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.

Der Blaue Reiter

This blog starts as a hybrid, as my life itself normally configures, between common and transcendental, matter and art. As a great adventure I undertake after leaving my home country Brazil to try to find, on the other side of the Atlantic, what I have been allways searching inside.