'This essay, although the verb "to understand" is present in its title, is not concerned with facilitating the comprehension of the works that make up the body of Marcia Ribeiro's oeuvre, which dances between painting, drawing, and installation. Quite the opposite: it speculates on possible reasons why the artist, who typically does not operate through written language in her artistic production, chose three nouns to lend a tripartite name to the set of presented works in this space-time. One form, the ellipse, metaphorizes the trajectories in various natural physical systems that have a central force, such as the Earth and other planets orbiting the Sun; an astronomical event – eclipse; an allusion to the final judgment – apocalypse. Words cannot capture the intensity of everything felt by the body, but poets, oracles, shamans, and other unknown forces operating in this world teach us that we can still try.

Among the figures of speech in the Portuguese language, the ellipse operates by excluding a term from a given statement. A subtraction: an operation that relies on synthesis, erasure. In Marcia's paintings, in the face of the brushstroke, erasure presents itself as an important supporting element. While the history of art insists on categorizing paintings as figurative or abstract, reminding us that it is an accumulation of paint on canvas, artists interested in acting from within this medium complicate such determinisms by critically operating on tradition. The repeated aphorism of the painter and painting professor Maurice Denis (1870 - 1943) announces that "it is necessary to remember that a painting, before being a battle horse, a nude woman, or any anecdote, is essentially a flat surface covered with colors assembled in a certain order." In Marcia Ribeiro's work, through scraping and removing layers of paint on the canvas, we, the viewers, the public, the seers, are summoned to the archaeology of painting itself to give it meaning. Through the removal of layers of paint, we perceive a past that is present, whose totality eludes us – much like life itself. However, knowing that every word is a code ready to receive new meanings, we can also understand that the first of these words is precisely the one that gives a name to a form, the ellipse. But also to the movement of the trajectory of a point – like any line ever produced, by artists or not, and described by physics. Ellipses abound in the movements that govern Space and, not coincidentally, govern the organization of time. It is the duration of the Earth's elliptical movement around the Sun that marks what we call a year. In acrylic paint, gouache, oil pastel, or dealing directly with pigments, we perceive a body of work that sometimes seems to be a liberated enjoyment of form experimentation, sometimes seems to have the impulse to reveal what science has not yet unveiled. Like kinds of hallucinations or psychedelic visions, we perceive a psychedelia of form that does not adhere to the rigidity of concrete and neo-concrete projects, so important to Brazilian art, but we still perceive a geometric will in the compositions structured by the artist. When looking at her paintings, we recognize enigmas that demand time from the viewer: they defy the speed of the daily order, seem to stretch time, invite slowness. Such delay, inherent to reflection, could lead us to travel through time and speculate on a regime of coexistence, free associations without support or fixity: in Hilma af Klint (1862-1944), a Swedish painter who experimented with abstraction before Kandinsky or Mondrian, we also perceive a physical representation, on canvas, of what is not visible. The paint reminds us that matter, through gesture, operates not only in what is concrete or apprehensible, through what has already been illuminated. It gains a spiritual quality – not only found in the annals of art history but also possible to be paired with contemporary Brazilian art produced by indigenous artists, such as the paintings of Daiara Tukano, who operate in this tradition that expands the possibilities of art.

By overlaying layers of paint and forms that balance and erupt in the rectangular paintings produced by the artist, we could perceive an allusion to the eclipse. This astronomical event will now serve to allude to the various layers of time: for what reasons, from Earth, would the artist allude to the movement of celestial bodies and other galaxies? Without having any certainty about this answer – perhaps the artist herself does not have them or prefers to keep them secret, like religious mystery – it is up to the critic who refuses to understand once again to imagine. Under the strict Military Dictatorship (1964-1985), Brazilians witnessed, in 1969, the arrival of humans on the Moon, during the enactment of AI-5, which institutionalized political persecution of its opponents and authorized a series of exceptional measures. Among them, the closure of the National Congress, intervention in states and municipalities, and the suspension of political rights for any citizen. Faced with the rigidity of the norm, it is up to the artist to create, nonetheless. It was in the year 1970 that the Brazilian artist Anna Bella Geiger developed the first serigraphs of her Lunar Phase, based on the intersection of color silkscreen and photo serigraphy techniques, using images personally obtained by the artist at the American Embassy. The power of these images accompanied Geiger's artistic investigation. Beyond the lunar surface, we perceive other images produced by NASA. On the contact sheet, photos rejected for future enlargement were marked with an "X" – also an erasure – and prompted the inclusion of such a code in works in the following years, as in "Here is the center," from 1973. In her artistic production, full of maps and representations of physical and human geographies, the artist gazes at the vastness of the sky. Turning the intangible, the unimaginable, and the impossible into her ground, an operation that relies on the opacity of art, for one who, without a guarantee of freedom of expression, insists on creating. Guaranteed by the Constitution, freedom of expression is linked to the right to express one's thoughts, the possibility for an individual to express opinions and ideas or engage in intellectual, artistic, and scientific activities without interference or retaliation from the government. However, this historical ghost shows us that even for those who trust in the linearity of time, the past insists on making itself present. Looking at what hovers over us renews its political possibilities when, in the present day, the country's ruler speaks without a mask at a pro-military intervention event in front of the Brasília headquarters, amid a gathering that called for the return of the same Institutional Act during the planet's greatest pandemic crisis. If we trust that words carry more than one meaning, we cannot help but distrust the political power of images.

