The art of
KITHI
For my art I let others do the talking. Here are texts by the art critic Matilde Matos, about my drawings and text by the philosopher and Professor at the Federal University of Bahia Dante Galeffi.
"Kithi's art is new, like her. Using nothing more than colored pencil drawings on paper, she creates her Being of Water among similar and dissimilar beings, in a spontaneous gesture that continues to reveal the particular tendency of her The line is its north. Safe and repeated, they embody the ideas that arise, as they run from the pencil, pointing out things that continue, or not, depending on the artist's command. The firmness of her features and the accuracy of space maintained between them ensures the quality of Kithi's design, which its suggestive forms enrich ”Matilde Matos - Art Critic and author of the book Água: reflexes na Arte da Bahia
A POETIC OF WATER AT KITH'S KINEMATIC WATER WHEEL
Dante Galeffi
Video demo of the work A Dança
Every work of art is defined by its own embodied formativity, its doing that when doing it invents its own way of doing, because in art what matters is the success of the work in its own and singular concreteness in its formed form. Every work of art is always an expression embodied within a certain limit of expression. The multimedia artist Kithi chose to express herself through the cinematic medium. Its intentional focus is water, and nothing better than kinematics to make it present in its fluidity, plasticity and unavoidable flow. Kithi's work is done like meditation with water, in an intentional coupling marked by the enchantment of the simple, of the dilated temporality, a long pause of the accelerated and stressed mental states. Meditation with water reveals itself in its poetic property as a Water Wheel presented in five somewhat upward movements, as it is as if they corresponded to five steps of a mystical initiation movement in the instant and unfathomable mystery of water. The fifth movement is a synthesis image of the whole work, Hologram. In a way, an experience of states of water in addition to its vital utility, also as a metaphor for the creation of possible worlds and the world that each human being is in his unique existence.
The title of the intervention designed by Kithi, Roda D'Água, is consistent with the intention of making the water element present in its poetic virtualities, forming an imaginary water wheel full of surprises and angles to be accessed by the user interested in the aesthetic experience in itself. The wheel is of water and for water, a wheel that in its movement composes a ciranda of moments intertwined by the intention of praising water as the matrix of everything. Yes, water is shown in its most self-power: the water of life that gives life. Plasma water of everything that lives and also achieves self-contemplation in the ecstasy that is the sentient being in its instant and always other event. A wonder that imitates the dynamism of life in its continuous creation.
But how can water, being such a common element, be metamorphosed by the hands that capture it in unusual synaesthetic frames? It is when the water turns out to be another, it surprises in its appearance. A crosshair and a capture machine become the field for the revelation of other water spectra, showing it as a mirror of the great war of the worlds of cosmic memory. The camcorder with its precision defined in its series mark is nothing without the appropriating aim of the artist. It is the aim that makes the difference when the new prostheses for expanding the human perception make available on a large scale the power of the aesthetic use of images in their various sensitive registers.
Kithi's art-movement work in its formed and repeatable form in its possible exhibitions offers itself as a meeting of an advance of memory for the future of the past and the present. This is the Roda D'Água in its surprising and recurring intentional movement. It all starts with The Battle / Fight. It all starts in the struggle of opposites. A war of primeval forms that evoke protoplasmic bodies in friction and shock. The struggle resembles the battle of life in the liquid environment of its matrix origin. Water becoming the means of revealing the artist's intentionality. After all, everything starts with the great explosion resulting from the meeting of different energy poles. But the figuration of the struggle of opposites is an invention of human intelligence at work. And life itself in its multiplicity presents the struggle as its own constitution. For everything that is alive feeds on what is alive. However, it is the artist's gaze that allows us to follow the vortex of the struggle captured in chromatic effusions and inversions of figure and background. The reverse of the culturally established perceptual pattern surprises the viewer of the viewer who finds himself pierced by what is shown and unveiled. The uncultured continues to open up to the unusual charming.
