writings

Abstract: Inspired by Georges Didi-Huberman’s concept of incarnate painting, I investigate Georgiana Houghton’s abstract art practice as a phenomenon of manifestation. Her spirals disrupted the linearity of nineteenth-century academic art, evoking a turbulent movement of insubordination that destabilizes the gaze and produces a pictorial experience marked by tension between the visible and the invisible. In doing so, Houghton anticipates debates on abstraction and on indices of presence in painting.

Keywords: Georgiana Houghton; incarnate painting; abstraction; spiraling; revolt; trace.

The Spirits say that when once the fact is acknowledged that they can work through a mortal hand, it is not really more surprising when they draw through a medium who lias not learned than through one who has; they can of course better guide the trained hand, and make a more speedy progress if they are thus relieved from all the elementary part, which must be gone through, for no person can spring, at one bound, to a pinnacle of art perfection, any-m ore than an acorn can in one season become a widely spreading oak. (Houghton, Georgiana, 1871, p.5)

In the summer of 1859, following the death of her sister, Georgiana Houghton and her mother would sit every night in ritual, placing their hands upon the table, as if awaiting guidance or the occurrence of something.

The table, a passive object, remained motionless. A few months later, it began to present slight vibrations: a tilt, an almost imperceptible touch, as though a fragile, invisible finger gently pressed upon its surface. From that moment on, the meetings were sacralized and took place on Sundays.

Soon after, sinuous curves in uninterrupted lines were traced by the turning table—or rather, at that moment, by Henry Lenny, the ghost of a deaf-mute man who guided the gesture and the movement. Miss Houghton claimed she simply obeyed; nevertheless, she offered her own revolted body-as-table as a disobedient instrument through which the occult revealed itself.

Over the course of a year, she used a planchette, a psychographic drawing board, a mechanical instrument through which the artist traced visualizations of drawings, forms, and studies of curves. Gradually, the gesture became even freer, abandoning the planchette and using only her hands to incarnate drawings on paper. The pencil soon yielded to the chromatic complexity of watercolor, as she began to perceive that the accompanying colors were themselves embedded with meaning, forming their own dictionary of color.

Without preliminary sketches, she maintained gestural freedom in creating compositions and emphasized that her hands were guided by spirits—an assertion that marked her departure from individual and conventional authorship for the time.

The abstractions that emerged were spiral labyrinths of color and form, without perspective or central figure. Untamed, spiraling visions that turned upon themselves and interwove in a circular, temporalizing movement of wild and revolted brushstrokes.

The spiritual dimension of art is not burdened with mimetic representation; rather, it carries the spirit of a time, an era, a moment. Thus, the primitive—proper to one who does something for the first time in a pioneering way—is the liberation of the soul through a genuine act within a specific temporal and spatial duration. Each mark is imaginary before becoming a graphic delimitation upon the surface. The contour that defines and delineates form, as abstract painter Wassily Kandinsky describes in Concerning the Spiritual in Art (1996), is the manifestation of this ambiguous content. To manifest traces is to make visible abstraction itself—non-representational of any real object and produced through basic forms: squares, circles, curves, and lines. Each scratch or brushstroke generates a vibration upon the surface, revealing to the eye the inaudible associations of these vibrations—this spiritual dimension of which Kandinsky speaks: “[...] in art, what is veiled is more powerful. Combining what is veiled with what is allowed to be revealed leads to the discovery of new leitmotifs in a composition of forms.” (1996, p. 82)

In 1871, Georgiana Houghton rented a space at the New British Gallery in London and spread her drawings across a table like tarot cards. Critics looked upon them with suspicion; some murmured about delusions, others compared her colors to fevers. Yet many lingered, hypnotized by her spirals and interwoven contours.

Houghton was erased from the main pages of art history, remaining hidden and marginal, ghostlike, while other names advanced. Nevertheless, she was always there—like one who understands the spiral of time and waits for something to happen. Georgiana Houghton’s world never ceased to turn: she painted the invisible before the invisible was permitted in art, before Wassily Kandinsky and all those who later claimed the invention of abstraction.

