Correspondence to Juan Manuel Perdomo is a series based on a strategy that started as a bar game in 2007 and has been transformed into obsession. It is a growing body of beer labels folded, without cutting or mixing brands. Correspondence is an everyday attempt to make folds that allow other senses to enroll in a limited universe of known signs.

Correspondence to Juan Manuel Perdomo is a series based on a strategy that started as a bar game in 2007 and has been transformed into obsession. It is a growing body of beer labels folded, without cutting or mixing brands. Correspondence is an everyday attempt to make folds that allow other senses to enroll in a limited universe of known signs.

Correspondence to Juan Manuel Perdomo is a series based on a strategy that started as a bar game in 2007 and has been transformed into obsession. It is a growing body of beer labels folded, without cutting or mixing brands. Correspondence is an everyday attempt to make folds that allow other senses to enroll in a limited universe of known signs.

The works from the Da parte pelo todo series (From part to whole) have been developed by Cinthia Marcelle since 2014, and are made up of sets of objects with strategic paintings in white latex paint. They are ordinary objects, linked to the world of civil construction and its work processes, such as shovels, buckets, sieves, spatulas and paint trays. The paint is manually applied into the pieces, in order to create delimited zones within the objects, establishing relations between figure and background, full and empty, addition and subtraction, presence and absence, visible and hidden. They are not, however, illusionist gestures: the pieces deal with the immediate identification of their components by those who see them, avoiding the commotion and ecstasy in the confrontation with the works. The pieces are formed by didactic relations that articulate signs present in the global culture within movements that avoid a sedative or nirvanic relation with the object of art. Marcelle’s works are calculated to what is strictly necessary, elevating the emotions to critical emotions and to reflection.

The spelling alphabets, internationally used and recognized, originated from the two so-called world wars, in the last century. These acrophonic alphabets (in which each word represents its initial letter) are used to avoid misinterpretations and keep mistakes probabilities to the very least, every time the mutual understanding of a combination of letters seems to be crucial. It is not easy to find words that can be pronounced and decodified in different languages, and the alphabet known as Able Baker, created by US army in 1941 and then adopted by civil aviation, contained such an amount of sounds unique to the English language that another spelling alphabet, called Ana Brazil, was used in Latin America.

Currently, the most used of these codes is the international radiotelephony spelling alphabet, also known as the OTAN phonetic alphabet, which, despite its reference to the North Atlantic, is used by civil aviation companies and radio amateurs throughout the planet. Even if it departed from the recognition of a necessity to find common sounds to English, French and Spanish, the OTAN alphabet comprises a considerable number of words that allude to Anglo-Saxon culture: from Foxtrot and Golf to Whisky and Yankee. Ironically enough, Juliet and Romeo (characters condemned to a tragic finale due to miscommunication) are also included in this list.

“Alfabeto fonético”, presented here in its first applied version, is a proposition to create a new spelling alphabet, trying to use words of an international meaning and spelling, even if their pronunciation is adapted to the phonetics of each different language and the customary sounds of each country. Some of the selected words, deriving from Greek or Latin, were initially mythological or scientific concepts and ended up being used in daily basis (such as Atlas or Flora); some others are so specific to a certain culture or geography that tend to be used every time a reference to their connotation is needed or desired elsewhere (such as Harem or Ninja); and some seem to have become transnational due to the necessity of them being recognized by foreigners anywhere (such as Camping or Taxi).

In NightDay, Cinthia Marcelle proposes a time count from the selection of materials: fabric, paint, timber batten and shoelace. The piece consists of 12 modules with 6 layers of industrially patterned fabric with 60 black stripes on white background. The black stripes are covered gradually by white paint. The same linear measure of covered stripes is transferred to black shoelace which covers segments of battens that accumulate piece by piece over each module. The movement of Marcelle’s clock reflects the time of labor used in the manual realization of each piece in subtraction and addition operations.

Truth or Dare parts from a photograph of a triangle embedded in the earth. The shape rotates sometimes slowing down, but never stopping. The movement resembles that of the bottle form the game that titled the work, or that of an unbalanced compass. The video was built using a software, created by artist and programmer Pedro Veneroso, who animated the photo by turning it on its axis. The sound design was done by Pedro Durães. At a certain moment, a shadow is projected over the image. The shadow can be understood as that of the spectator who is included in the game, and who can choose between truth or challenge, order or disorder. After the passage of the shadow, the triangle reverses its direction of rotation, “it is a physical inversion, suggestive of the non-hierarchical mixing and movement of people and materials”, as Stephanie Straine, curator of the exhibition “The Family in Disorder: Truh or Dare,”presented by Marcelle at Modern Art Oxford (MAO), in 2018, wrote. The sound of the video surrounds the exhibition rooms and establishes the circularity of the montage: that of changing the stripes into time, the one that disrupts the drawing of a human figure and that of the novelty converged on what has already been seen.

The set of frottages from the Secession series: The Tempest, is part of a project created for an artist book by Cinthia Marcelle, published in parallel with the solo show “Dust never sleeps”, by the artist in the Secession, in Vienna, in 2014. The images were made from folded sheets of paper, the same size of the publication pages, creating a kind of book within the book.
Composed of 21 chapters, the project builds a narrative of this gesture of folding paper. It is a relation between what is and what is not present, as frottage – or tracing – depends on a tangible referent.