Saturday, December 19, 2015

Political Proportions

2015 has been a strange and gloomy year for the world. We have been struck by terrorist attacks, war and obviously the refugee crisis in unprecedented scales. All of these events highlighted by the growth of the right and extreme right wing movements.

In Brazil, specifically, where I have been mostly in contact with, we have been struggling with the "sudden" discovery by the Brazilian people of the exhistance of corruption, as if it had never existed and as if the current government had invented it. Rather the opposite, we actually have the first government that is investigating and punishing acts of corruption, appart from promoting a deep reorganization of our society, diminishing extreme poverty and growing the middle class. Obviously with it's own mistakes and bad decisions, but being judged in such a scale for these acts that wouldn't ever be imagined to happen against previous conservative governments.

The Brazilian media supports the elite right wing parties and a coo of monumental proportions against this same democratically elected government. In the everyday life, the relations between people have become more aggressive and individualistic, leading to a dangerous belief of the enemy allways being the other.

All these questions, and the possibility, even though sometimes absurd, of looking through different sides of a same question, led me to the development of the current series of drawings that I have been working on lately. Dealing with the questions of mathematics that allways interest me, bringing their inferences to the concrete relations and events of the tangible world, they bear a notion of reflecting over the idea of the point of view, deception, illusion and the volatility of truth.

All the works bring visual mathematical problems in which the solutions, when seen with the common gaze, are taken for granted as simple and obvious. This, in the given historical moment, comes as a proposition of the reeducation of the perception of the world around us and the relations established within it. A seemingly abstract and intangible set of ideas, when placed in the world that we currentely live in, are redefined and promote an understanding of multiple points of view and the possibility of all of them being true at the same moment.

Proportion of 1/4


Proportions in process


64 & 65

Thursday, April 10, 2014

The artist is in transit



While I'm writting this post I'm experiencing a reality of transit. At the moment I'm doing a residency at Baró Galeria in São Paulo since the 2nd of April. Curiously, although I was brought up in the outskirts of São Paulo, in a small town called São Caetano do Sul, and spent the last years of my teenagehood and first years of my adult life in São Paulo, the city seems as a distant relative that you hven't seen in a while: you recognize it although you feel you don't really know it.
This is probably one of the most creative situations, and at the same moment quite oppressive, to come back to a city you know so well now as, not just a tourist, but an artist in transit.
It is normally in these situations where different outcomes burst into the work in an unexpected way.
The residency has started just about a week ago, but the new ideas and procedures are establishing. As for those of you how follow the posts in this open journal, some might have noticed how I'm quite fascinated by my work tables and studios and how they configure in slightly different ways in distinct moments. Above is an images of the process endeavoured in these first days.
The idea of being in transit isn't new for me, althought it allways seems to catch me by surprise. Thinking of this process, it reminds me of a recent experience I had at BAB (Bienal Anual de Búzios) curated by Armando Mattos, in the outskirts of Rio de Janeiro.
Armando is quite a curious figure, as an aquarius, I'd say he's very keen to his star sign being quite a visionary and a radical in the best sense that these words bare. He is an artist, originally from  the city of Rio and moved to Armação dos Búzios, where BAB happens, that for the last 6 years has put his own money into this project that he created for bringing artists from around the country and sometimes the world to experience the city and create freely with neither market, intitutional or public demands. It's quite a thrilling adventure, and in the end of 2013 was my second time in the project (the first was 2011), and I cane across unfoldings of my work that I would never have expected. Being so detached from any kind of demand, the artist feels free and the works grow. I myself experimented with my own poetics and rhetoric different outcomes and mediums. As surprising to me as it was I worked with grafitti for the first time, and the final works made me even more enthusiastic about the process. Bellow you can see some of the public works I created in Búzios.
Lately I have been seing with a detached point of view how these processes work on the procedures of an artists too. I coordinate Largo LAB, which is a weekly meeting with the artists in residence at Largo das Artes to speak about their works, processes and questions. "Largo", as we kindly call the institution, is quite an unusual intitution in the environment of Rio de Janeiro's art scene. It's a space bursting with creativity having an institutional gallery space, studios (where I work myself), residency programmes and courses. Every resident that shows up, as myself when in that situation, I see growing and taking huge leaps in their productions. These are the kinds of spaces and enterprises that artists need and deserve, to create free of restrains and drinking from different and excentric waters!
Congratulations to all you, either people, intitutions, galleries etc, such as Armando Mattos, Baró Galeria and Largo das Artes, that endeavour this amazing idea of putting artists in transit to get the best out of them!

www.barogaleria.com
www.largodasartes.com
www.babbienal.org




Wednesday, April 17, 2013

Approximately 1kg of Sapucaí

This is the beggining of an enterprise of collecting material samples from relevant and irrelevant sites in Rio de Janeiro.