When understood through the etymology of the word revolt, her spirals carry both circular movement and a gesture of insubordination against the artistic conventions of her time. If revolt derives from revolvere—“to roll back,” “to turn again”—we may understand her spirals as a pictorial inscription of this movement, in which the line not only advances but returns upon itself, creating a space of vibration between past and future, presence and absence.

Houghton brought us gesture in constant motion: a revolted female body, gesturally and pictorially insubordinate, contorting the linear perspective of the nineteenth century into a flow that resists rational order and returns in reactive cycles of reconnection. Her disoriented gestural revolts dissolve the center and unsettle the gaze until the very logic of perception bends, producing an experience of renewed contact with the unknown that insists on revealing itself. By setting the act of seeing itself into motion, painting becomes a vortex in which the invisible incarnates in matter.

In Spirit Drawings in Water Colours (1871), Georgiana Houghton describes her hand as guided by something beyond herself, turning paint into deposit and trace—a diluted, aqueous, unpredictable boundary with a certain transparency that, once absorbed, penetrates the fibers of the surface and settles between what has been and what still vibrates, like a residual pulse and an index of presence and contact. A vibrant apparition that intertwines the world of incarnated matter with the invisible.

Georges Didi-Huberman’s Incarnate Painting (2012) itself places tension between image and flesh, as though Houghton’s pictorial surface were a living body that, rather than merely representing, manifests. Miss Houghton painted the field in which gesture and matter collide and spiral in a pulsating manner.

The traced invisible incarnated there as skin—an expanded epidermis, organism-colors, and impregnated materiality. In this context, her paintings were not decisions but phenomena of revelation.

The pictorial surface can be understood as a field of presence—not merely as spiritual records, but as radical experiments in painting, in which matter becomes a vestige of the invisible and a means of contact between dimensions. Georgiana Houghton allowed us to touch what escapes and presented presences that insist on not disappearing.

References

DIDI-HUBERMAN, Georges. A PINTURA ENCARNADA: seguido de A Obra-Prima Desconhecida de Honoré de Balzac. 1 ̊ Ed. São Paulo: Editora FAP-UNIFESP, Editora Escuta Ltda., 2012.

HOUGHTON, Georgiana. CATALOGUE OF THE SPIRIT DRAWINGS IN WATER COLOURS Exhibited at the New British Gallery, Old Bond Street. Public Library of Victoria,1871.

KANDINSKY , Wassily. DO ESPIRITUAL NA ARTE e na pintura em particular. São Paulo: Martins Fontes, 1996.

Abstract: In The Letter and the Ghost, Ana Andreiolo investigates the materiality and symbolic potency of a handwritten letter, revealing it as a vestige of a spectral presence. The letter is more than text: it is body, image, and memory, traversed by time and by the action of gesture. Within its marks, folds, and stains, a ghost dwells—though not visible, it manifests itself through trace, writing, and matter. The author proposes a reading that goes beyond the verbal, exploring the sensory, tactile, and spiritual dimensions of the written object. The act of writing is performative, almost ritualistic, and handwriting becomes image, visual poetry, and an inscription of a desire for presence. By deforming, enlarging, or dissolving the word, new possibilities of meaning emerge, in which silence and absence speak louder than what is said. The letter, ultimately, is a mediator between worlds, embodying the invisible.

Keywords: letter; phantasmagoria; writing

The faculty of communicating with the invisible,

of maintaining a constant bond with the departed,

of caring, of healing—was it not a superior grace,

one that inspires respect, admiration, and gratitude?

CONDÉ, Maryse

Thus, as one who receives a message from beyond, I opened the brown A4 envelope containing three loose sheets, written in pencil, front and back, each protected by transparent plastic and covered with firm, broad, expansive letters, written with assurance and speed. Despite being restrained by the protective plastic, I granted myself the right to touch it and to impregnate it as well with my fingerprints.

In my hands, the letter rests as visible and palpable matter. Its sheets, if they were once white, are now yellowed and stained. Time has unmistakably passed through it. It was likely stored folded, as evidenced by a clear crease line. There are also rusted marks from metal paper clips at four points on the sheets, suggesting they preserved the integrity of the set and the order of the pages for a long period. Its margins are darker, and irregularities are noticeable along one side of each sheet’s edge, as if they had been torn from a notebook. There are no ruling lines; the writing is free and loose, with well-articulated letters and sentences aligned along imaginary lines. There is no doubt that this is the handwriting of someone who mastered writing and was in great haste.

