Exhibitions

Freud asks whether we should not look for the first traces of the imaginative faculty in childhood. In Creative Writers and Daydreams, the founder of psychoanalysis brings play close to the inventiveness of artists and writers. Flávia Junqueira's work has this poetic dimension of the child's imagination. In her work, the magical aspect brings into play the possibility of fictionalising reality, which in the image opens the way to a connection with the first imagination.

The balloons, merry-go-rounds, toys and playgrounds that the artist portrays condense the radiation of the colours and the subtle impression of the rhythm of the images that harbour the dream, the fantasy, the call to poetry. Streams of pulsating images of meaning open up in the living matter of memory.

Recalling the roots of childhood is a way of articulating and integrating the different sensory modalities. The richness of the child's sensitive world - this kind of "ceaseless origin" - is a source of creation and discovery, as the Dutch historian Johan Huizinga emphasises in his 1938 book Homo Ludens the importance of play in culture, explaining that "civilisation is born and develops in and through play". Charles Baudelaire, in his masterful essay on the Morality of Toys, also found in the interaction of the child with the toy the first signs of a literary or artistic predestination. In the apparent simplicity of children there is a great capacity for improvisation that can capture what escapes us through inattention.

Real and surreal spaces house invented images that traverse the dimension of the childlike, the dream and the imagination. Filled with the "memory of things", they create a universe - flexible, mobile, unfoldable. In this, their work is close to the artistic proposals that shaped the 20th century - from Van Gogh to Renoir, from Cy Twombly's doodles to the photographs of museum paintings with children that show the dimension of distance. From a wandering gaze that refuses to be captured by the obvious, the subject of childhood appears not as a fixed state but as a changing body that leads to a constant questioning of the visible and the invisible. And this is the zone where art and childhood converge and which the artist makes shine by accessing regions where the senses are still permeable and immature.

In his book Childhood and History, Giorgio Agamben considers childhood not only as a chronologically or physiologically defined and completed age, but as a form of sensibility that permeates existence. Flávia Junqueira's work also embraces this dimension of humour and flirtation with the indomitable and the beauty that hovers between the images. The balloon - the possibility of vertigo and dream - and the toy magically transform and ground the play of presence and absence, placing childhood at the centre of her work, touching on the ineffable and the experience of mystery.

Psychoanalysis has denaturalised the discourses on language and childhood, and through art we can perceive "how a society dreams up its childhood". Flávia Junqueira's work focuses on this point because, in the final analysis, it is always about the childlike: what remains of the childlike experience as an imprint in the subject, that is, what remains as a matrix for the rest of life.

As in Louise Gluck's infinite poetry, "we look at the world once, as children. The rest is memory". Art never lets the mystery of the early days disappear, and Flávia Junqueira updates the subversive idea of play as a gift and an offering.

Text: Bianca Coutinho