Unbecoming what was becoming

Yesterday the studio had to be cleared out for the holiday break.

When clearing the space and storing my things a series of questions came to me in a wave of instant reflections, giving me specially a notion of the performative aspect of this undoing process of a place constituted itself to be a space of process and of construction.

The whole question of having a studio has been, I wouldn't say a burden, but an uncunfortable and thinkative question in my process. The idea of having a space in which the gap of my processes, originally just mental, materializes in front of my eyes revealed a profound sensation of insecurity towards with I am not used to, making unclear, what used to be very clear, of what constitutes a work, and what, on the other hand, may be an experiment, a material thought about proces or just a necessary mistake. And I have felt, understood and am starting to accept, that probably I am not the type of artist to be confined in the silent protocols a studio presents, and probably I may feel more free in the realm of the mind, as I have allways worked, first as a lack of acess to a physical space and now, understanding that I've learned to think differently by it, by an option. What brings me to Sol Lewitt's 29th sentence on conceptual art:

"29. Once the idea of the piece is established in the artist's mind and the final form is decided, the process is carried out blindly. There are many side effects that the artist cannot imagine. These may be used as ideas for new works." (Lewitt, 1969)


All these questions came together by the performative act of "unfolding" a studio into one single box. Almost as constituting a Pandora's box, creating this object of reduced dimensions with the vibrating latency of works that were, are, and shall be. And the strange feeling that drowned my thinking was that of unconstituting works. It was all as if I was depriving those objects from their auratic aspect of art. If at least not of art, but of their almost-artistic state. Or as if they were reduced once again, or now even more distant from that possibility of becoming art than before. In a way of now being almost-almost-art, having been turned into the latency-of-the-latency of a thought as they, even when they are fully enbodyed, are seen by myself as latencies-of-thoughts, or simply mental-propositions.

These process of unmaking what was and what was to be remind me very much of some methods used by argentine artist Marta Minujin, speacially in her work "Partenón de Libros"(1983) in wich she constituted in the middle of Buenos Aires a scaffold replica of the Parthenon covered with books prohibited in the time of the dictatorship in that country. The work was itself in some way in the manner of this "pandora's box" as I mentioned in the way that it is a vibrant, contained space with the latency of these mental propositions, ephemeral and even more powerfull as may exist only in memory or as in a fragment, one of the books carried out by one of the people passing by. So it wasn't just about the sculptural process, but also, and mainly, about making these books, that were silenced for so long, go around and make the changes that were so feared by the oppressing former governments in that country.

And Sol Lewitt grants me this beautiful and convenient thought from his "sentences on conceptual art":

"12.For each work of art that becomes physical there are many variations that do not." (Lewitt, 1969)

... And I would say that there are even others that become unphysical, although even more powerful sometimes, after being fully physical...

Marta Minujin's "Partenón de Libros", 1983

Exhibition "On Becoming"

Text of the Exhbition: Felippe Moraes - On Becoming

The action of becoming, in itself, is a gap, a latency, it is nothing in absolute terms, and that nature can be assorted in the situations in which it is detected. Something that is becoming is neither one thing or another, it is the transitional becoming in its fullness. That suspension of time, existence and difficulty of conceiving is powerfully spiritual in the way that it speaks metaphorically about our own conditions as humans, scientifically, historically, culturally: all a process of becoming something else since the moment it started.

All the works in the exhibition bring with themselves, and by the relations they establish between them, a complex notion of conceptual abstraction and also their clumsy relation with the world of the experiences. Although mentioned as works of art, that indeed they are, the pieces are all experiments between the tangible materiality and the ideas we make of it. They construct and destruct concepts, put to the limit the wideness, and sometimes the narrowness of our understanding to propose a poetical point of view over our existence as rational entities in the realm of matter.

