Listen to me carefully, you bunch of snobs. If you think contemporary art is reduced to absurd NFTs and pretentious installations, it’s because you’ve never stood in front of a work by Celina Portella. This Brazilian woman, born in 1977 in Rio de Janeiro, navigates the twists and turns of art with an ease that would make the greatest tightrope walkers blush.
Portella is not an artist like the others. Her works were awarded the prestigious Luxembourg Art Prize in 2021, an international contemporary art prize that attests to the worldwide recognition of her talent. Her academic and professional background immediately reveals the richness of her artistic approach: trained in design at PUC Rio, then graduated in visual arts from the University of Paris VIII, she also danced for the Lia Rodrigues company before embarking on a multidisciplinary artistic career.
This dual training in dance and visual arts gives her a unique perspective on the body, its movement in space, and its representation. Portella moves between disciplines with disconcerting fluidity, transforming each medium she touches into a field of exploration of the boundaries between reality and representation, materiality and virtuality, presence and absence.
What immediately strikes in Portella’s work is her way of transforming the mundane into the extraordinary. In the series “Corte” (2019), she photographs herself cutting her own image, creating a dizzying mise en abyme where the subject becomes both creator and destroyer. The photographic paper is physically cut, creating a perfect continuity between the action represented and the material support. This material intervention on the image surface recalls the experiments of Lucio Fontana, but Portella adds a performative dimension that transforms the destructive act into a creative gesture.
The kinetics of the body is at the heart of her work. In “Movimento²” (2011), the screens projecting her choreographed performances move in synchronization with the movements of her body within the frame. The illusion is so perfect that one finds oneself searching for the invisible threads connecting the image to its physical manifestation. This work perfectly illustrates Portella’s ability to create devices that blur our perception of reality and invite us to question our relationship to images.
Portella constantly plays on the limits between the real and the virtual, blurring the boundaries between performance, architecture, cinema, and sculpture. In “Vídeo-Boleba” (2012), children play marbles on screen, and when their marbles exit the frame, real marbles appear on the exhibition space floor. This sophisticated trompe-l’oeil forcefully reminds us that every representation is a construction, an artifice that can be manipulated, diverted, subverted.
Portella’s relationship to kinetic iconoclasm constitutes one of the most interesting dimensions of her work. In “Derrube” (2009), she literally strikes her own projected image with a mallet, creating a visual collapse that questions our relationship to images in a world saturated with representations. This work evokes Vilém Flusser’s reflections on our society dominated by technical images. As he wrote in “Towards a Philosophy of Photography”: “Technical images are not mirrors but projectors. They do not reflect the world but project meanings onto it” [1]. Portella seems to have internalized this idea to the point of making it the raw material of her artistic work, questioning not only what images show us, but also how they shape our perception of the world.
This relationship to the image as malleable material is also found in her series “Dobras” (2017), where photographs of body parts are folded and framed, as if to give volume and movement to what was previously confined to the two-dimensionality of paper. These image-objects evoke Paul Virilio’s research on dromology, the science that studies the effects of speed on our perception of the world. Virilio noted that “speed reduces the world to nothing” [2], and that is precisely what Portella seems to counter by giving materiality, a physical presence to her images, anchoring them in the three-dimensional space of the exhibition venue.
In her series “Puxa” (2015), she takes the exercise even further by creating photo-objects where the body in tension with ropes extends materially beyond the frame. The ropes seen in the image are the same ones that support the weight of the frame in the exhibition space. This visual continuity between the represented and the real creates a strange sensation of doubling, as if we were caught between two parallel dimensions, between two distinct temporalities that miraculously meet in the present moment of contemplation.
This work on doubling and duplicity is reminiscent of the research by the Russian filmmaker Sergei Eisenstein on intellectual montage. Eisenstein sought to create a “third mental image” through the juxtaposition of two distinct images. He asserted that montage is not an idea composed of successive shots glued together, but an idea born from the clash between these shots [3]. Portella seems to apply this principle no longer to the temporal sequence of cinema, but to the spatial coexistence of the image and its support, of representation and its materialization. The clash between these two realities produces a third reality, a mental one, that transcends the limits of both.
More recently, in her series “Fogo” (2020), Portella began exploring the destructive possibilities of fire as a transformative agent of the image. In “Queimada,” a series of identical photographs in which she appears holding a match are burned in various ways, creating openings in the paper’s surface. The body thus becomes an agent of destruction of its own image, and the action depicted seems to overflow into reality. These works can be interpreted as a metaphor for our hyperconnected age, where images consume themselves as quickly as they are created in the incessant flow of social media, leaving behind ephemeral traces of their passage.
The use of fire as an artistic medium inevitably recalls Gaston Bachelard’s reflections on the symbolic power of this element. In “The Psychoanalysis of Fire”, Bachelard explores the symbolic and psychological dimensions of fire, its power of transformation and regeneration. For Portella, fire does not simply destroy the image; it transforms it, sculpts it, gives it a new dimension that transcends its two-dimensional nature. It is a paradoxical act, both destructive and creative, reminiscent of certain ritual performances by Ana Mendieta or the incendiary actions of Catherine Mayer.
What sets Portella apart from many contemporary artists is her ability to navigate different disciplines without ever falling into the trap of dispersion or superficiality. Each work is conceived as an autonomous ecosystem, where each element (body, image, medium, space) interacts with the others in a meticulously orchestrated choreography. This conceptual and formal coherence gives her work remarkable strength and clarity, despite the complexity of the issues it raises.
Her work is also remarkably accessible, without being simplistic. There is something immediately captivating in her trompe-l’oeil and her plays on perception, which invites even the most reluctant contemporary art viewer to engage with the work. But this accessibility masks a conceptual depth that rewards closer scrutiny and more sustained reflection. Portella achieves the rare feat of creating works that operate on multiple levels, offering each viewer a rewarding experience, regardless of their familiarity with contemporary art.
It is this rare combination of conceptual intelligence and formal seduction that makes Portella such an important artist in the current landscape. At a time when contemporary art often seems to oscillate between arid conceptualism and superficial spectacle, she reminds us that it is possible to create works that are both intellectually stimulating and sensually engaging, works that speak as much to our mind as to our body.
Portella continues to surprise us. With each new series, she pushes the boundaries of what an image can be, what a body can do, what a frame can hold. She reminds us that art is not an inert object to be passively contemplated, but a living experience that transforms us as much as we transform it, a constant dialogue between the work and the viewer, between the virtual and the real, between the past frozen in the image and the present of its contemplation.
In a world where we are constantly bombarded with images, where reality and fiction blur on the screens of our smartphones, Portella’s work offers us a space to reflect on our relationship with images and our own body. She invites us to rediscover a sense of wonder at the world, to rediscover the power of illusion and transformation, to acknowledge the persistent materiality of our experience in an increasingly virtual world.
The work of Celina Portella constitutes a fundamental contribution to contemporary aesthetic thought. By methodically blurring the boundaries between the virtual and the material, she develops a genuine phenomenology of the image that goes beyond the simplistic dichotomies of our time. Her approach engages with the most advanced philosophical questions about the nature of perception and representation, while making them accessible through a direct sensory experience. By inviting us to reconsider our relationship with images not as flat surfaces to be contemplated but as hybrid entities that inhabit and transform space, Portella contributes to the development of a new visual ontology for the 21st century. She thus offers us not only works to see but a profoundly renewed way of seeing the world.
- Flusser, V. (1996). For a Philosophy of Photography. Circé.
- Virilio, P. (1977). Speed and Politics. Galilée.
- Eisenstein, S. (1976). The Film: Form, Meaning, and Essence. Christian Bourgois.
