From Sep 05 to Nov 18 2017
At home | Felipe Scovino
Marking LURIXS’ opening at it’s new address, this exhibition, more than highlighting the occasion tone, articulates the idea of home in it’s most diverse aspects and, moreover, helps building the own history of the gallery. It’s important to emphasize this last point because all the participating artists are represented by LURIXS:, but the biggest strength in this context is to understand the trajectory of this gallery, with 15 years of activity, through a coherent line – notably the constructive index - that crosses time, materials and poetics.
The works explore the ideia of home though diverse optics. Since it’s capacity of shelter, the structures that give form to it’s interior and facade, until the relation between home and street. In the works of Amalia Giacomini, Beth Jobim, Geraldo de Barros, Hélio Oiticica, José Bechara, Luciano Figueiredo, Manuel Caeiro, Raul Mourão, Renata Tassinari and Valdirlei Dias Nunes, we can perceive doors, windows, slots, rooms and all sorts of components and places that structure a house. The relation of these works with architecture is perceptible, but draws attention to how each of them elaborates this evidence or dialogue with architecture, because in these works it appears in a translucent, leaked, open, mobile, moving in a proper and elementary dynamic. Giacomini experiences the overlap of plans, creating environments that follow each other intermittently. Caeiro, Figueiredo, Jobim, Tassinari, Oiticica and Geraldo de Barros create a very proper relation between art and architecture in the sense of transmitting to the plan a desire to launch into space. They are works that exploit in their maximum exhaustion the bidimensionality always with the intention of creating ephemeral spatialities that tend to a constant displacement and formation of dynamic spaces. The photo of Vicente de Mello also walks through this encounter between a minimal gesture and the very particular creation of a locus. It seems to me a establishment of an event, that is to say, the qualification of anevent of the usual everyday as an art production. And in the case of Paulo Climachauska, space is constructed in a proper and subjective mathematics, although order and rigor are present and are a process of development of works.
The works of Hildebrando de Castro, MUDA, Bechara and Mauricio Valladares create a very own relation with the exteriority, in particular with the street. MUDA brings in a precise and authentic way the colors, forms and procedures of a dynamics very own of the city in the contemporaneity: it happens to be a great panel or white screen to be filled. The facade in Castro's painting already alerts us to this passage or limit that the exhibition also explores: exteriority or how much the house is also perceived or is made from what surrounds it. The façade is the representation of this thin film that separates the private from the public. Speaking of breaks, notice how Bechara's photos expose the act of the house by expelling its own interior. The house acts unexpectedly, is no longer the guardian of things or the shelter, but owns will of its own, builds its desire. This is an important relationship for the exhibition, because the surroundings, what surrounds the house, is as important as the building itself. Everything is home. It itself, but also its interior and its exteriority, including the sounds, smells, people, environments and atmospheres that cross the street. At that moment, the photo of Valladares gains a strident atmosphere when documenting and exploring a glamorous and decadent Copacabana in the late 70's. This vision of a city that exposes its frailties and ambiguously its force is also present in the poetics of Raul Mourão, who, by activating a kinetic device, also visually explores a noisy and complex city. The work of Gustavo Prado, in a certain way, and preserved its specificity, makes reference to this internal space of the house. Its organic form, drawing a proper dialogue with the place where it is installed, and the variety of perspectives and sightings that are drawn by the mirrors make their objects welcomed by this dwelling.
About the curator
Felipe Scovino is a professor at Escola de Belas-Artes da Universidade Federal do Rio de Janeiro. He also works as an art critic and curator.