Felippe Moraes, Eledá
by Marc Pottier, 2020
Don’t be surprised if installations like Solfejo (presented in 2019 at FIESP) and projects like Eledá (his new photographic series), by Felippe Moraes, seem to think and organize themselves with a very precise, deliberate order — this involves a whole preparation. It is, in a sense, an introduction meant to draw you into a complex, at times interactive world, in which thinking will be called upon a great deal, and in which we will be subject to profound reverie. If Felippe Moraes’s work carries some of Mondrian’s rigor, we also find in it the fervor of Joseph Beuys.
I cite these two artists because, with Felippe Moraes’s work, it is impossible not to think of the anthroposophy of Rudolf Steiner (1861–1925), which marked them both. Recall that anthroposophy draws its conception of karma and reincarnation, as well as elements of Christianity (the idea of Christ as savior of the world). It affirms the existence of a spiritual world underlying the material world. Theosophy — the doctrine of a divine knowledge omnipresent in the world, formulated by Helena Blavatsky (1831–1891), combined with occultism, spiritism, and other features borrowed from Hinduism and Buddhism — promises to reveal fundamental truths about the order of the world, taking a certain distance from the old monotheisms of the Churches and from modern scientific rationality, which separates Man from Nature. In Eledá, Felippe Moraes brings in Afro-Brazilian cult and ritual, which are an integral part of his way of thinking and living.
In his work Homenagem a Oxalá, on which the artist asked me to comment, he considers himself a living sculpture. Every living being is one, in and of itself. This is a series of four images in which we see the artist’s bare back. His hair goes from shaved, to very short, and finally to a light blond dye. The order is left to the viewer’s judgment — did he shave his head to erase the blond, or, conversely, did he wait for his hair to grow out in order to transform and cover his head in a symbolic gold? This photographic work turns his life into a staging. Art as catharsis, both individual and collective. The work of art penetrates a person just as the person internalizes the work of art. The two must drown in one another, as Joseph Beuys might say.
Felippe Moraes is an optimistic shaman of a pre-apocalypse heralded by the coronavirus. This Carnival fanatic sees positive energies in all things, and the invisible bonds that unite us to one another and to Nature. After his gesture of purification in Homenagem a Oxalá, which he allows us to glimpse, he — who catches sight of the infinite — perhaps wishes to assure humans of their true place within the plane of the universe, saving us from the degradation of the archaic truths that underlie every religion, by drawing us into his ritual. In this way, he helps us discover — each in our own time — the fundamental union from which we all arose.
The poet Heidegger speaks of is the one who, through his creation, manifests the mystery of the world by wanting to show it… He seeks to rediscover the essence of life and of its emergence. He is in search of a historical, human memory, one that draws on his personal recollections in order to establish a shared past. Felippe Moraes is truly a poet.
Marc Pottier
2020
Translated into Portuguese by Jamile Ratter
Originally published in Revista DasArtes, 08/31/2020