LAURA F. GIBELLINI: LUNA DE BRILLO

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

From the Greek μαιευτικός (maieutikós, maieutiké) maieutics designates the art of the midwife and was the method used by Socrates so that, by means of questions, the student would discover knowledge already latent in him. 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 forever carry the weight of the world on his shoulders. Zeus was so moved by the suffering of the daughters in the face of their father’s fate that he transformed them into stars so that they could be with him.

Mayautics is then an exploration of Maya’s drawings between the ages of two and five, but it is also an investigation of both the act of drawing and of the mechanisms of drawing itself. The project is articulated in different series each of which explores different aspects of drawing as a form of knowledge. It considers scribbling, the relationship between drawing and writing, the gestural dimension of drawing and its ability to express a vital energy that unfolds in an almost three-dimensional way.

Luna de Brillo/ Shinemoon is an exhibition and a book. Luna de Brillo/ Shinemoon is an enquiry into the distance—or the lack of it—between things.

– LFG