mouillée would be the opposite of this ennounciation strategy). A painting enhances the visibilities of within.

Confronted by Pierre Fédida’s melancholic cannibalism – an anticipated grief comes out of the wish to devour the partner in intercourse[3] – there is a conclusion that it needs to banish death. It’s crucial to beat the skeleton and not to dance with it, as did Ensor and all Todtanz, in the Nordic European culture. The battle of scissors and the blade language, between castration and the hymen’s rupture. Without guilt and shame, bringing life to George Bataille’s characters[4]. The feelings of culpability, shame or disgust are transferred to each observer, if that is the case. There are no strategies of shock, but the scene is materialized.

Essentially, Martins de Melo paints diptychs. The separation in two canvas is not a naive hope to product a diptych where one image comes out of two separated parts. It’s neither a need that emerges from a shortage of bigger canvas. It is a slit, a cut on the surface of an inseparable procedure. Lygia Clark’s organic line reassures the separations of what should be as one in painting - lack’s abyss, and the crack of incompleteness –. The pictorial signs are libido’s work, as in Bourgeois sculpture - life’s cravings, libidinal movements, ghost’s wishes. The painter’s effort is to maintain an interweaving between the unconscious – a possible writing project that uses the unconscious language, rather than the illustration of the unconscious – and the desire’s experience of the pictorial, of the inescapable confront with the physical sign of language. This relationship keeps the coherence between signifier, signified, and signification.

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[1]  Maurice Merleau-Ponty. L’oeil et l’esprit. Paris, Gallimard, 1986, p. 

[2] Gilles Deleuze e Félix Guattari. Anti-Oedipus: capitalism and schizophrenia. Transl Robert Hurley, Mark Seem and Helen R. Lane. Minneapolis, Minneapolis University Press, 1998.

[3] Pierre Fédida. Le cannibale mélancholique in Destins du cannibalisme de Nouvelle Revue de Psychanalyse. Paris, Gallimard, 1978, vol. 6, pp. 123-127.

[4]  Bataille, Georges. Guilty. Trad. Bruce Boone. Venice, The Lapis Press, 1988, p. 13.