Catalina Chervin

Lucia Tennina

What does your mother do? She’s a draughtswoman, I used to reply, without much conviction, to be honest. I couldn’t quite understand why those large sheets splashed in black and white—those that, when angry, I called scribbles—she insisted on calling drawings. The truth is that I only began to understand my mother’s work as an adult, truly as an adult, when she invited me to join her project: a dialogue between her own work and that of Clarice Lispector, a portfolio that would take the name IT. At first, I found the idea somewhat forced, although I was moved by the image of my mother reading Clarice. So I accepted, though still disoriented. And suddenly, the words of one and the lines of the other became an emotional and aesthetic force that revealed to me the depth of my mother’s vision and of her work itself.

I have always understood Clarice’s writing as a language in perpetual construction, a form of rewriting defined by the attempt to “capture with words what is beyond words,” as she once said. Like an epiphany, in the manner of Clarice’s own characters, that body of work—written on scattered papers, glimpsed in fragments, that typewriter resting on the legs of that beautiful woman who, meanwhile, was mothering—that furtive Judaism, that dictatorship striking from the margins, that provincial childhood, that Ukrainian ancestry, that black-and-white calligraphy—all of that, which ultimately formed a language of its own that must be read and reread to be discerned, also defined my mother’s art. And just as in Clarice, where each book reordered and reconfigured that language, in my mother’s work each exhibition, with its shifting curatorial frameworks, and each new medium began to offer me other meanings. It is for this reason that I now wait, eager, to enter her studio and encounter her drawings striving to capture what is not drawing—to the point that, lately, they have had to become sculpture.

And of course, just as Clarice eventually approached painting, my mother’s own search inevitably led her to the book. And here it is. Atmospheres and Entropy is an artist’s book that is undoubtedly beautiful as an object, but above all, it is a book that invites reading.

It is a book that brings to the foreground other media integral to my mother’s practice—photography and her own handwriting, appearing as titles or critical reflections—through which one senses that her path, at times, is a shared one. There are many possible ways to read it, for there are many ways to tell her story. The one I choose is to see this publication as a play between proximity and distance, between a near-sighted gaze—such as Clarice’s style has often been described—and one that looks from afar. It is a book composed of close-ups of her hands at work, of materials taking shape, of fragments of the works themselves; close-ups built from the words of critics who interpret her; and also wider views of her completed pieces, assembled through the book’s own structure and even in its very title: Atmospheres and Entropy.

With this publication I discover that my mother’s work can be read as well as seen, and that the book establishes itself as a distinct form of engagement with her art—one different from an exhibition mounted in physical space. I also discover that, much like Clarice’s dispersed fragments, there are many more potential books within her work.

This one, in particular, seems to narrate both her art and her life, perhaps distilled in that first photograph of her resting serenely against her immense canvas, her hand serving as a cushion, her gaze turned sideways without a fixed point, as if she were in her own trance. There is something in her practice that concerns the materialisation of spirit, as Susan Owens writes in one passage of the book: “The first time I saw Catalina’s drawings, and she described her working process, I was struck by the thought that I was in the presence of a medium conducting a séance—falling into trance and inviting the darkness to step forward and reveal itself to daylight.” When I read that, I recall something Clarice once wrote in one of her chronicles: “Oh, I am too much of a realist—I only walk with my ghosts.”

This book is an invitation to that intimate séance with the shadows that emerge from my mother’s work. It is a story told in what Edward Sullivan has described as her “vocabulary of black,” leading us through unexpected paths that are not constructed upon pre-given concepts or comforting meanings, as we sometimes prefer to receive art, but instead challenge us to decipher—or to lose ourselves within—its revelation of a world.

2023

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