LAURA F. GIBELLINI: LUNA DE BRILLO

Luna de Brillo is a drawing made on carbon paper in which I transcribe the title of a painting made by Maya exactly as she wrote it on the canvas itself. This title gives its name to the exhibition and to the book that accompanies the project in which this research is framed, titled Mayautics (a term coined by Ricardo Horcajada in a text that gave origin to the project).

From the Greek μαιευτικός (maieutikós, maieutiké), maieutics refers to the art of the midwife, and was the method used by Socrates to help students, through questioning, uncover knowledge that was already latent within them. Mayautics is the title of a long-term artistic project, and Maya is the name of my daughter. It is also the name of one of the seven Pleiades, daughters of Atlas. Atlas was condemned by Zeus to hold up the weight of the world for eternity. So moved was Zeus by the daughters’ suffering at their father’s fate that he transformed them into stars so they could be near him.

Mayautics is, then, an exploration of the drawings my daughter Maya made between the ages of two and five, but it is also a study of the act of drawing itself and of the mechanisms involved in drawing. The project is organized into different series, each of which investigates diverse facets of drawing as a form of knowledge: from scribbling, to the relationship between drawing and writing, to its gestural dimension, and its ability to express a vital energy that unfolds in an almost three-dimensional way.

Luna de Brillo is an exhibition and a book. Luna de Brillo is a study of distance—or its absence—between things.

– LFG