Claudia
Bakker

Nocturnal Spring is a work about nocturnal germination. Like the rest of Bakker’s output, it talks of the potency for transformation inherent in becoming-woman. Nocturnal Spring draws powerful links (across time) with the worship of the most beloved and revered of goddesses in Ancient Greece, the goddess of agriculture, Demeter, responsible for all forms of reproduction, especially of plant life, whose form of expression was beauty.

With refined sensibility, Bakker creates a visual presence that materializes circuits of thoughts, inventions and desires through a system of interlinked tubes of pink cloth like upwardly growing poetic roots, which, upon joining the chairs (characters from Eva Klabin’s life), rise up to the candelabra in the middle of the room in search of light, bathing the whole environment with a rosy hue and giving an atmosphere of harmony and beauty. Just what Demeter needed to induce a bountiful harvest: nocturnal springtime, when the power of thought is as great as the power of matter.

Claudia Bakker confirms her intention by spreading art books from Eva Klabin’s library around the dining room. As if she were colluding with the art collector, she places a single art book from her private library on the table, served up as if it were a dish to be eaten, left open on the page with a photograph of one of the eleven islands in Biscayne Bay surrounded by pink fabric by Christo and Jeanne-Claude, evoking the idea of a giant floating vulva made of pine trees. With this image, Bakker brings Demeter, goddess of fertility, to mind, triggering in the room the immaterial energy of sexuality and thought, essential ingredients for the creative processes involved in the production and collection of art.

Marcio Doctors
Curator