Why do we hate the sensation of falling? It happens that’s all we’ve been doing of late. Falling, falling, falling.
Ailton Krenak.

Falling
Stop for a second and be still. Look around you. You're standing in a room filled with vibrations. Water swirls, splashes, murmurs, pools, eddies... Notice the cascading lines of color that unfurl across raw linen canvases in bright flows. Stand back a little, quieten your mind and take a breath.
    In...
        and    
            out...

Let your shoulders drop, sink, and pull your body groundward.

Turn to the canvas and follow the lines.
    Let them draw your gaze
        down
through bands of
        red, blue,
            black, red,
                grey, white...

Perhaps you'll pause, as your eyes flicker left or right to bursts of yellow or orange that take you across the plane
        until you resume
            your
            descent...

Breathless
When was the last time you felt vertigo? That precipice of meaning that suspends space and time in a sudden and unforeseen spasm, dispersing what felt until that moment stable, shaking it into unfamiliar forms.

Spasms. These involuntary jerkssome patently obvious, others barely perceptibledon't stop the flow of life or water; they are the flow. If you look more closely at Emilio's colored stripes, you'll see those spasms in the not-so-fluid lines of pen and paint that registerlike the peaks and troughs of river flow patterns or cardiogramsthe syncopations of his hand, breath, body, and attention moving across the canvas. Methodical, restless calm.

As water, we've never been still. Our bodies, just like rivers, lakes, and oceans, pulse constantly. Currents and tides rise and fall, circulate and eddy, and sometimes get stuck. Surfaces are deceptive; what appears tranquil or motionless, might actually be choking. Dammed. And yet, still it moves.

Gasp
Emilio began making the colorful waterfalls of his Angst series in 2020. We'd been set to gather a group of artists for a residency in Mexico's Usumacinta River with entreríos, the collective we've been collaborating on since 2019.  However, instead of navigating actual watersheds, we were locked down, confined to our homes by the global pandemic. So, we invited artists, scientists, and inhabitants of three watersheds to occupy virtual spaces where we invented alternative ways to connect to water stresses that intense urbanization and industrialization are inflicting on rivers across Latin America.

In one of these meetings, we learned how the Bogotá River, one of the world's most polluted water bodies, uses the precipice of the Tequendama Falls to gasp for breath. Starved by oxygen by a toxic load of heavy metals and human waste, as it crashes against the 157-meter rock face it finds a way to self-regulateto take in air and move towards health, falling in waves and rising as vapor.

The poetic potency of this scientific fact lingered with many of us. Soon after, one night, it surfaced in Emilio's dreams...

I dropped a video camera over the big waterfall. I saw it descend, wallowing in the soapy waters of the river, painted with chrome, mercury, and excrement. I felt excitement and disgust. The camera shook and spun as it fell down the waterfall until it hit the bottom of the precipice, plunging into the water. What I don't remember is if I saw the camera fall from a distance, standing still and motionless ... or if I was looking through the viewfinder of the camera as it fell with the water, or if I was the camera and was submerged in the river's dirty waters, drenched in mist.

Dreaming to wake up
A breathless river in a world coping with Covid was more than an analogy. It was a symptom of the dis-ease somatized by the planet and our bodies. Immersed in non-stop flows of algorithmic economics, politics, and culture, we are living at the ends of sleep.  Such is our spasmodic slumber that podcasters are getting rich by posting white noise to Spotify, while Amazon sells machines producing their soothing vibrations by the hundreds.  In a present shaped by breathlessness and chaos, our collective futures depend on how we conjugate our individual and common (bio)rhythms by finding ways of breathing togetherliterally con-spiringto expand the horizons of the possible into the poetical.  

This has been a recurrent thread in my conversations and collaborations with Emilio over the past few years as we have wondered what artistic research and practice might offer the thick present of ecological crisis and collective anxiety. During the pandemic, just after his vertiginous dream, we were reading Ideas to Postpone the End of the World (2020) by Indigenous Brazilian thinker Ailton Krenak. The book proposes recalibrating our consciousness as a route through volatility and injustice. Krenak says “we all need to wake up,” and for him this means recovering the lost art of dreaming as a disciplined and transcendental practice where “the human chrysalis cracks open onto unlimited new visions of life... places of connection with the shared world.”  Dreaming like this could change our way of relating, vibrating “in another register, another potency.”  

