The Brooklyn Rail

Roughly thirty-thousand years ago, our early ancestors left their handprints in caves of the European Atlantic coast. Marks like theirs are among the earliest surviving evidence of humans’ innate drive for creativity, and have been found on nearly every continent, showing that, before language, early humanity thought about hands with great awe. Across cultures and times, the human hand has become both a symbol and a subject, the ultimate apparatus of human thinking for a long lineage of thinkers, across fields, from pre-Socratic philosopher Anaxagoras to Aristotle, Martin Heidegger, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Swiss educator Jean Piaget and French post-structuralists like Derrida.

The instrument of instruments, per Aristotle’s definition, is also the starting point of the exhibition I See No Difference Between a Handshake and a Poem, which marks the opening of the Parisian outpost of Mendes Wood DM Gallery. The group show invites a meditation on hands—what they hold, create, learn, destroy, touch and transform, in relation to other beings beyond the visible realm. The exhibition curated by Fernanda Brenner brings together a vast range of media, as well as artists from different contexts and career stages. Its title comes from a letter by the poet Paul Celan written in 1960.

At the entrance of the gallery, a former private residence and psychoanalytic practice in the Place des Vosges, two riveting small pieces offer an original entry point for the show. “My hands. Tools that are ever more wrinkled make me feel as if I’ve just been born,” writes Paloma Bosquê in a text-based piece created this year (the short poem is drawn from the artist’s 2022 book Materia). Primarily a sculptor whose research revolves around materiality, Bosquê understands sculpture as an entity sharing space in the world with the artist. Likewise, Davide Stucchi draws on the body’s interactions with its surroundings. In Light Switch (Kitchen) (2019), he repurposes an emptied electrical fixture as frame for a cutout extracted from a publication. Together, these works create a kind of existential weight, one stripped to its bare minimum but nonetheless an evocative container for human experience and the relation of the body to other entities.

Further into the exhibition space, to the left, the highlights are Paulo Nazareth’s Chainsaw (2022), CA – Ita Gyra and CA - Ita Gyra Guasu (both 2018), rocks whose surface were etched with rudimentary symbols and industrial iconography of tractors and power tools. A traveling artist who creates as he walks, Nazareth has a process-based practice that resists definitions and hierarchies. Here, he also “walks” by way of his works, which are placed throughout the space so as to offer a trail, an itinerary within the show. On the stairs one finds Rolleytruck (2022).

Upstairs, Yvonne Rainer’s The Hand Movie (1966) is a six-minute silent close-up of a hand whose fingers engage in a sequence of increasingly complex movements, until they return to a flat position. The hand, not easily identified as of male or female, is purposely shown from all sides, implying a sculptural, three-dimensional way of seeing. A founding member of the Judson Dance Theater and a key name in American dance, Rainer reinvented the genre by incorporating gestures drawn from daily life in her choreographies. She turned to film while she was bedridden after a surgery: unable to move, she put her hand to dance.

Sonia Gomes’s Nebulosa 2 (2022) is also a choreograph of sorts—one has to bend and move to fully apprehend its organic yet otherworldly forms. Born in a town that was once a hub of Brazil’s textile industry, Gomes works with found or gifted fabrics that carry a myriad of collective and personal stories, intuitively experimenting with color and shape to create her volumes. The artist’s gestures evoke an Afro-Brazilian hand whose wisdom comes from doing—twisting, wrapping, tensioning and suspending, sewing and stitching. Her textile poem, grappling with the stories contained in the fabrics as much as her own, seem to echo a line by French essayist Hélène Cixous: “I clung to your hands so that something human might exist in the chaos.”¹

Finally, a poignant, melancholic meditation on the origins of civilization and the inexorable march of times, Marguerite Duras’s film Les Mains négatives (Negative Hands) (1979) delves into the discovery of handprints dating back thirty-thousand years in the Magdalenian caves at the European Atlantic coast. As dawn approaches, the camera films through a car window as it drives through Paris, from the Bastille to the Champs-Élysées. The images of the modern city are juxtaposed to Duras’s grave voice, who describes the handprint as a petrified cry, underscoring it as a powerful creative act that bridges the distance between our harrowing times and those many millennia ago.

Just like the petrified cry from the Magdalenian caves, the works assembled here are, to use another of Celan’s descriptions of a poem, a message in a bottle: a testament of creativity, a modest yet exquisite promise of hope in a world perpetually menaced by tragedy and despair.

1. “Olivier De Serres - A Single Passion Two Witnesses,” Love Itself: In the Letter Box (Polity Press, 2008)