The samples showed in the pictures were collected from Avenida Marquês de Sapucaí on the 17th of April 2013 and sum about 1kg of matter.





Wednesday, April 10, 2013

Arithmetic Composition

After months of intense and deep absence of engaged action within the practice of art, work has been restored to my life. Although it was indeed just the first day, it was a day's work after all.

The very act of coming back is a way of rejoicing. This is my first day in my new studio and actually it is the first time I pay to have a studio space which, in itself, is already a new position towards the practice of the artist.

I have been developing some new drawings that are, up until now, entitled "arithmetic composition". It is the creation of a language or a code that is visual and explains its own terms in a visual/geometric/mathematical manner.

May the work restart.







Tuesday, March 12, 2013

Horror Vacui

I have arrived back in my home country, Brazil, in the 12th of October 2012 after spending 369 deeply introspective days living and surviving in Britain.

Apart from the fact of them being deeply introspective, they were also, and maybe because of that, very productive. The exotic environment proposed a leap in the procedures employed in my work and my very understanding of it.

I do not know, to be honest, if it has become better or worst. This only the surrounding time of the future will judge. I, however, am sure to have become a better man. I have become conscious of my mortality and the fragility of my existence, although I suffer from the ever weakening disease of being young.

The environmemt and the experiences have enrichened me and the work has changed, reflecting the terrain and the evolution of the artist as a living being.

Nevertheless, since I came back, I have no longer experienced the bliss of constructive and active creativity. I have only been able to produce one single work and nothing more. My notes in my sketch book have become very rare and my artistic apetite to eat the world has weakened to the point of almost disappearence. It is the distress of the vacuum. I have even questioned, for the first time, my condition as an artist.

My wise tutor, Dr. Craig Staff, that has been a strong guidance since the day I met him has helped me in my understanding and acceptance of this vacuity: "The artist is like a crop: sometimes the soil needs to rest so it can, once again become fertile."

Here is my hope.

Tuesday, August 28, 2012

Transporting "Matter"

The idea of transporting works of art dismantled, and in the latency of being put together again, never seems to stop fascinating me.

The day before the opening of my exhibition "Matter" at MK Gallery, I took all the pieces from my studio, pilled them up, rolled the pictures, dismantled the shelves and placed them in the boot of Sherrelea Weber's ( a very talented artist and dear friend) car.

The whole idea of having a complete show, full of conceptual tensions to me, that took so long to be understood by myself, totally pilled up for a trip is indeed overwhelming.

Although it may seem as some pieces of logs in the boot of a car and old shelves, that is exactly what is breathtaking about it: that it is the latency of an exhibition, of precisely orchestrated works of art with the intension of proposing reflexions to the viewers.

I can't help appealing to a metaphore. Caravans, caged animals,faces not yet painted and red noses in boxes traveling through roads is not yet a circus. The magician still hasen't taken the rabbit out of the hat, the canvas is still not up, the elephants are still resting. However, it is a circus to be. That tension, that potentiality of the almost being is not only powerful, but contains within it the indexical inscription of what will be in a given moment.

Sunday, August 19, 2012

Making of "Matter"

The following video reveals an insight on the making of the solo exhibition "Matter" at MK Gallery selected for the 2012 Showcase.

www.mkgallery.org

From 16th to 22nd of August

Special Thanks to Helen Turton, Sherrelea Webber and Raphael Fonseca.


Wednesday, August 15, 2012

Making of "1/2"

The work "1/2" (2011) has been giving me interresting questions lately. The original version, made in late 2011 was sent to Brazil for the exhibition NOVÍSSIMOS 2012 at Galeria IBEU. For that occasion I had to separate the two parts in different packages. Curiously that situation revealed me another latent concept within the work: that they were both different. However we may conceptualize mathematically the idea of half, it won't be as such in the real world. So the work is now in Brazil. Therefor, for my solo exhibition entitled "Matter" at MK Gallery in Milton Keynes, I had to make a new version. Here is the making of this version in the laser cutter (2x faster in the video) and the images of the finished work.


