Let’s start like this: I make your figure my background. But the teeth remained. Yes, the sky’s dentures. Lie down with me beneath that denture. I blinked, and night fell. We sleep—we die—in the swell, now. I blinked, and the sky screams in pink. We were swallowed by the sun. Can I get a light? Help yourself. I light a candle to see better. What? The night in the cave. The crack in the rock. Hands twenty thousand years old. And two eyes as bright as the moon, gazing at the man of the future. Future? My hands are stained with the clay of the past. I rub them here. Who moved my Krishna? My Sweet Lord… Come on, hop on the back of the figure. I’m heavier than you think. “And you laugh, thinking I bit you”. Who said that? I don’t remember anymore. It was me. It was me. Oh, look at that—what a beautiful four-legged creature…

*

In these four-hand compositions, Gokula Stoffel and Paulo Monteiro engage in a interplay of alternations, combinations and overlaps that allude to the ambivalence of a loving encounter. The lovers’ “mixed-up condition,” which involves a temporary suspension of their individual identities, does not come without its setbacks. “Eros is expropriation,” wrote Anne Carson. The artists tangle, clash, and imitate one another—more through mimicry than through mimesis. The images that emerge from this tug-of-war—as unexpected as they are sedimentary—are the result of a sensual interplay of successive alterations and superimpositions: the lovers, the artists, make an eternal bed, throwing one quilt over another (an ochre one, a black one, a blue one, a white one, and a light blue one), forming geological strata whose thickness only grows denser.

The intensity and paradox of magnetism—in Transa, we don’t know whether the smoking sun and the purple, eye-filled form attract or repel each other—coexist with beings as cadaverous as they are haughty: on her deathbed, a woman spits out her final breath. And in the canoe floating beneath the starry sky, two skeletons embrace. The “mixed-ip condition” always brings death’s shadow in its wake.

If there is a tonal, gestural, or morphological difference between the languages of Gokula and Paulo, here the artists take on the challenge of bringing them together. This interplay of adjustment and friction between different languages results in images that sound like puns: it’s not surprising that Let it Bee is the title of one of these paintings, in which insects of all kinds—along with a centipede—are entwined in rounded, floating forms, awaiting an approaching swarm of angry bees. The battle is imminent—or is already in progress, judging by the enormous mosquito revelling in the fresh blood that drips from its proboscis. Grace, terror, and delight. The pun in the title mocks the carnage-filled atmosphere of the image: Let it bee twists and echoes the expression “Let it be”. The comparison between these phrases—which coincide phonetically but lack semantic continuity—only truly comes to life when considered in relation to the battle scene in the painting. The bee’s struggle or the ease of being? Which will prevail? From the clash between these statements and nuances, a third impression begins to emerge: strange, unstable, elusive, yet all the more genuine.

Like cat and mouse, Gokula and Paulo relentlessly pursue one another. It’s all an exchange of drives, pauses, contaminations, transitions, silences, and resumptions. In the erotic rhythm of play, the law of repetition reigns supreme. Once again, “again and again, a hundred and a thousand times” these works seem to growl, with their tongues between their teeth. In the background, a scratched record repeats: “Oh, my love, forever / don’t ever let me rest.”