It reminded me of dictations, in which we rush to keep up with speech so as not to lose a single word along the way. The strokes of the letter “t” and the accent marks, for example, are brief. What haunted its authorship seemed to be the passing of time, which deflowered the gesture of writing and covered the surface of the paper with its skin and traces. In this way, in haste, it transfigured itself into the visible: the letter, the demarcated gesture, and the ghost—a trinity organized into unity.

A letter embodies the presence and the gesture of a ghost that wishes to be seen. It carries anima and stages the relationship between the visible and the invisible without disregarding the matter that constitutes it. It offers exposure to what goes unnoticed and memory to what is forgotten. Nevertheless, the ghost that inhabits it is not filled by letters and gestures; it remains preserved in its secret, even while inscribed in the physicality of the letter.

In this manifestation, the relationship is a borrowing of bodies, capable of sustaining the alterity of ambiguous existences. As an object of memory, it incorporates the presence of an absence and describes within itself what is veiled and hidden, also functioning as a figure of speech for animism and personification. The letter itself possesses an indivisible anima of the phantom author. Its edges demarcate two worlds—graphic lines that relate spatial and temporal dimensions. The handwriting of the lines that trace it draws marked and delimited spaces, as if small wounds on its skin, or fissures made by graphite on paper, alter its form, corrupt its matter, and introduce new residual substance. Even so, the ghost remains free and does not become imprisoned within the delimitations of flesh and lines. The graphic icon exists beyond the visual image and the inanimate; the object contains the ghost without the ghost being contained within it.

Just as a draftsman precedes vision, authorship is also a tracing clairvoyance of the imaginary.

The rotated lines twist, contort, and distort across the letter, drawing letters and describing an image through visual annotations. The full bodily, manual, and gestural amplitude remains there as residue and record. As a photographic lens captures an image mechanically by stabilizing movement, the image of the act of writing is impregnated in the deposited marks. The image of the letter is therefore this imaginary space and the facticity of the act itself; it is the condensation of time into the instant of its occurrence.

The landing upon the letter caused its ghostly authorship to cease being a specter, and yet to remain one.

To imagine the event is also to return to the spectral. The letter manipulates time so that imagination may amplify it. Through it, the intertwining of space and time takes place, emanating the aura of the act.

Vulnerability to prolonged temporal exposure heightened the contrast between the whiteness of the paper and the areas filled by graphite. The luminosity of the white allows the darkness of words and imagination to stand out. The modulation of time reveals its own exposure, which momentarily revealed the ghost but also concealed it within the organic invisibilities of bodily remnants—fingerprints and manual traces impregnated on the paper’s surface. Appearance, through negation and contrast, exposes the pose and the landing retained within the duration of the instant of the inscribed word-gesture. Expectation thus becomes a question of time transformed into a question of visibility; exposure and revelation speak of time—of a compulsory time whose symptom is to appear and disappear, to expose oneself to it until revelation occurs. Thus, a specter becomes visible.

On the white plain of the paper, all colors were reflected until certain areas became covered by dark pigment revealed through contrasting grooves of exposure of immeasurable duration.

To gesture the word is to perform, to produce an impulsive action of bodily language that seeks to go beyond the pictorial toward the manifestation of a spiritual dimension through the body.

The letter presents itself as a kind of calligram, yet also ceases to be one. It carries within it the form and the intent to represent something from the realm of the unrepresentable; it employs calligraphic resources as figurative representations of a non-objective form and becomes a kind of visual poetry, distributing the plastic properties of its elements with clarity, firmness, and vigor, supplemented by the abstraction of its own materiality.

The confrontation between the formality of calligraphy and the subjective dimension of spatiality distributes transgressive forms that exceed an implicit standard of ruled lines; its number of pages represents the freedom of gestural exhaustion and the liberation of the imaginary.