Saturday, July 7, 2012

Making of "Paris 14/07/1789"

This video in time lapse is a registration of the drawing of the work entitled "Paris, 14/07/1789" wich reveals the sky of that city in that specific and relevant day.


Tuesday, June 19, 2012

The Cabinet that was almost...

It is very tough to relate what I shall. The sentiment of cowardice and of delusion is inevitable. However, experience is teaching me the relevant lesson of simplicity, intuition and humbleness.

For the exhibition that was the final assessment of a module in my MA Course at The University of Northampton, I was going to undertake an endeavor entirely new in my experiences.
After some time working in a studio, and after long months fighting against it and against myself, I started to understand it and my own self. The marriage came to be so profound that my gaze started to lay upon it as to admire in the means of a living processual work. I was then going to transplant this external organ of mine into the bodiless body of a white cube.

However, when transported to be transplanted, the new body rejected the organ and it suddenly started to rot.

Intuition and despair yelled and I asked for help. In my rescue came one of the wisest men I've ever met, my course leader Dr. Craig Staff. Many words of profound clarity and diplomacy coming from him made me understand what I needed to understand and already knew from the start: abort the transplant.

I suffered, I felt guilty, I felt weak. However, I also felt grateful for my intuition and for that wise man.

The work of the artist does not differ very much from that of the monk. It is about listening, understanding and being silent most of the times, but above all of precise action when needed, if needed.

"The Cabinet", how it was going to be called, did not come to be as imagined. It is in a limbo, in the realm of ideas and in the dimension of the "what was almost something at a given moment".

Down below follows the proposition I wrote for what I thought would come to be in a given moment. It is a grave stone of a birth dead child.


"The Cabinet" latent still in the studio space

The process of transporting the pieces

The walking dismembered cabinet


The rejection of the organ by the new body.




The Cabinet, 2012

The work “The Cabinet” derives from the Idea that every work of art is an índex of the presence of the artist and that any work is the conscious or unconscious unfolding of all the experiences lived by this artist. A particular work of art is the result of a particular moment suspended in time in which all the different vectors of influence culminate into that particular piece. With this the notion of existence of the artist as a living being with fragilities and complexities is brought to the forefront not as an opposition to the romantic image, but as a parallel to that, with the practitioner always bending from one side to the other.

My work generally establishes by simple visual statements that open wide discussions making my understanding of the world direct and intentional. However profoundly connected to my own experiences, as underlined before, the work was never intentionally autobiographical. On the other hand, intentionality never deprived it from connections to my own experiences. The work started to more and more yell to me about my own presence in the work, by the clear relations of my decisions in life directly parallel to the one in the works.
Since the first moments in my experiences as an artist as I know myself nowadays, the artistic propositions were always distinct between each other being difficult to find a coherence between all of them. Time started to show me that the discussion was about human presence within the world, and the idea of trying to understand ways to deal with a material experience while we are so filled with subjectiveness. Time also showed me that in fact that was my own discussion as a human being as a whole, not just as an artist, and started to perceive how intertwined life and work were since the beginning. All the things I were attracted to, materially, conceptually, all had this same discussion and coherence in one way or another. The life of the artist was not being just intertwined with the work, but it is self was revealing to be the ouvre.

These are the principles of “The Cabinet”. The studio, that can clearly been seen as the indexical physical presence of the process of the artist, started to come to be coherent towards my understanding. It’s visual presence, the concepts, the memories involved in each object were all asking to be seen and understood in the manner I am starting to see now and present here in this text.

These statements are made not because the artist is a chosen mystical figure above all other humans, to the contrary, he is just an existing material being dealing with the questions of the world. The work deals with existing in the world both the material and immaterial notions of this, its realities and fictions. The dealing with existence and it’s main philosophical questions are what I am dealing with. The incomprehensible melancholy of being human, all too human. This is what brought me once again to a work that has been following me for some time, Albricht Dürer’s  Melancolia (1514) which narrative deals with the question of the strive to understand existence. Mathematical objects are left on the floor, puzzles are all over the place and also do the figures in the image that look desperate to understand their place in the world and seem tired from the endless attempts with no precise answers.

I first noticed the studio as coherent within itself as a work should be when I took a picture with my mobile, posted it on Facebook and called it “O Gabinete do Dr. Moraes” or “The Cabinet of Dr. Moraes” as a silly and unpretentious joke relating my studio and name to Robert Wiene’s film “The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari”. Then it all came to be in my mind after a few days.

