Letter I · The discovery of the line: the first cry

To whoever enters at the beginning,

Every birth is a wail before it is a name. My line was born that way: without grammar, without technique, only the urgency of handing back to the world a weight it had laid in my lap. They were scenes told in work meetings, between one coffee and the next, by people who covered the city and came back with it stuck to their skin. I listened. And what I heard did not go away.

The first canvas, The Discovery of the Line, was painted and buried several times. Each version buried the one before, like someone who tries to forget and only manages to accumulate. There I understood that my painting would be made not of getting it right, but of sediment. The color vibrated, and beneath it there was silence, anguish and paint.

In this phase I described nothing: I thrashed, and the line thrashed with me. It became a body trapped behind black bars in Bodies of the Line. It became cut skin or gooseflesh over red grounds that recall the heat of desire as much as a pool of blood in The Sexuality of the Line. It became a Romeo and a Juliet under thin blankets in a freezing shack, in The Romanticism of the Line, proving that affection insists on living where everything around it demands silence. It became the stream that runs through the favela and washes, at once, memory and pain.

And it became lament. The Lines of the Three Marys are three canvases, two hundred and forty centimeters of weeping, for the mothers who mourn their children. I painted the way one builds an altar: circular gestures, colors that waver between tenderness and wound, absence turned into presence.

But I also danced. In Frevos of the Line and in Olinda of the Line, I let the canvas become crowd, steep street, February. I wanted no center, no direction. I did not guide the line: I let it drag me along. I discovered that celebration and tragedy use the same palette, and that the people who suffer most are the ones who best know how to celebrate.

At the end of this phase, I blew the line to pieces. The Dismantling of the Line is the moment I opened the body of the gesture to see what pulsed inside, like an anatomy of creation. I dismantled the line because I no longer fit inside it whole.

If you look at these works and find them naive, look again. They are not the drafts of a painter who did not yet know. They are my record: that of a man who already knew too much and needed, for the first time, to know nothing.

Marcus Yabe, Phase I, 2020 and 2021