The works all come across this process of being something else. There is a tension between the fullness they have as works, but an incompleteness in their becoming. Although they are by themselves, they are physicalities that are to conceptually become something else, in the meaning or in the matter itself, or just condemned to be forever in the state of latency: of being a possibility of completion. And all those “non-beeingnesses” relate very closely to our, although transcendent nature, suspension in time and space, searching for what we were and what we shall be. Forever in the process of becoming.

November, 2011 - Northampton
Felippe Moraes

CLICK HERE to see the exhibition's interactive panorama

Felippe Moraes - On Becoming
Fishmarket Gallery
Bradshaw Street
Northampton - United Kingdom
NN1 3DN

Thu - Sat, 10 am - 6pm
01/12/2011 to 31/12/2011
www.felippemoraes.com

The becoming of "On becoming"

Yesterday was a full day in putting up my solo show "on becoming" at the Fishmarket Gallery.

Division

Division establishes itself over the issues that concern our rational view over the experienceable world that surrounds us.

Numbers and strict notions organize our existance. The question prevails on the possibility or not of their hability to regulate it. Or, the even more profound question, is that if it can be regulated at all, or would it all just be a composition made by chaos?

The numbers by themselves, in their graphical manifestation, hold a strong and absolute concept: abstract and intirely mathematical. When brought to the tangible world they fail in connecting the realms of thought of the concept to that of its experienceable existance.

On the question of measurings

Since I arrived in Britain, measurings have been a real issue. I tend to get quite confused with this distance measuring system in feet and miles and weight in pounds.

It brings me to a very dear question to myself and very present in my work. It isn't just a different system, it is a whole different aprehension of what is measurable, a cultural statement.

Measurings can almost be the language that we give matter to speak to us and for us to reply back, conceiving its dimensions and making judgements and evaluations over its existance.

The chosen system, or idiom, is a statement in itself of how one, or a group of people, put themselves towards matter.

This reminds me of a story I heard once about a tribe which counted only up to the number 3. Beyond that, they would quantify according to the tone of their word for "many". For example: "I have many children", "there are maaaaany stars in the sky!". What is very coherent and logical. The principle is that all they need is 3 numbers and an inprecise concept of many. And that they use and don't conceive, exactly by lacking its necessity, a more precise quantification system.

This thinking, unfolding from the previous post (1/2), brought me to Walter De Maria's work "The Broken kilometer" (1979), in which in the floor of a large room (shown on the pictures bellow) 500 polished metal tubes of 2m each are shown aligned in five rows.

I've allways felt very atracted to this work, but the more and more stronger presence of mathematics in my work has been bringing me back to it, and this whole situation of exception, of feeling almost as if the space behaved differently, since I can't fully understand the local measurings, has suggested exotic apprehension of the dimensions that surround me. And obviously, comming from that, a space that conforms itself differently, as if language was reshapping matter.

Thresholds

The weekend was a torment: the will to work banging on my head as I evolved some old ideas that have been in the deep drawers of my mind and of the material world.

"Thresholds" intitled in Potuguese "Umbrais" is a work I started probably more than two years ago: drawing a golden square in each of 7 tracing papers and than aligning them, producing a three-dimensional feel created by the overlapping of bidimentional planes. Bringing than to the forefront the discussion of perspective and even our aprehension of reality. The planes come together as overlapping layers of existance and, by their transparency, conveying a diverse assimilation of the being. Reality isn't the dynamic of a circle on a transparent surface, but the relations and spaces created between them.

1/2

All these questions of the processes of the becomings of things, concepts, people have brought me into thinking about fractions of the matter. How can this materiality constituted by unified bodies in themselves, be fragmented into pieces, and not becoming autonomous bodies of matter by themselves, but as parts that belong together although aren't, and probably will never be, together as one as we conceive this state of being.

I started thinking of the mathematical procesd of fractioning. I've allways seen each of these strange representations of pieces, such as 1/2, 2/3, 33/48 etc, as parts that should be containned in a whole, or that are desperatly separated from it and wanting to come back to it. I came than to this act of cutting the log into two pieces to reflect on the question of how can a body be as one, or the latency of becoming again what it was as one, and still being separate wholes? Or better: more than being two separate wholes, two latencies of THE one again.

