Visual Essay: Book of Artist

Abstract

How many hands do we need to make an artist’s book? Keta Cabral Linhares and Mário Linhares have produced an artist’s book with four hands and two pairs of eyes. They traveled to Ivory Coast and drew, maybe as a way to live and understand life, their own lives and the other ones. They defined page by page the relations between the registers and the shapes, taking the time to them, building their own spaces. They took the risk of dialoguing using a portrait, as they share their choices and multiply the traces. Ultimately, they scratched and scribbled, leaving impressions that risked reaching the other in the process of finding himself. The artists say: “drawing the Black Africa is, inevitably, a meeting with the essence of human being, with the purest and most unselfich state that we may achieve someday. It is the sensation of marking the personal history with the words that will be invented.” And, for us, in the role of observers and spectators of art, going through the books with the artists, looking to the left or to the right, up and down, touching the pages, in the synergy between the vision and the rhythm of the hands, at the four sides, in an attempt of accompanying the time of turning the page, we have a shared experience, that, with no reason, leads us to look, and that also starts do draw.