Indícios

Marcone Moreira

From Feb 28 to Apr 09 2005

At the very first sight, Marcone Moreira's works suggest a mix of distinct references. For some people, the various planes constructed over diverse surfaces by neighbouring a reduced palette of colours might be its most striking aspect. Others might be more interested in the coarse materials (mostly worn-out wood, at times nylon, cardboard paper or iron) and the various supports for the chromatic fields that weave uncertainties about the nature of the pieces that the artist displays, either hanging on the wall or standing on the floor. To the cultivated eye, due to the geometric configuration of the painted shapes, there may also be an affiliation with the Brazilian constructivist tradition, still echoing in diverse ways throughout a significant segment of the visual arts in the country. To those, however, who are unaware of the history of that ethic and artistic project, the works might rightly evoke, although imprecisely, the traces of vernacular patterns used for decoration of vehicles, toys, and façades.

Moreover, the facture of Moreira's works proposes doubts about its origins. Although all the painted forms and shapes might have been hypothetically created by the artist, the careful examination of their surfaces exposes signs (peeled-off paint, nail and screw holes, remains of ironwork, recognisable cut-outs) evincing that these pieces were in fact painted and assembled at a variable and uncertain time by the hands of other people. Therefore, instead of the painting tenets, what guides his creative practice is the appropriation and juxtaposition of objects or their parts, albeit with a look that is charged with interest in what is painted or dyed on them. These procedures permeate the entirety of his output but, nevertheless, only in a few works this constructive operation becomes more evident, less obvious in those where he uses bits of coloured nylon, commonly used in upholstery and to make shopping bags.

Furthermore, by transforming the debris of doors, crates, truck bodies, boats, roofing materials, furniture, and other things into new objects, Moreira affirms the double importance for his artistic production of the city where he was born and currently lives ? Marabá, state of Pará, northern Brazil. On one hand, it is from this hectic place of intense bustle of people and goods, located at a crossroads comprising two rivers, plus the Transamazon highway and the Carajás railway, that almost all the material used by the artist comes from ? discarded items that no longer possess their original functionality, which are selected, cut, assembled, and re-signified by the artist as his own material. On the other hand, for being a confluence of various routes and of symbolic references that are irreducible to any others, the urban dynamics of Marabá may be taken as a metaphor for the constructive procedures employed by the artist. As well as in his artistic production, there are no spaces in the city for precise definitions of belonging or of identity, something that requires from its inhabitants, including the artist himself, the exercise of constant translations of meanings that are necessarily fated to opacity and, therefore, to a result that is always inconclusive and temporary.

The difficulty in classifying the works by Marcone Moreira into stable categories is reflected in the ambiguous dialogue they establish with the output of two other contemporary Brazilian artists. At a first glance, the wood cut-outs exhibited by Moreira are remindful of the works created by Celso Renato, from Minas Gerais, who, as early as in the 1960s, appropriated wood hoardings and other materials collected at construction sites, as well as the remains of doors found in the streets, to create paintings of constructivist extraction over their surfaces, adding another layer of meanings by the accretion of pigments, inversely to what Moreira does, only selecting and transporting them to another context. Still, it is inevitable to approximate his works to the paintings created by Emmanuel Nassar, also from Pará, who shares with Moreira an interest in the same impure visual repertoire of the region where they both live. They differ, though, in what regards one basic constructive procedure: whereas Nassar appropriates, most of the times, only found images, recreating them over varied supports, sometimes using them as they are, sometimes modifying them, Moreira appropriates, in addition, the physical support (wood, nylon or whatever), where the images that attracted him and that were previously scattered are located just about anywhere.

On that account, when one is faced with a set of his works, not much can be said in a definitive way. This imprecision does not result, however, from conceptual deficiencies or constructive indecisions. On the contrary, it comes through as a constituent element of the integrity of the pieces. Following his option to create neither paintings nor objects, and moving in between popular and scholarly references, Moreira appropriates what already exists in the world, laying no claim, however, to exclusive authorship of what resulted from his gesture. All in all, the artist brings forth indications of a time that is not known for sure and of places that are just passageways to some precise time and place, that is, the moment of each exhibition and its placing within the art field.

Moacir dos Anjos