Logs that we carry

Every artist should carry logs to comprehend the density of the matter he deals with.

Today in campus I found these logs which deliberatly asked me to be taken away to the studio.

A system of stars

When closing the drapes to go to sleep, my window gives me this strange vision of this foggy Northampton night. An almost-system of stars, an almost-abstraction of the figurative reality.

How to describe a square or not

Squares in the process of becoming or unbecoming. A tension in the almost cosumation of form.

In the process of becoming...

All that is a work to be but already a discussion in itself. The gap between the chaos and the cosmos, although am not sure which is which.

Un-humanly non-bodies

A strong and dense visual poetry that any place can provide to the wide eyed observer.
Strange bodies in the landscape that, by their own nature, deprive our own bodies from their humanly formed equilibrium.

I am here

"Every serious work is tranquil... Every serious work resembles in poise the quiet phrase, 'I am here'. Like or dislike for the work evaporates; but the sound of that phrase is eternal." - Kandinsky in Roger Lipsey "The spiritual in twentieth-century art"

This quote by Kandinsky touched in me in a very profound way when reading Lipsey's book. It all led me to exact situation for conceiving this simple visual statement, not so absurdly entitled: I am here.

The questions lies on the question of light using itself to write and therefore, in this moment, affirming its presence and existance.

Although sometimes reluctant in giving English titles or putting writings in other languages that not mine into my work, somehow feeling as if I was faking the process or deceiving my history, this was a very specific case and made me notice an important aspect of the reading. The verb "to be" encompasses a dual notion of existance: a transitory and a permanent. On the other hand, in portuguese, a decision would have to be made between: "eu sou aqui" (permanent) and "eu estou aqui" (transitory). I'm interrested in fact in the work as ambiguous as it has become: being eternally, becoming, or whichever gap in time it may want to assume.

Dematerializing

Hammers have been a constant in my work. Although I do not fully understand them, and don't really think I should, there is something fascinating about their existance. So strongly physical and present and executors of the immaterial conceptions.

These hammers were photocopied, a copy, of the copy, of the copy, until fully disapeared. A simple but strong symbolic process of dematerializing such a present physicality.

The Circle To Be

These days I have encountered myself thinking of this very simple work that popped into my head. A golden pin stuck to the wall from which hangs a pencil tied to a string. Through that simple structure, and its latency, a circle is described. A circle that is and that is to be. A circle of being.

It all brings me to plastic questions over drawing, but above all the process of geometry, its sacred aspect and the wheel of fortune.

The silence and the errors

Althoug sometimes exceedinly opressive, Northamptons silence proposes situations very much in accordance to its introspective nature.

Some weeks ago I had the situation of a much expected dream come true: visiting the Charles Rennie Mackintosh's century changing project: 78 Derngate. And what a mystical/aesthetic experience it was.

From 2007 to 2008 I conducted a vast research on him back in Brazil oriented by my close-to-the-heart teacher Patricia Fonseca.

Very far from the distance I should have had as a researcher at the time, I fell in love with the gloomy stories and works of this gentle and fascinating man. He already gave me so much. But visiting the Derngate, he continued generously giving so much beauty and excitment! As a close friend I can say:

Thank you, Toshie.

Dance of the spheres

Two weekends ago, a sunday, when out to walk through Northamptons dense silence and comprehend some of its lessons I, on the other hand, found instead an excentric vision, although silent and poetical itself.

I came back at night to understand its lightfull beauty and capture a little of it to myself. A video is in progress.

Smoke

In the last week I have been working, and I shall try to make a small retrospective until i get to the present, in a very symbolic work of my own lifes process. A transition. An acumulation of smoke images extracted after the extensive research on library book on incountable subjects: from engineering and geology to war photography. It all culminated in a vibrant pastiche of ephemerity and changing forms.