I started to see my studio as a cabinet of curiosities, a mathematician’s classroom, a monk’s cell or an alchemist’s laboratory. All these where metaphors that always have followed and intrigued me for, in one way or another, these figures are always in an attempt to understand, having one answer produce so many other questions. The objects I collected all had these connections without a deliberate thought of ever putting them together. They all related to each other and the vector of that was myself. In some way what I do in the work is to reveal the artist fully naked, letting the readings of the work be made by the observer, letting he or she apprehend and read from the indexes left in the instalation.

In some way even my blog (www.invisiblegeometry.blogspot.com), which since the beginning of the MA course has been a testimony of my life/work experiences, speaks about the constitution of the artist as a being in process, my studio, my things and of my human existence. It itself started in some way to behave as a work, a living work, always changing, growing, creating narratives of its own.

It is relevant to bring back the idea of reality and fiction. The work, although full of ‘truth’ in the sense that the objects where acquired without any deliberate attempt to bring them together, the studio was transported into another space and reassembled according to my own intentions, being this place a limbo between the extremes of reality and fiction, truth and spectacle. And all this, inevitably brings the discussion of the white cube. If the studio was to be seen in the studio, it would be just a studio. The studio within the gallery space is not just a studio, it is intention, it is a statement and it is work.

“The Cabinet”, therefore is an index of the human presence, a manifesto of the will of the artist and a proposition of engagement towards the observer that cannot be and will not be accepted by the work as a passive receiver.

Saturday, May 19, 2012

Bending a tree

The studio

Euclidian Fields

The process of 'Euclifian Fields' comes from photographing the lines in sports fields and then 'explaining' these images by geometric notatios on blackboards. The work is in fact a series, where various images are to be understood via the geometrical language. Here only one of the images and its 'explanations' are showed.

'Euclidian Fields' is a paradox in its own for it is a frustrated attempt to understand the material world by reducing it to a bidimensional synthesis that does not comprehend its totallity.

Conversations with Newton, Euclid and Pythagoras

Suspension

Division #2

It is interresting how some fragments of matter are curiously awhaiting for the moment in which they become art. Some works seem to be latent, in a cocooning manner until an entity places its understanding over it. However, it is not a random understanding, but that of the art. When an artist sees it as art it is therefore art, for the work of the artist is not to deliberately produce art, but to bring it to materiality from the realm of the concepts. Art is something of the mind before it is of the senses.

Division #2 was found and was found as it is. According to Dr. Carl Gustav Jung we are all attracted to thing we need or long for in a process he calls 'sincronicity'. Therefore findings are not random, findings are process of creation.

Division #2 brings with it a direct unfolding from the works 'Division' and '1/2' (both can be seen in previous posts in this blog) and brings their questions once again: the intangible notions brought by the measuring and deliberate fractioning of the material realm.

36kg of Triangle

The work "36kg of Triangle" deals with the unsolvable question of materially measuring concepts. The triangle, as a linguistic idea produced by civilization, exists in its absoluteness only in the conceptual realm. When something with those charachteristics is brought to matter all the material questions start to take place, having size, weight, texture, volume...
This work confronts the abstract ideas of geometry to the tangible world, therefore a triangle is put to its limits starting to exist, ambiguously, by a power of tension that in the form that we know only exists within materiality. The entire establishement of this form comes to be in a way of its measuring, not in terms of bidimensional understanding such as area or perimeter, but by the weight of the tension that produces it: 36kg of triangle.

Sunday, January 29, 2012

The Stubborness of Matter 1 & 2

The works "The Stobborness of Matter 1" and "The Stubborness of Matter 2" are action-tokens of forces employed in their changing. They consist originally each of a white metal bar. The first one is heated and bent and the second one is hammered until achieving this angle of 90 degrees to then be placed against an angle on a wall.

The work constitutes itself in revealing the profound tensions that took place when bending these hard objects. The question, which becomes clear by the title of the project, is to deliver some of the issues related to matter and its 'will' to remain as it is. One can derive this thought from the first laws of Newtonian physics: that a moving body tends to stay in movement and also that an inert body tends to stay inert. The very matter of these objects were making a clear statement of their 'will': wanting to remain as they were. The relations also are made by revealing not just the human force directly or mechanically employed to transform it but also the human will to change it. There are two different wills opposing and taking to the limit until one finally is neutralized.