The Infinite forms of the same thing.

Throughout decades of work, Márcia Xavier has returned repeatedly to the body. Not the body as portrait or representation, but the body as a material of transformation. The hands, fragmented limbs, silhouettes, photographic traces, and ghostly presences that recur throughout her oeuvre seem to constitute a single organism in perpetual mutation.

In Fotossíntes [Photosynthesis], this process extends beyond the human and approaches the vegetal world, revealing profound continuities between forms of life that we habitually think of as separate.

When Goethe wrote The metamorphosis of plants, he sought a way of looking at nature that escaped the logic of separation and classification. He was fascinated by the idea that a leaf might virtually contain all the other forms of a plant, and that growth was nothing more than a succession of transformations of the same original gesture. There is something of this vision in Márcia Xavier’s works. The figures inhabiting Fotossíntese seem to exist in an intermediate state, before becoming definitively body or image.

Each form contains the memory of another and already announces the next. More than a group of works about plants, the exhibition proposes a reflection on metamorphosis as a condition shared by all living beings, drawing close to Goethe’s intuition that life is not made up of isolated entities, but of infinite variations of the same creative force.