Silence

of
Maria Leal da Costa

Follower of the formal strictness and without adornments, not needing extravagance to affirm originality, or the provocation either to indicate challenge, the work of Maria Leal da Costa matches the modern way of her time, without expunge a traditio that she assimilated well and she assumes entirely.
In that heritage is, for instance, the increase of the valorisation of the materials that in their qualities, textures and colours are an integrant part of the meanings and not only it support. In her contemporaneousness a constant register is pointed out between the figure and its evocation, for times tenuously, in a simultaneously reflected and impulsive poetics, indifferent at the explicative prefixed concepts and at the categories imposed by the prevailing critics.

Being born is to put on the mask and in the modulation of the representations that we choose, the valid ones, i.e. the sincere ones, it exists that of assuming the functions, the ages, the homelands that our life knows.
In this beautiful Lithuania it will remain Silence - Philosophy’s first temple stone – that was simply conceived but conscientiously that the stone represents absolute ecstasy, the absolute serenity, the dead and angelical state of the things and that all the enigma of the life is closed in the head of an ant.
It is a homage to those who elected, forced or voluntary, silence as knowledge, sometimes even The supreme knowledge, or elected it as a weapon, often with a deafening effect, knowing we that the artworks are great due to their indefinite and imperfect content, and from this fertile imperfection is our spirit fed.
Peoples are big and their geography is scarce – therefore, the rivers Nemunas or Tejo, the Neris or Douro, are more valuable than their distance –but we are aware of our contingency: the infinity is itself minus the meter in which we stand out; the eternity is itself minus the hour in which we live.
If we want – tells us Maria Leal da Costa -, and in the highest wall the breach appears, and in the opposite side of the rubble, the tight fist point to the inventor of the silence: remove the word humanity and we will be covered of hair, in an moment.

(Text on aphorisms of the Portuguese poet Teixeira de Pascoaes, about the sculpture Silence, of Maria Leal da Costa (http: // www.mlealdacosta.com), done in May of 2007, in the Park of Vilnoja, Lithuania).

Joaquim Pinto da Silva