The poem was a song before its verses were inscribed on clay, skin, or paper. Writing was the reading of signs sent by gods, in constellations or in traces on the earth, before it became a sign drawn on the surface of stone. The letter was an image, before the Western alphabet dulled the visuality of its writing and became phonetic and abstract, a rational vehicle of meaning.

 

The relationship between writing, image, and the medium of inscription and meaning articulates a series of philosophical, artistic, and political questions that have permeated the Western tradition, from metaphysics to contemporary debates on language, art, and representation. They are fields of dispute about the way in which worlds are inscribed and understood.

 

However, writing would find, in the arts and poetry, the privileged opening to unfold, to complexify the split between word and image, visible and legible, name and thing, matter and meaning. Like other writing systems, such as Eastern ideograms, image and text, medium and reading, in the arts, intertwine in collisions and reciprocities in the constitution of meaning. Untethered from the confines of the page or discursive linearity, poets and artists would overflow writing. The alphabet would not stop at the abstract line, would not obey contours – the word would flow over the edge of meaning and conventional supports. Writing would migrate, expanding as a poem-object, a poem-process, a poeminstallation, a poem-city, a poem-landscape. It infiltrates the body, erupts into objects and images, into walls and gestures, into sounds, materials, and spatialities.

 

Xico Chaves and Cláudia Lyrio are artists and writers. Both intertwine art and literature: in the unlimits of writing, letter and image, word and object, name and thing are no longer opposed, but rather interwoven in a zone of mutual contamination, where seeing and speaking, the legible and the visible, the nameable and the formless, coexist in tensions and indistinctions. Writing in their works thus reveals itself not as a closure or stable signification, but as a field of openness, of displacement, and of sensitive reinvention—that which insists before and beyond the linguistic structure, as a mark, difference, and inscription in (and as) the matter of the world.

 

Xico Chaves, since the 1960s, has moved between various categories of art: poems, music, paintings, objects, installations, performances, interventions, videos. Among them, a continuous flow, a transfusion without borders. When the word bursts into his poem-objects, it does not caption it, does not name it, but permeates it, contaminates it—at once transforming it into language and opacity. The object, in turn, gives writing back its weight, its materiality, its concrete and sensitive dimension. If, since the avant-garde (especially with Duchamp ' s ready-made), the object in art has ceased to be merely a support or representation and has become a conceptual and poetic operator, the connections between words and what they name sometimes reveal themselves to be arbitrary, sometimes inextricably entangled.

 

Between word and matter, between the linguistic sign and the world of things, in Xico Chaves ' s object-poems, an interval of ambiguities and exchanges is established. In this writing-object or object-writing, the word is not just a transparent sign of meaning, but has the opacity of a thing; the object is also not mute materiality: it speaks, but from an unstable place of inscription, precarious and beyond its contours—it is traversed by memories and voices of the very matter that constitutes it. In the objectpoems "Heavy Weight, " we read AIR, SKY, EARTH, on bottles of cement, minerals, lime, and resin. The translucent invisibility of the (word) air and sky confronts the density of minerals like pure graphite, whose materiality carries layers of memories and meanings. "Hidden Forces, " PET bottles (of Coca-Cola) painted with black mineral paint and filled with red earth from Brasília, allude to dark moments in our Republic, such as the suicide of Getúlio Vargas or the resignation of Jânio Quadros, replayed in the vicious cycle of political institutions, captive to economic power. In "Translucent Poems, " the process is reversed: on twisted PET bottles, verses printed in black letters hover like specters over the diaphanous surface.

 

This game of obliteration, so that the word falls silent and the earth, stone, fire, and air speak, is radicalized in other works. Since the 1970s, the artist has created works, including paintings and objects, using minerals and natural pigments collected on expeditions to the Iron Quadrangle in Minas Gerais and other regions of Brazil. "Livro de pedra (olho mágico)" is a book petrified with minerals, natural pigments, and acrylic resin. In another work, the poet reads 1,000 unpublished poems for the last time, then incinerates them, encasing them gleaming in a "Meteor Cube". They will remain invisible in the sound waves disseminated by the last reading, or in the voice of the fire that amalgamated them.

 

In his spatial poems, words stuck on the gallery floor or on the stairs weave games between meaning, reading and the body in movement. Reading is walking, breathing, spiraling. In the video "Multiverse", writing travels through the cosmos, seeking constellations of meaning, other readings. These are verses from his book "Poeta Clandestino" that sparkle, returning like ciphers once sent from the heavens: "A point seen from afar illuminates the sky / It is the incandescent word / Everything shines."

 

Cláudia Lyrio is a writer-artist whose hybrid works—paintings, drawings, watercolors, collages, and books of both large and small dimensions—establish an infinite conversation with the long tradition of the alphabet, which has surrendered to its imagistic power: from carmina figurata to calligrams, from Mallarmé to Picasso, from Magritte to Duchamp, from visual poetry to asemic writing and the lines drawn in the deserts of Land Art. Writing is not a transposition of speech or a system of representation whose function would be to encode and preserve meaning through visual signs.The letter, a visual and material fragment, resists the transparency of meaning, the abstraction of the phoneme, revealing the remainder that escapes: it interrogates meanings while simultaneously opening them, in traces and drifts.

 

The artist presents three series, begun during the pandemic lockdown: "The Manuscript", "Study for Possible Futures", and "Meditative Labyrinths". "The Manuscript" is an expanded book, in which each screen is a page, written-drawn-painted by its personas (the writer, the melancholic naturalist, the archaeologist...). In them, birds, trees, lands, and animals encounter the visuality of the written word in the intertwined lines of its lyricalpoetic vocabulary. Each screen/page contains many other pages, excerpts, collages, notes, hesitations. Spiraling fictions, stories within stories, that leap from screen to screen, in anachronisms and tangles. The letter bends, fades into breaths and visual noises, almost a pure stain; the text becomes a fragment, a murmur, a noise, which sometimes blurs legibility, sometimes ignites in a sentence, in a poetic fragment that shines from the screen, disseminating unexpected escapes. A misplaced verse or riddles contained in the titles refer to so many other books and poems in this vast library we inhabit. Each screen/page is thus a portal to possible worlds, but whose narratives are always interrupted, suspended, and incomplete. Never linear, never fully mastering the text, reading is a choice and a wandering as we delve into each page-screen, or into the interpages distributed throughout the space through which it unfolds, with each new exhibition configuration.

 

In the friction between graphic marks and visual forms, Lyrio ' s writing becomes a line, a trace, an erasure. At times, she launches into the labyrinthine adventure and loses herself in the drift of this writing of paths, between meticulously designed paths. At other times, she scratches maps to deny territory and enclosed bodies, draws margins to cross them, sews excesses to find silences. Each path is also a crack, a sense, and vertigo.

 

Writing is, for Lyrio, a compulsive choreography, a living tracing of a body situated in relation to surfaces, textures, resistances, and times—not just the inscription of signs. Writing is a sensitive, poetic, and relational act in which worlds and existences co-emerge in flows of words, images, and affects. The act of writing thus becomes trembling matter, a cosmopoetic gesture that affirms the inseparability of form and background, thought and flesh, language and visuality.

 

In the unlimits of writing, the sign frays, the name renounces the name, the alphabet bows to the image, and the word, insurgent, refuses to be held hostage by codes and pages.