Video demo of the work A Batalha
The enchantment then takes place as The Dance. The water also dances and its dance forms prayers and gestures of elegant and light stylized entities like feather. Cutouts of shapes that intertwine in an impassable, inaugural act of love of the cosmos as a relation of complementary opposites. The very movement of everything is a loving act of meeting the different with the different, the radical interweaving of opposites and the transcendence of the struggle to achieve the most beautiful harmony. The dance itself brings together the different in a common and belonging sphere. In addition to the Battle there is also the dance of opposites without which nothing would be as it is. In addition to the struggle, there is the love that brings everything together in the same ground. Everything, then, changes into dance and dance in a continuous creative act like water. Dance produces the meeting of waters and power is present in its Density.
We entered the third movement-moment of the ciranda round. The density of the water is formed by its precipitous precipitations. While a simple trickle of falling water does not have the power to produce density, the gathering of waters forming wide rivers in abyssal fall produces its most visible density. Nothing compares to the power of the collected water and precipitating itself in the sudden falls that draw the waterfalls. The greater the height of a waterfall, the greater its density that generates potential energy. The power of water is made by the gathering and multiplication of its atoms and singular molecules. The union makes density which is moving force.
It is when Density causes Meditation. The fourth moment-movement of the ciranda invites the viewer to rest his gaze on the smooth movement of the water of a pond populated with small, faded golden reeds that sway slowly with the winds and submerged currents. Reeds retain debris as if they were purifying filters. Meditation occurs as a stop of the gaze before a landscape cut by the artist's hands. For meditating means resting and stopping as an observer of one's thoughts (affections, perceptions, judgments, concepts), until the reach of full non-thinking: empty-full. But meditation is also always a singularity that is immersed in the totality. A singularity as a contemplative subjectivation movement. To meditate is also to contemplate insofar as contemplating is a singular vision of moments of totality. It is when the singular becomes plural in its power to multiply itself. Meditation sharpens the perceptual instrument by clearing everything. It is when multiplicity is brought together and unity becomes an articulating understanding. In meditation, the unit does not find a possible picture. It is no longer about image capture in its cinematic flow. It is not a unit capable of representation, because all representation ceases and all mental projection is silenced to give voice to what resonates from the most wide abyss: the leap of nature between one and another silence.
Video demo of the work Meditation
Nothing breaks the abysmal Abundance. We access the fifth movement-moment of the ciranda. Abundance unveils the power of water. In water all life finds the means of its birth. As the matrix of life, water is the image of Abundance. But, if everything is abundance because it comes from the matrix water, how to show the abundance in its abundance? Enter the sights of the artist to choose the field of view of the named Abundance. Abundance shows itself as the power of multiplicity and differentiation. Abundance gives rise to the varied world of infinite possibilities of abundance. Abundant life is shown in its infinite creative plan. The singularities of abundance are its moments open to the unpredictable and ever new multiple creative act. For abundance reaches all the planes of immanence of life in all its forms in becoming. Abundance is like water in its malleable and simple form, being the image of the most sublime kindness, benefiting everything without preference and remaining silent in the despised places. Abundance like water resembles the wise path.
Video demo of the work Abundance (holography)
At Roda D'Água the end is the beginning, as everything starts from water in endless cycles. To admire the work in its appearance and appearance is to remember the renewed beauty of instant living and celebrate its admirable abyssal enchantment. Reborn in the Fight, develop in Dance, strengthen in Density, rest in Contemplation, converge in Abundance, start over and end in Roda D'Água. At Roda D'Água the end is the beginning, as everything starts from water in endless cycles. To admire the work in its appearance and appearance is to remember the renewed beauty of instant living and celebrate its admirable abyssal enchantment. Reborn in the Fight, develop in Dance, strengthen in Density, rest in Contemplation, converge in Abundance, start over and end in Roda D'Água.
fire water
Video demo of the Fire Water work
Moving painting video made for collaborative work with Matt Sheridam for presentation at the front of the Igreja de Santana.
Kithi + Sheridan
Equipment and support: Mzad Eventos