Over the past three decades, Valeska Soares has produced a vast body of work, spanning various media in two and three dimensions. At once sensuous and wry, her sculptures and installations invoke the human body even when absent or abstract. Wax lips and solitary velvet limbs appear like lonely lovers, fragments of a body shattered by unrequited desire. Collaged empty candy wrappers and sticky puddles of perfume, meanwhile, seduce our tastebuds and noses. With Soares’s tender touch, such materials pick at knots of complex human emotions – love and loneliness, hope and hunger.
‘Absence persists – I must endure it,’ Roland Barthes wrote in A Lover’s Discourse: Fragments (1977). For the French theorist, ‘absence becomes an active practice’, one that Soares adopts in her own works, in which anthropomorphic qualities also suggest the many ‘doubts, reproaches, desires, melancholies’ of the soul. Seduction is so often accompanied by pain: Soares’s visual language acknowledges this traumatic ambivalence as much as it celebrates the liberatory potential of affection. Romantic tropes, like roses and perfume, though alluring, can be thorny or sickeningly sweet. Her unusable furniture might produce what Barthes called a ‘scenography of waiting’: the chairs of Lugar Comum (Shared Place, 2016), for instance, are conjoined as if trapped in a dysfunctional relationship.
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