Adriano Amaral
Delirium Tremens
7 September - 14 October
GRIMM Gallery
202 Bowery, New York
NY 10012, USA
My dear Aerius,
On my nightly walk outside the studio yesterday I thought again about your last letter and I thank you for your concern. Sleep comes to those who rest, and although I can imagine no greater salvation, dormancy cannot find me. I am hidden too severely into the shadows of what has made me both gifted and cursed. My labour is a growing force bearing down upon me as both an arrangement of duty, and also the hope of redemption and absolution from these assignments.
The production of my incantations has been made expedient by this influence, and your concern is fitting to this situation. Pleading voices come to me more often still. They line-up outside the closed walls of my confines. They slip under the door of my meek environs, and aptly subvert the paralysis of my reticence. I try to flee from them under the cloak of darkness that evening provides. I search myself for possible breaches like the spaces between the starry constellations above me. Yet, all I find is my focus drawn towards the material potential of the metaphysical world that sieves through my oral passages, brushes alongside my robes, and cruxes under my feet. The energies in these are too strong to ignore. They are poured into me unwillingly. They are force-fed to my entirety and I have no choice but succumb to their influence. To exist completely under their influence and imbalance.
The pleas that haunt my cognition are the relentless impetus to extrapolate these material circumstances. To use this forbidding gift to transform their seemingly mundane properties into transcendent influence and eternal accompaniment. Sometimes their accent is cruel and obstinate, other times they call on me to extend care and guidance. It is only on the rare occasion that an erogenous desire speaks to me that I feel a corporeal bond with these elements. I will then allow my full molecular capacities to grasp their significance. I dispose all of my concentration onto their potential and wish myself closer to a fathomable transience. I direct every spare resource I have to immerse myself into this sensibility and hope that my spirit leaves my earthly restrains to soar away with these amorous enchantments. But my dear Aerius, these moments are few and far between. Perhaps I must redirect my properties to the concept that it can, and will, only be an amalgamation of my deeds that frees me.
Until then, I am kept under the sentry of my own predestination and must accept its extent. I must consent to my talents being both my curse as well as my calling, and in this, distribute my experiences to the companions whom are valued to me, such as yourself. And so, I do, and this is also why I write to you. While I am invidious of your autonomy from the severe incarcerations as I have described to you, I also see that I can assist in your examinations. Please be warned that my counsel comes with the precarious balance of accumulating a greater understanding and influence over our material realities, but also becoming a prisoner of an all-powerful disposition contained in the command of these materials whose grasp is unforgiving.
I am sorry if my correspondence reads so clamarous dear Aerius. Our reciprocity has become an imperative part of my existence which I cherish, as you are the last to acknowledge the extent to which I have travelled. You are the last to do so, as all the rest have either been swallowed indefintely by time immemorial – as I am sure this is my destiny – or have become only wicked under the full control of the feral creatures that come with this duty no human agent is capable of warding off. I am also sorry, as my circumstances have grown so dire since last we spoke, that I do not have the strength to escape this. I accept and honor my task, and yet I wish for you the resilience to understand my attempts to constrain my capacities, so that one day you may be the one to assign the final impetus onto my existence.
Until then, Forever yours,
About the Artist
Adriano Amaral (b. 1982, Ribeirão Preto, Brazil) makes site-specific installations that model the exhibition space as an encompassing experience. Amaral engages in an alchemic artistic process, employing synthetic and organic compounds as well as video, light and sound. The materials and objects in his work form rare combinations that deny a categorical logic or hierarchy and acts to decontextualize architectural spaces with a sensitivity to the viewer’s physical presence. Delirium Tremens is imbued with an ephemerality that speaks to the life of a place that exists in different conditions than our own, but one which we can venture to understand through its materiality.