We have reached the apocalypse announced by the third term elected by Marcia Ribeiro. Three flags are also raised by the artist in Parque do Carmo for visitors. In times of uncertainty, the flag poles announce that it is necessary to reinvent codes and operate through symbols. The exhibition "Elipse, Eclipse, Apocalipse" will unfold three flags with the words "Galaxy," "Universe," and "Planet." The artist's substitution of the conceptual order could rhyme with the paradigmatic title "Anywhere is My Land," a painting by Antonio Dias from the intense year of 1968. By splashing white paint on the surface of a black-painted canvas, the artist produced a myriad of disordered points of non-uniform size. Over this irregular composition, he overlaid a mesh, also in white paint, organizing the canvas surface like the grids that measure scale on geographical maps. Although working through painting, screen printing, and installation, the direct citation of Dias' work recalls a conceptual operation by an artist who seems to want to be imbued with her time, although not using codes that overtly connect her to space. This subversive energy seems to allude to the feverish temperature of a wounded Brazil once again. The scrutiny of images, words, symbols, and codes in this exhibition, however, may say more about the violent politics of our times than about the poetic reasons that drive the one who creates. Those who look at Marcia's older works may notice an elliptical return to chromatic synthesis: just black and white are enough. In 2022, we are still the same and, as survivors, already others: a health crisis has overflowed not only geographical boundaries but also interpersonal borders.

In a text about the pictorial procedures present in Marcia Ribeiro's paintings, artist Fabio Morais uses a geological lexicon that illuminates the topological aspects of the canvases: surfaces, crusts, reliefs, layers, and eruptions. He highlights what we should already know: what we see is not reality; it is an indication. This assertion echoes in the words of another text by critic and curator Clarissa Diniz about the artist's work, the installation "Um pouco do nada," an allegory of the elements that make up the body of every human being on this planet: within vessels, tubes, and other glass containers that hold the chemical substances that shape us: oxygen, carbon, calcium, potassium, hydrogen, chlorine, sulfur, sodium, among others. In Clarissa's perception, it is a body "entirely elusive, evanescent, and, therefore, infinite." Boiling, condensation, and sublimation, "Um pouco do nada," an installation, remind us that representation is not enough, recalling that which escapes. Not content with so much, the body that leaned over the installation also found, in the shape of an ellipse, a mirror: a portal, a fissure, an abyss.

In "Elipse, Eclipse, Apocalipse," Marcia insists on perception. She provokes the encounter of her works with those who come to the planetarium to, through their bodies, have an expanded notion of the universe where we live – and will die. From science to religion, from family to the state, from psychology to ecology, we have seen in the 20th century structures crumble without the establishment of a new order, as announced by the catalog of the exhibition "Light & Space," presented at the Whitney Museum in 1980 by artist James Turrell, another lover of perception. In Melinda Wortz's text, we are led to understand the nature of existence as ephemeral – in relation to times, places, and mentalities – in a continuous process of exchange between what we can call matter and energy, form and void, or ultimately, observer and observed. Perhaps work and spectator. A phenomenon observed by physicist Bernardo d'Espagnat is highlighted in this catalog, which, like Marcia's erasures or the occupation of the planetarium, blurs boundaries between fields of knowledge: the experimenter's attitude influences not only the result of the experiment but also, in some cases, the physical behavior of the particles themselves involved. The author also warns that in other circles, these occurrences had already been identified, called parapsychological, by those who claim to know everything – or understand, as in the title of this essay. In the recombination of words, millennia jump: it shares with us that for centuries the Hindus referred to the essence of our lives and the physical world as maya (illusion), pointing to the ephemeral or non-fixed conditions of existence. With admirable conciseness, it recalls the Buddhist Heart Sutra, expressing the simultaneous exchange that constitutes everything: "Form is emptiness, emptiness is form." Inscrutable in word, lover of images, marveling at experience, like one seeking the inspiration of the spirit, I am left, with the certainty of not knowing, to make my own the words of Olavo Bilac in his poem Via Láctea, which responds to those who claim to hear the stars: "Love to understand them! / For only those who love can have the hearing / Capable of hearing and understanding stars."