Do not go gently into that dark night.

I will never write a wall text for an exhibition for three simple reasons: first, the wall text is subordinate to the exhibition; it merely informs, and thus any accompanying text becomes spurious content. Second, because it is tautological. It risks burying, in written form, the energetic and ungrammatical impulses that constitute the very nature of apprehending art. And finally, third, no one reads them.

For that reason, this text, once again, is not a wall text; it is a text for the Moon and for the Sun, when it is lent to the other side. I write at night, when God allows us to encounter ourselves as strangers. Dissolved in sleep-dream, within a natural religion in which nature is nothing of what it seems. Here unfolds the time of continuity, of prior community, of a multitude of predecessors who invented firewood cut by the fine tools of men.

Contemporaneity breathes life into vain notions of “attention to oneself,” of “care of the self,” of self-care, and of “self-knowledge,” in an absolutization of idiosyncrasies. Alongside this “desacralization of the world,” the “difficulty of being oneself” is amplified, rendering collectivity unviable. There is, in fact, a problematic experience in constructing an individual without a past. In art, this tendency manifests as a desire to be novelty itself, to reinvent gunpowder. It lives in a perpetual adolescence, estranged, in absolute otherness. Thus, the departure from the “time of religion” is directly correlated with the advent of a hyper-individualistic age, which in art results in a production disinherited by its own recreation.

What we see in this installation by André Vaz is the revitalization of communal practices of a timeless making, nothing new under the sun and, for that very reason, so original. Of an origin without beginning or end, where the human, animal, mineral, and vegetal are indistinguishably implicated. Through a tacit preestablishment that the making of art does not override the mystery of the ritual that matter itself demands. In the image of the poem…

In the earliest days of art,

Builders forged with utmost care

Each smallest and invisible part,

Because the gods are everywhere.

Culture, whether agricultural or artistic, emerged in the service of a ritual or by giving it form, arising from an imperative necessity. Primitive, magical, and later religious, nothing happened without everything being interwoven. It is therefore of decisive importance that the mode of existence of aura in the work of art never becomes completely detached from its ritual function. In other words, the singular value of the “authentic” work of art has its foundation in ritual, where it acquired its original and primary use value.

This work presupposes a collective dimension and also assumes the fantasy of a continuous flow between affective heredity and the force of symbolizing the real, like the choreographies of flocks or schools, in reflex rituality, in movements of silver and salt under the sun. Thus, repetition, whether more atomic or of similar anatomies, is the perpetuation of the life of the dead and of natural matter.

For this reason, rituals of repetition that slowly gather divine beings bring with them the reactualization of original time, when the rite was first celebrated. In this sense, it seems that there is nothing new under the sun. However, repetition is not sameness but intensification. For this reason, the rite is effective: it makes us participants in a notion of time that transgresses normality, as an other. A primordial night in which the rite updates the myth. It gives it a body, for art does not wish to be a servant of the provisional.

Here we see the conformity of a mapping of coexistent temporalities with their dichotomies between nature and art, countryside and city, in a deep intermutation full of meaning. This does not occur without radical contaminations, filled with transgressions and misappropriations of the universes of matter and making. [Thus, it is unsettling that on the day Life was domesticated, stripping the elements of their inexplicable powers, humanity even imagined stepping onto the moon. Which indeed happened without even asking its permission, at the very least, with a verse; antiguo llanto. Mírala. Es tu espejo.]

The absurdity of trying to make something pass as new is thus confirmed. The unprecedented appears as a stale residue of modernity: new progress, the tabula rasa, the ambition of spontaneous generation, a body that self-fertilizes, engenders, and is born. In this, Qohelet is precise: nothing that appears as new has not already been. We can never think we might erect, upon the earth or under the sun, a tower of Babel, new wings for Cicero.

[Forget it, entrepreneur of robotics and AI. Everything you make is a footnote to a sneeze of Homer, or to the cracked hand down to the bone of a fisherman.]

The day they sawed that oak beam, they did so on the hill and under the right moon for cutting and felling the tree. The breath of sweat and hunger was the same. The wood, in turn, in every centimeter narrates the pendular back-and-forth of the blade aloud. A drawing of resistance that the vertical grain offers to the temper of iron. Thus, we are all of the same Stone and Lithium Age. These serve to cut, to crush, or to make electric batteries. Materials from the subsoil, deritualized, disenchanted, that perpetuate profitable individualization in place of the sensitive handling of mutual and progressive transformation, as we see the artist do. For even the sun has been made into a clock, an instrument. Yet it already was so, across all centuries, when it entered through temples during solstices or equinoxes. We did not assign numbers to mark the passing of a cast shadow and thus measure time. Rather, we desired to receive reconnection and photosynthesis, the vitality of light, the warmth and the mirror of water. Even if there is nothing new under the sun, we will follow André, not chasing the wind of the new, but perpetuating the gesture of origin, even within that dark night.

João Sarmento sj 2026