Fenestra

Raul Mourão

From Apr 20 to May 29 2015

On April 20, LURIXS: Arte Contemporânea gallery will inaugurate Raul Mourão’s Fenestra showing new works, 5 kinetic sculptures and 8 paintings distributed at its main exhibition area and at the gallery’s collections area. An exhibition of kinetic sculptures and paintings inspired by the shapes of windows, works of “impure geometry”. 

Since the late 1980’s, Mourão has dedicated himself to observing security railings and metal bars in cities, which led to the creation of his series entitled Grades. Currently, the artist has turned his attention to the shape of windows using their geometry to create corten steel kinetic sculptures, and, especially, to create paintings.

Fenestra is Mourão’s first exhibition to award painting the leading role. Instead of using paint brushes, the artist used rectangular stamp like pieces soaked in paint to work on his canvasses. “Until last year my painting was exclusively made up of abstract geometric compositions inspired by arrows taken from public worksite signs. The new series, Windows, experiments with pictorial creations in a slower process located between figurative work and abstraction. Although it is painting without paint brushes, still, it is, even so, an image constructed on a plane by applying acrylic onto the canvas,” says Mourão.

There is also a new development: while Grades refers to the public security crisis, to violence, and arose from observations of the city, Windows was created in the artist’s studio, inspired by a series of drawings started in July of 2014. Mourão adds: “The paintings again include an observation of the cityscape, but in a different way. These paintings are now representations and no longer direct appropriations of real objects. Windows are painted in life size scale, and shapes suggest landscapes and objects in street scenes or inside apartments. These images are not intentionally clear or sharp, they are open to the viewer’s perception.”

Set in a hundred-year-old Botafogo townhouse,  LURIXS main exhibition area has three kinetic sculptures and two paintings of the Window series, the paintings are hung on the inside wall where, in the past, there used to be two windows. At the LURIXS collections area located in front of the main building façade, Mourão showcases the first sculpture of the Windows series, which was used in a 2013 play in honor of the poet Carlos Drummond de Andrade at the Moreira Salles Institute. The collections area also includes a multiple inspired by Marcel Duchamp’s famous piece Fresh Widow (1920).

Writer Eucanaã Ferraz uses the term “impure geometry” to refer to Mourão’s art in his article on the exhibition: “Abstraction in the works of Raul Mourão has always been based on indistinct and problematic dynamics at play. Mourão after all, takes his geometry from day-to-day objects, such as building facades, soccer fields, railings and signs from public worksites. If, during his career, Mourão aspired towards progressively freer formal arrangements, at the same time he never hid from view the memory of his research processes rooted in the everyday experience of city life. This has led him to creations of recognizable abstraction, creations contaminated by bodily, symbolic, emotional experiences, individual and collective reminiscences. In other words, we are looking at impure geometry.”

The Fenestra exhibition will be the last exhibition to be held at the current LURIXS: Arte Contemporânea location where it has been since 2003. The gallery is moving to Dias Ferreira Street, in Leblon, where it will occupy 570 square meters. The new gallery was designed by architect Miguel Pinto Guimarães and will open on the second semester of the year, during ArtRio.    

Currently, Raul Mourão is also has four new sculptures at the Please Touch exhibition, on show at the Bronx Museum,  New York, that runs until June 26th.

 

About the artist

Raul Mourão was born in Rio de Janeiro in 1967. He studied at the School of Visual Arts of Parque Lage and has been exhibiting his work — that includes the production of drawings, prints, paintings, sculptures, videos, photographs, texts, installations and performances — since 1991. In 2010, the artist began a series of kinetic sculptures shown in the following solo exhibitions: Tração Animal, Museum of Modern Art of Rio de Janeiro; Cuidado Quente, Galeria Nara Roesler, São Paulo; Homenagem ao Cubo, Lurixs Contemporary Art, Rio de Janeiro; Processo, Studio X, Rio de Janeiro; and Toque Devagar, Tiradentes Square, Rio de Janeiro. And also in group exhibitions such as From the Margin to the Edge, Sommerset House, London; Projetos (in)Provados, Caixa Cultural, Rio de Janeiro; Ponto de Equilíbrio, Instituto Tomie Ohtake, São Paulo; Mostra Paralela 2010, Liceu de Artes e Ofícios, São Paulo; and Travessias, Centro de Arte Bela Maré, Rio de Janeiro. As a curator and producer, Mourão organized solo exhibitions of Brazilian artists Fernanda Gomes, Cabelo, Tatiana Grinberg, Brigida Baltar and João Modé, among others, and the group exhibitions Travessias 2 (Galpão Bela Maré, Rio de Janeiro), Love’s House (Hotel Love’s House, Rio de Janeiro) and Outra Coisa (Museu Vale, Vila Velha). He was the editor of the art magazines The Carioca and Item and made the overall coordination of the multimedia show FreeZone, which brought together artists from various fi elds curated by the poet Chacal, in Rio de Janeiro, Curitiba, Porto Alegre and São Paulo. Along with Eduardo Coimbra, Luiza Mello and Ricardo Basbaum, he created and directed the gallery Agora, in the neighborhood of Lapa, Rio de Janeiro, between 2000 and 2002. In 2005, the artist published the book ARTEBRA, by Casa da Palavra, and In 2011 MOV, by Automatica Editions.

 

To see the visible | Eucanaã Ferraz | Version: Lis Horta Moriconi

In this exhibition, Raul Mourão once more devotes himself to the difficult marriage of construction and chance. Careful not to override each other,  the entwined tensions engender through taut interplay solutions that reject judgements of decision or classification.

