Beth Moys\u00e9s\u2019s latest performance, Red Bed, sets a new direction in her career as a performance artist \u2013 one of the media she uses besides installations, video and photography. Since l998 she has been working in Brazil, where she lives, and in different cities in South America and Spain to organize parade-like performances with local battered women, many of whom live in local shelters. These silent processions have involved as many as 100 low-income women dressed in worn-out wedding gowns, walking silently through busy city streets denouncing domestic violence. The pedestrians and cars stop and the women take over the public space.
\nIn Red Bed, however, there are no faces of women who have endured a hard life. In contrast, she has invited six young and attractive women to sit in a circle and to concentrate on their own heart. She has done this performance twice: in Brazil where they were naked and in Spain where they were wrapped in a white sheet. Each women gazes intently downward at the red lump she is moulding in her alternately quickly and slowly moving hands, taken from the 30-kilo pile of red lipstick at the centre of the circle. Unless you know, this red substance bears no resemblance with the lipstick one buys inside a designed case. It just looks like a kind of material, perhaps sensual because of its bright colour, and related to the body and the senses as opposed to the mind or the intellect. Against the white backdrop of the sheets, the women\u2019s hands manipulate the red paste as they systematically explore the material\u2019s plasticity. The red hearts that the women form seem to evince alchemical transmutations, since to make them they spread the paste over their bodies or the white sheets.
\nThe erotic frisson of the performance is unmistakable. In its theatrical delivery, the moulding of these shapes resembling a heart or maybe just the representation of feelings contains a moment of grace: only the women can feel the thick, slippery substance on their bodies and only they are able to transmit, through the movement of movement their hands, aggressions of every kind. Some make figurative heart-shapes, others are nonrepresentational yet this highly mannered ritual is obviously charged with emotion. In the progression of the performance \u2013 it lasts 60 minutes \u2013 their hands as well as the white sheet are stained by the red of the soft mass; the setting\u2019s atmospheric mood is emphasised by the ambient sound that according to the artist is a short of mantra which directly affects the heart\u2019s chakra. The performance ends when each participant presses her heart\/object on her own skin and \u2013 after feeling the contact of the greasy material \u2013 puts it back at the centre of the circle where it was originally.
\nAlthough most of the artist\u2019s earlier performances were held in the public setting of the city\u2019s streets, this time she has resorted to the structure and concept of a more formal setting: a clean space offering no distraction for the viewer observing the women sitting in the circle and manipulating the greasy paste. The change in setting is consistent with a shift in her aim: this time, rather than publicly exposing the result of an intimate suffering, Moys\u00e9s proposes to reveal what goes on in the individual\u2019s inner world. Even though it takes place in an exhibition space, Red Bed manages to resonate far beyond the venue\u2019s confines. It highlights a perception of what happens previous to the external marks of physical or psychological pain and distress. This latest work is certainly a new direction that involves the rational, the emotional and the poetic while keeping its roots in the essence of Moys\u00e9s\u2019s work: the cycle of life, death, and regeneration.<\/p>\n