The action reveals the potency of the creative act, which consisted of matter endowed with primary visual, olfactory, and tactile qualities, fulfilling the conformity of a space essential to its materialization: the occupation of a body.

Reading this concealed plane required me to abandon the word that describes the visible world, for the letter is something more than the text inscribed upon it. Within it dwells something unsaid. In the silencing of the text, the silenced appears.

To discover the ghost behind the word, one may treat it as image—stretch it until its letters, digitally enlarged, burst, dissolve, and disappear, reappearing blurred and misshapen. Once transmuted from its signification, this other thing becomes visible. To approach the stems and curves of the letters, to stretch them to their limit, until their traces abandon form and empty themselves. To speak of the word without it.

To alter matter in order to disintegrate and pulverize the verb so that other meanings may emerge in freer, looser associations. In this rite of passage from the linguistic to the non-verbal and back again reside minimal sensations that wander in tonal gradients through the intersection that calls upon the senses to seek the absent meaning.

To detach from meaning is to leave the word turbid like a stain. Thus, the formal word and the formless stain cohabit the same system: the sharp lines of each letter and the spectral smudges are the product of the same gesture.

Distortion, in this case arising from visual amplification, is the desire to bring closer, the wish to blur the boundaries between present and past, between reader and ghost-author.

To bring forth stains of color from contour, tonal sensations, and dissolve the system of reason, then sublimate the stain. To make it pass from one state to another, to transfer it while hot, through heat, to render it vapor. In this vaporous state, to stain furtively, to penetrate the weave of a fabric, a garment, and finally to clothe oneself in the word-ghost.

References

COCCIA, Emanuele. A vida sensível. Florianópolis: Editora Cultura e Barbárie, 2010.

CONDÉ, Maryse. Eu, Tituba, Bruxa Negra de Salem. Rio de Janeiro: Editora Rosa dos Tempos, 2019.

DIDI-HUBERMAN, Georges. A Pintura Encarnada: seguido de A Obra-Prima Desconhecida de Honoré de Balzac. 1˚ Ed. São Paulo: Editora FAP-UNIFESP, Editora Escuta Ltda., 2012.

DIDI-HUBERMAN, Georges. O Gesto Fantasma. Belo Horizonte: Ed. UFMG, 2011.

GIL, José. A Imagem nua e as pequenas percepções: Estética e Metafenomenologia. Lisboa: Relógio D’Água Editores, 1996.

LAPOUJADE, David. Existências Mínimas. N-1 Edições, 2017.

MERLEAU-PONTY, Maurice. Fenomenologia da Percepção. São Paulo: Martins Fontes,1994

In 1983, the philosopher Jacques Derrida was invited to appear in a film. The British director Ken McMullen was shooting Ghost Dance, a feature in which actors and thinkers were questioned about the persistence of the dead among the living.

The camera frames Derrida. The question comes, direct:

“Do you believe in ghosts?”

He does not deflect. He answers yes and goes further. He says that cinema is the art that allows ghosts to return. That by appearing in that film, he himself was already a ghost. That his image would circulate through time without him, would visit people he had never known, would speak in rooms where he had never been.

Before the scene closes, Derrida answers the telephone. A call that arrived there, in the middle of the set. He hangs up. Turns to the camera and remarks, with the lightness of someone making an obvious observation:

“That was the voice of a ghost. Someone I did not know.”

And then he says something that has stayed with me since I first read it:

Technology and telecommunications, instead of diminishing phantasmagoria, multiply it.

Think of the last time you heard the voice of someone already dead. An audio message forgotten in WhatsApp. An old video that suddenly surfaced in your phone’s memories. The recorded voice of a person you cannot delete.

Technology has created a new class of apparitions: the dead who keep sending messages, the birthdays of people without a living body that the algorithm still celebrates, the profiles that remain open like windows onto a room no one inhabits.

YouTube still recommends videos from a channel whose creator has died. The contact saved on your phone you cannot delete because to delete would be to grant the dead a second death. The artificial intelligence that can already recreate a person’s voice from three minutes of recording, and the children doing this with their dead parents. The “last seen at 23:47” frozen forever at that hour. The email account that keeps receiving newsletters, promotions, order confirmations. The playlist the dead one assembled, that Spotify still plays. The phone number you call only to hear the voicemail greeting in her voice.