Thus, with such destabilizing interconnections, Mourão’s works convey familiarity with the principles of printmaking without however being defined by reproducibility. Mourão borrows procedures from monotyping, but his images do not emerge from the usual process of painting on the surface of what is often a sheet of glass, subsequently pressed against paper.  It would be too little to say they share an affinity with stamps. Nor are they completely alien from the procedures of painting. Mourão’s work is not about choosing this or that surface, this or that material, or even this or that pigment. It is not the definition of a technique that is paramount: all efforts are directed toward the experimentation of technical possibilities, from which solutions will burst out to engender new problems to be resolved later.

A critical review overly concerned with classifications would also find it challenging to define the conjunction of straight lines and the fluid abstraction of space between them. Even as we are faced with Mourão’s frugal economy, how to speak of minimalism when his methods are not hidden away in his works, but rather embrace unpredictability, prizing imperfection? Or how to define his work as informal, when we are offered rigorous construction of planes and geometric arrangements?

Abstraction in the works of Raul Mourão has always been based on indistinct and problematic dynamics at play. Mourão after all, takes his geometry from day-to-day objects, such as building facades, soccer fields, railings and signs from public worksites. If, during his career, Mourão aspired towards progressively freer formal arrangements, at the same time he never hid from view the memory of his research processes rooted in the everyday experience of city life. This has led to a form of recognizable abstraction, one that is contaminated by bodily, symbolic, emotional experiences, individual and collective reminiscences. In other words, we are looking at impure geometry’. 

Earlier works from Chão Parede Gente (Lurix 2010) had taken that direction. And this new exhibition brings greater depth to those issues. Looking at the window-sculptures we see that Mourão continues investigations that, while unceasing, are not linear. Mourão’s steel sculptures at first suggested an urban chronicle or sociological commentary in as far as they displayed the aesthetic situation that was born of a crisis in public security: the overpowering and indiscriminate use of bars and railings for protection.  His sculptures came out of a process of de-functionalization, their lines and volumes dimmed due to utility. Over the past few years however, Mourão has moved towards more classic abstraction, closer to the works of Amilcar de Castro, Franz Weissmann or even Calder. In the sculptures on show at Lurix, bars have exited the focus of interest, abstraction has also retreated, offering us instead, something prosaic and recognizable, something that they had prevented us from seeing: the windows themselves. What we have before us is invention, and an invented architecture that is fragmentary and mobile, it dances thanks to kinetic matter that brings back to us spectators, to our eyes, and touch, states of weight, volume, movement, balance, time and value.

What draws our attention here is less the functionality or usefulness of things than their situation or ontological nature. Mourão’s gaze is turned above all to the apparent intelligibility of shapes, as if they spoke directly to us. His ensemble of works – sculptures, drawings, painting, prints, videos, installations, performances- always scoured subjectivities in action, in permanent coincidence with the real space in which they move. Since however cities do not separate themselves from their inhabitants and vice-versa, there is no real interest to be found in landscapes or time and space contingencies treated as mere background: shapes pulled out from cities are important in as far as they allow us a vision of the memory of social practices. For that reason, instead of pure forms we have an impure geometry, it is not abstraction strictly speaking nor is this a case of mere figurative art.

Looking at Mourão’s “stamps” we experience the illusion that there is something to be seen in the in-between spaces, the intervals, created by the window frames as if there were something to look through to, an outside. Is there something to see outside? Is there an inside and an outside? Our eyes tend to see something, want to see something. Mourão knows that and teases us. Almost inevitably we are reminded of Alfred Hitchcock’s Rear Window. In the film, windows exist because of what can be seen through them: a world where the old bourgeois privacy dissolved as middle class clustered promiscuously together in apartment buildings. It is a gaze that delves, indiscretely, into narratives, facts, into the intimacy of others. By refusing that content, Raul Mourão creates windows, and doors, that are facts in themselves. Or even, concentrates on surfaces, creating a universe that lacks another side, it is bottomless, and there is no inside-out. I recall the Portuguese poet Sophia de Melo Breyner Andresen, who mentions the “vehemence of the visible”. Raul Mourão’s every gesture seems to look for this type of total presence.

We are a world apart from the effects of the trompe l´oeil. With no desire to imitate reality, but quite the opposite, Raul Mourão’s works are an effort to make the eye see. Even when Mourão recreates the Lurix Gallery façade windows inside the main exhibition area - his aim is not to make visitors feel they are inside a (false) reality. Instead of feigned reality, visitors experience a displacement, an estrangement and are made to ponder, sharpening their perception. All is what it seems: form, texture, color, weight, volume, movement, density, rhythm, memory. Each construction has the “vehemence of the visible”. Instead of sleight of hand, we are faced with a lucid play, with the playful proposition of an art that will return us the pleasure of seeing things, and our own selves, in new situations. Thus by rejecting illusion, tricks, and falsity, Raul Mourão reaffirms the ethical and political dimension of his work even here, in this new exhibition whose works are at a considerable distance from those that carried a more explicit political statement.

Duchamp’s 1920 Fresh Window steel multiples created a curious historic line, since they at once recovered the ready-mades (a key strategy in Mourão’s work) and the historicity of objects -in this case the window- in the history of architecture and the discursive fields that adopted it as a privileged sign. In much the same way, Mourão’s various versions of window frames remind us of the cubist grid or concrete art. In this sense it is possible to detect a clear critical and metalinguistic aspect that prevails over the entire exhibition – the drawings, paintings, sculptures, photographs (as far as it is possible to use such definitions) –whose subjective expression reveals aspects of philosophical commentary, both on Raul Mourão’s singular poetics – there are many echoes here of his obsessions – as well as of (his own) history of art, always understood as, to use an expression by Giulio Carlo Argan, “storia dell’arte come della città”.

 

About the curator

Eucanaã Ferraz is a poet, professor, essayist and autor of children’s stories.