Disjunctions of the liquid mirror

the informe in Luís Miguel Nava's poetry and in Hans Breder's Body/Sculptures

Abstract

Luís Miguel Nava’s poetry explores a descensional movement – poetically elaborated through images such as the excavation of one’s spirit, the penetration of memory’s lacerations, the dive into a liquid mirror’s plasticity – throught which it is formulated, in his work, a poetic of the underground as a fracturing space which creates disjunctions of meaning and thought. By electing the mirror as a central image in my investigation on such descensional movement in Nava’s poetry, I establish a connection between his poems and German-American artist Hans Breder’s Body/Sculptures, a series of intermedia artworks that engage with notions of performance, photography, and classical sculpture. Through the insolit disposition of naked bodies in space – studios, forests, bodies of water –, the human figures from the Body/Sculptures interact with the landscape, with other bodies, and, mostly, with the images produced as reflections of the mirrors they hold. I seek to articulate the way the two artists develop a language that allows us to interpret the liquid mirror – elaborated by Nava in opposition to the plane and algid mirror – as a space of revealing irreality, characterized by its powers of mutilation of forms and contamination of reality.