Derrida was right. He miscalculated only the scale.

He could not have imagined that in 2026 each person would leave behind hundreds of hours of audio, thousands of photos, a profile with twelve years of posts, conversations across seven different applications, a search history, a list of favorite songs…

The quantity of “ghost” each person produces is an entire egregore. A collective entity that persists in clicks, audios, avatars, images, faces and virtual bodies lit by screen.

Before photography, the dead disappeared more completely. The face faded in memory, the voice dissolved, the smell embedded in clothing slowly vanished. Today, the dead return with sharpness. With color. With timbre. With image. I question whether death still really exists or whether it is only a delusion of the past. I ask myself about the nature of mourning, which was also a labor of forgetting. To inhabit absence and to live with it. Death had a logic of dissolution.

And the algorithm keeps remembering her birthday on your calendar and suggesting you forward a meme.

What is death when the dead keep producing presence?

It is genuinely disconcerting, an absence that remains present, occupying spaces alongside the living, in the physical memories of devices, inhabiting servers, backups and playlists.

Perhaps death has lost its monopoly over disappearance.

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In 2022, at the Bourse de Commerce, in the very heart of Paris, in the third-floor gallery, heavy curtains, a dark room. The dark was dense, dense enough to open the ears.

Unmistakably, one could hear the voice of an opera singer.

Maria Callas had been dead for forty-five years.

It took a few seconds for my eyes to adjust. My pupil began to dilate, my body entered night mode, and perception descended in frequency. It was then that she appeared. It was then that I saw her. Suspended at the back of the room. A luminous red female figure. She seemed to be there. Alive.

Little by little, the red light that illuminated and tempered the room revealed more contours to me. It is the light of the lowest frequency and longest wavelength. Because its wave is long, it penetrates darkness without dispersing; this is why automobile brake lights in night mode are red, because it does not close the pupil. Photographic darkrooms are lit by red lamps so the film, sensitive to other frequencies, does not burn. Red is the frequency that lets the invisible remain invisible while something shows itself.

Under the red light, my eyes adapted to the dark. The phantasmagoric woman with the abyssal voice at the back of the room was the image of the artist herself, Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster. I learned later that she had lent her body to Callas and recorded the performance on site, live. The voice came from a tape recorded in the fifties. They were there, at the same time, a holographically projected body and the voice of a dead body, and neither of them entirely.

When they asked Gonzalez-Foerster what she was doing, she did not answer something like theater or performance. She answered:

“It is a kind of séance.”

This is how many women of the nineteenth century began to communicate with their dead: gathered in a dark room, with heavy curtains, waiting for a voice that belonged to none of them. Victorian spiritism was an intimate ritual of a few people, in the dark, with fresh mourning. It was occult, it was familial.

Gonzalez-Foerster chose the only color that allows one to see an apparition without making the apparition disappear.

The channeling rooms in spiritist centers are always accompanied by darkness and a small red lamp lit. The nineteenth-century séance consecrated red light as the light of the dead. Victorian mediums said that white light frightened the spirits away, that ectoplasm manifested only in red, and that communication with souls required this specific frequency. Horror cinema knows this, analog photography knows this, Catholic chapels know this, the sanctuary lamp is always red. In the chromatic protocol of Victorian spiritism, the red room is the medium’s room. It signals that a hidden presence dwells there.

In 1973-74, Maria Callas took to the stage in a red dress on the last tours of her life. Dressed in the color of the (final) apparition. Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster reproduces this dress in the hologram. Red exists in three layers in the work: in the light that bathes the dark room, in the diva’s dress, and in the frequency of the séance. In the room of the spectral image’s revelation. In the room of the ghost’s apparition.

The work is called OPERA (QM.15). It operates as a calibrated apparatus to summon the body and perception, from the triad: optical, of the red light frequency that preserves the dark; historical, of the consecrated color; biographical, of Callas’s farewell red dress.

Red is the frequency in which the dead can still appear without being extinguished. It is the color that summons ghosts.