Turbulent poetics
Inspired by his and Krenak's dreams, Emilio's Angst series explores multiple forms of breathlessness related to the fragility, precarity, and toxicity of contemporary planetary life. Likewise, his densely layered paintings of watery surfaces summon attunement as an affective disposition to face ecological collapse and social upheaval. The work does not represent these dilemmas; it works through them by probing the semiotics and energetics of human relations to the Earth and hydrology. By generating other rhythms and tempos of hydrological relation, Emilio implicitly questions the politics and ethics of the way water is objectified and reduced to a mere resource. He does this by directing deep attention to the intimate dynamics of how water moves, finds, and expresses form so that painting isn't a genre to depict landscapes (he doesn't paint from photos or videos), but a medium that hosts lively confluences of body and matter. Composition as a mode of finding composure.

His pictorial explorations are thus a very material process, a deeply embodied attention to liquid forms that connects his own body and bodies of water in a turbulent poetics of whirling and falling. Paint serves as a medium and milieu for this to happen, demanding constant negotiation with the shifting viscosities of pigment and water, and an attunement to flow that is mediated by the technical and sensible prosthetics of body and brush. This turns the paintings' making into a dance between matter, gesture, and form, in which Emilio channels the intimate and subtle dynamics of water's lively movement, himself becoming submerged, to some degree, in its eddies and flows.

A similar current already ran through earlier water works wherejust as in his waterfall dreamhe ceded artistic agency to what water sees and sounds. In Usumacinta (2019), he plunged five cameras and microphones underwater, recording the river's voices and motion to conjure its turbulent poetics in a five-channel video installation. This poetical impulse surfaces again in White Noise Water in the paintings' erratically patterned flickers and vibrating canvases. These turbulent forms produce excess and overflow in a dominant global tempo that has deadened water by instrumentalizing it as a resource channeled into pipes, dammed behind walls, and churned through turbines. Through painting, water returns, lively and alive, animated by the fundamental entropy that keeps it shape-shifting constantly from meander to cascade, pool to rapid, stream to vaporoverflowing.

White noise
Emilio describes his painting process as bucolic and sometimes romantic, admitting: “Sometimes I stay up all night working. Usually, my artistic processes are not so pleasurable. That's something about the work that makes me feel uncomfortable but that I also like, and that makes me wonder: why am I not approaching my other projects the same way?”  

The ambivalence attached to pleasure in process resonates with a bigger, implicit question of what type of art making might change environmental sensibilities and our experience of being in the world. By attending to the material energies that shape the world beyondand beforethe forms humans give it, can art seduce us into ecological relations that are not extractive, but sensitive and care-full? Can it offer inspiration, in the literal sense of the worda way to breathe in and breathe life into other rhythms and ways of being?

Vertigo endures and dominant systems continue to separate humans from “nature.” But pleasure can be part of change and resistance, not apart from them.  This is what we can sense in White Noise Water, as it gathers practices of attending and tending to water, working through dis-ease toward states of pleasure as common waters meet. Painting, in this mode, becomes a practice of decolonizing our imaginations, as Suely Rolnik envisages it, hosting “the experience of the world as something living, whose forces produce effects in our body, which in turn is also living and shares that condition with all the elements that make up the living body of the biosphere.”  

There is always something happening below the surface. What seems still and fixed, is in fact constantly vibrating and making meaning. Perhaps staying with the flows and sounds of water is the white noise we need, not to lull us into sleep but to practice disciplined forms of dreaming. Moving beyond the gasps of our breathless moment, the practice of calm-and-restless painting that vibrates on these canvases marks a rhythm for other flows. As they re-attune us to a common vitality animating life, perhaps they might move us toward con-spirationbreathing together in a world that has not yet reached its end.  

        Lisa Blackmore
February 2024

Lisa Blackmore is a curator, writer, and university professor. She is the director of entreríos, an international collective that explores continuities between bodies of water, human bodies, and territories, creating curatorial projects, seminars, and publications that depart from artistic practices to create collaborative experiences that connect us to the environment and to each other.