Modifications and appropriation of an autonomous identity
by Gretta Sarfaty

For a definitive relation
Where converse prevails over inverse
And inverse finds its placement
To repropose the concept of autonomy
Social autonomy
Intellectual autonomy
Autonomy of freedom
Autonomy of condition
Snatched iconography
In segments of irreality
Sequences joined
By symbolic personage
Color
Full of temporal suggestions
The cage, the bar torn
Rational modification
Of time’s irrationality
That occupies space
Dedicated to it by the avalanche of events
Measuring the reality
Of irreversible events
To repeat the ancient game
Of frontiers weekly marked
By mythical religious characters
To find again the lost pleasure
Of small great men
Armed only with their names and thoughts
And that upon earth draw
Invisible but important signs
Whose shadows
Play out their game and mark point to the future.

Gretta Sarfaty/metaphysics of flesh
by Lui Tanaka

In 1986, Gretta Sarfaty (Athens, 1947) produced a series of paintings titled Intimacy, using acrylic paint over canvas, which Nuno Centeno Gallery shows to the public, for the first time, at Gretta Sarfaty/metaphysics of flesh exhibition.

Part of the exhibit, are the Hommage to Tiziano “Vênus of Urbino”; the Hommage to Manet, “Le Déjeuner sur L’Herbe”; the “Hommage to Manet “Olympia”; the “Hommage to Gauguin “Nevermore” and “Hommage”.
This is an exhibition, but above all an act of courage. Because Gretta Sarfaty/metaphysics of flesh brings to light a little-known side of the artist, which is her painting side. Throughout her almost fifty-year career, Gretta Sarfaty has always been much more recognized as a performer and photographer than as a painter.
Maybe because, during the 1960s/70s, when Gretta Sarfaty started, women artists had to occupy freer and more innovative territories (such as performance and new technologies), instead of the masculine dominion(1) and the stricter canons present in painting.
Enlace, a performance first held by Gretta Sarfaty in 1978 for the first time and documented on 110 35-millimeter slides, records the artist’s choreography with a sailor’s rope. It’s a “dance” that blends pleasure/displeasure, freedom/oppression and other antagonisms between the artist’s self and the material.
By giving her body away, during the performance, and wrapping herself with a rope, Gretta Sarfaty accomplishes something at the same prowess level of a hero. The artist, like Ulysses, binds herself not to a ship’s mast, but to herself, in order to undertand the weight of being a woman. And she delivers her own body to art, turning it into her field of reflection. A “feeling everything in every way; knowing how to think with emotions and feel with thought”(2).
It is said that ancient Greeks never worshipped Métis, the goddess of intelligence. But those born in Athens are under her guardianship. And this is how inventions, war strategies, and even Athenian philosophy emerged. Metis is the sort of cunning present within Greek heroes, such as Ulisses of Ithaca, inventor of the Trojan horse and the ruse of passing by mermaids tied to a ship’s mast. For this reason, he was also called polymétis or, in other words, greatly cunning.
Métis, the same kind of wisdom present in Gretta Sarfaty’s work. That is, perhaps, why Cèzanne used to say that painters think through painting. A thought that can be observed in Gretta Sarfaty in the “link” she makes between her painting and other paintings, like a sailor’s rope that seeks anchorage in the work of masters in order to decipher the imagery of the feminine in Art History.
The Hommage to Manet “Le Dejeneur sur L’Herbe”, painted by Gretta Sarfaty, is a tribute to Manet’s painting, Le Dejeneur sur L’Herbe, which in turn is a reference to Tician’s Pastoral Concert (1509, oil on canvas). This work repeats a detail from the Raimondi’s The Trial of Paris by Raimondi (1510, chalcogravure). This, in turn, recalls a tradition of representation that exists not only in painting but also in classical sculpture: two men accompanied by a nymph.
It’s also worth mentioning that in 1960 Picasso also did his cubist version of Le Dejeuner sur L’Herbe. But what Gretta Sarfaty’s Le Dejeuner sur L’Herbe does, however, is expose this ballast of tradition, where the female body is placed, within the scene, as a mere object. This is true of classical paintings, the Renaissance, and the modern avant-garde as well. Among all of them, the female body is always a reification. A “thing”. A model that is part of the painting’s composition.
Hommage to Tiziano “Venus of Urbino, by Gretta Sarfaty, evokes Tician’s painting, Venus of Urbino (1538, oil on canvas), which, in turn, was based on Giorgione’s Sleeping Venus (1507, oil on canvas), which Tician helped complete. Manet, in turn, was inspired by Tician’s Venus of Urbino to create his Olympia (1863, oil on canvas).
Another work that Gretta Sarfaty also recreates in her series, Hommage to Manet ‘Olympia’.
Manet’s Olympia was a cause for scandal. And the painting was rejected at the Paris Salon. The reason for the censorship was the female body. Nudity that did not belong to mortals, but only to the pantheon of gods. A prostitute could never take the place of the female figure, iconic until then, which was occupied by Venus, the Roman deity representing beauty.
But both Venus and Victorine Maurent (Manet’s favorite, who appears in Le Déjeuner sur l’Herbe), or even Victorine and Laure (model-prostitute and servant, characters of Olympia) are not images of women, nor women.
Although Art History preserved their names, the painter their faces, and, even more so, the Impressionist put all his technique into imposing an air of truth on his paintings, suppressing lines, defining shapes, and organizing the light and the palette, they are not women.
They are not. They are things, objects and reifications of the feminine. The ideal, the whatever, the prostitute and the maid.
Today, two centuries ago and a long time ago. And it won’t be the banning of such iconographies that will change reality. Instead, the contrary, the constant accusation of these conditions, might reiterate these matters’ continuous reflection on these issues.
So, with courage, Gretta Sarfaty does the inverse: she lends her body as an artist. The painter’s hand. But, more than that, she donates her own face as a model in the self-portrait. And, perhaps, goes even further, she lends her flesh to the work, making layers and layers of thought into skin-colored paint.
And her body is offered in the canvases with well-emphasized lines, black, that mark the feminine presence of real in the world. Lines that subvert impressionist or, even, Renaissance paintings’ optics. The color palette is reduced. Perspective is distorted. And the outline of the shapes is taken up again, as if drawing the female body denounces the fact that it is just a faceless image. The image of the image. The stereotype.
A face that could be that of Gretta Sarfaty, but also of any woman. It doesn’t matter What matters is that the artist resignify the place of the feminine through her paintings Paintings that narrate the trajectory of the female body in the history of art itself. A feminine that will never again be a “snack” at a “Lunch on the Lawn”.
Nevermore!
For this reason, these paintings reveal the artist’s maximum autonomy. The autonomy that Gretta Sarfaty expresses in her text is part of the performance Modifications and appropriation of an autonomous identity: social, intellectual, freedom and condition autonomy. Autonomy exercised in the fullness of its etymological meaning, which means self-regulation (“auto”, from own and “nomos”, from law). The autonomy of an artist who gives herself to art, as a painter and a woman. The autonomy of Gretta Sarfaty, who gives her own flesh to the work, in order to achieve with her métis, a kind of metaphysics of flesh.

(1) Schor, Gabriele. The Feminist Avant-Garde of the 1970s: Works from the Sammlung Verbund, Vienna: art of the 1970s: Sammlung Verbund Collection, Prestel Publishing, Viena, 2015.

(2) Pessoa, Fernando. 230 [around 23 de marco, 1930] in: Livro do desassossego. Todavia, São Paulo, 2023.