Tiziana
La Melia
Books + Selected Writing
St. Agatha's stink script
galerie anne barrault
(click gallery link for images)
April 18 - May 11, 2019
Tiziana La MeliaIn the course of a meditation on the process of “decreation” described by Simone Weil, Anne Carson’s advice to the visitor to Tiziana La Melia’s exhibition at the Galerie Anne Barrault sounds like a warning: beware of the temptation to taste the images because the desire to consume them could turn out to be a refusal to confront the contradiction that they reveal. Carson writes:
I remember a little book of the Lives of the Saints that was given to me when I was five years old. It described the flowers that make up the crowns of the martyrs with such abundance of words and detail that I had to stop myself from eating the pages. I wonder what those pages must have tasted like in my imagination. But perhaps the compulsion to eat pages has nothing to do with taste. Perhaps it has to do with being on the verge of contradiction, which is a painful situation that children, in their natural wisdom, seek to escape, while mystics love it. (1)
The story of Saint Agatha, for example, is both painful and sordid. She was condemned to the stake for having persevered in her vow of Christian chastity despite the advances of the Roman prefect Quintianus. The earth refused this injustice and began to tremble furiously. In the chaos that followed the earthquake, Saint Agatha was thrown into prison and died there around 251. To convince her to renounce Christianity and take Quintianus as her lover, she was raped several times before her death, she was made to endure the torture of the rack and her breasts were cut off with pliers. On her feast day, February 5, she appears iconographically in the form of small buns in the shape of severed breasts covered with a cherry.
The patron saint of women with breast cancer, rape victims, and wet nurses, Saint Agatha is invoked to protect women from the violence she herself suffered and that represents her: on cold February afternoons, people feast on replicas of excised breasts, their fingers covered in icing sugar. Simone Weil might have seen in this paradox a phenomenon of decreation. “We participate in the creation of the world by decreating ourselves,” she writes.(2)
In other words, decreation is a process of withdrawal from the self that the seventh-century Greek poet Sappho described as a progressive loss of acuity in the senses of sight, hearing, and touch.
Sappho, writes Anne Carson, “shows us the objects of sense perception emptying themselves of their own content” to the point of allowing the poet to stand as if beside herself.(3)
I suggest that the viewer look at La Melia’s paintings from this perspective: as objects of perception emptying themselves of their sensible content. Butterfly peas, for example, as a fuchsia-pink vaginal form in shot-against-shot with a pair of paler pink forms, a ghostly checkerboard in the background in the upper left corner. Or Kind of murex, kind of marzipan, a dark green body grappling with its own neon aura, and Radula, a gray form that seems to sit on its own dripping shadow. Each in its own singular way, these paintings demand to be eaten and show a form in the process of unraveling.
“Greener than the Grass”: Melia quotes Sappho in the opening subtitle of the video projected at the visual center of the exhibition and in the video inspired by its accompanying text, St. Agatha's Stink Script. Sappho speaks of herself and her sense of having emptied herself to the point of surpassing in color the things of the natural world. Then Ada Smailbegovi?'s legs appear on screen, dressed in the same playful tones as the field of wildflowers that surround her, as if one could forget oneself to the point of becoming pinker than the flower buds.
Smailbegović is an assistant professor of English literature at Brown University, but nothing interests her more than the fruitful intersections between disciplines: “Science embraces the result of change, the most recent discoveries. Poetry has the power to embrace the process of change, the nature of development itself,” she writes. With her hands wrapped in pale mesh, she manipulates a collection of eggshells, cradling some and placing others on her lap like precious objects. Then she pulverizes the shells with mortar against the stone of the flower-filled patio, reminding the viewer of the painful contradiction involved in any process of transformation: to become other, it is necessary to experience loss.
Natasha Marie Llorens
Algiers, April 2019
(translation by Hélène Quiniou)
(1) Anne Carson, “Decreation: How Women Like Sappho, Marguerite Porete, and Simone Weil Tell God,” Common Knowledge, Volume 8, Issue 1, Winter 2002, p. 199.
(2) Simon Weil quoted in Carson, “Decreation,” 196.
(3) Carson, “Decreation,” 190.