Horizons are among Anete Ring's artistic obsessions: they are present, in one way or another, in almost all the works included in this exhibition, as if they were trying to fix, in the background of the canvas, a gaze in permanent search. The idea of this search also appears in what is directed towards these horizons: sometimes paths that cross a desolate landscape towards infinity; sometimes the luminosity that emanates from liquid surfaces and makes one think of crossing large expanses of water, on paths that depart from no one knows where – but whose goal seems to be, paradoxically, on the horizon.  

It's as if those who fix with their eyes this promised place, always there at the bottom of the canvases and drawings, pretend not to know that their goal is unattainable: the horizon, by definition, is always beyond, but an atavistic impulse, an ancestral impetus and irresistible, it pushes the gaze, always, towards that place that is not a place, that point that is defined by the insoluble distance. It is their unattainability that keeps the flame of the desire to move on.

If the myth of distance, wandering and diasporas substantiates the pictorial work presented here, there are also works that allude to the solution of the enigmas that the horizon proposes: a path that ends abruptly and plunges into the void is the end, forced or deliberate, of all horizontal displacement.

It is, equally, an encounter, desired or not, with the hic et nunc, the here and the now. Displacement now takes place only on the vertical axis: towards depths or heights, which are also mirrors of each other.  

From there, new dimensions are revealed as new arrangements for old paradoxes: from vertical cuts, the infinite landscape allows itself to be captured by the limits of a lateral gaze, by the finitude that is the mark and meaning of existence. And thus captivated, it becomes humanized, it becomes less majestic, also less terrible, perhaps more wise.  

Luis S. Krausz is a PhD Professor in Hebrew and Jewish Literature at the Faculty of Philosophy, Letters and Human Sciences at USP, at RDIDP. Post Doctorate in Jewish Literature and Culture from the University of São Paulo (2010). PhD in Jewish Literature and Culture from the University of São Paulo (2007), with a research internship at the Free University of Berlin. Master in Classical Letters from the University of Pennsylvania, with a thesis written at the University of Zurich under the supervision of Prof. Dr. Walter Burkert (1992). Special student at the Jewish Theological Seminary of America and Columbia University in the areas of Biblical Literature and Classical Literature.