Morlan
Companhia Açucareira Vale do Rosário. The faded yellow label stuck on an old poster is barely readable, but hints at the image that expands beyond the field of the record at hand. As there is a photograph of the set exhibited in Requadros in which the artist inserts digital images of geometric shapes, this rectangular object reminds us of the coloured interventions Mariana Tassinari has discretely and consistently developed over several series since 2005.
Requadros is perhaps the closest sample of Tassinari's work to architecture; indeed, before deciding to study art, she spent some years working as an architect. It also represents a more silent instant in the artist’s work; with her taking more time to select the images to be developed and exhibited. However, such clippings, so subtly modified, make stronger connections back to the specificity of those records.
A great deal of Requadros was taken at the Morlan metal works, in Orlândia, near Ribeirão Preto, in inner-state São Paulo. The old purple earth there, which drove the café com leite (coffee with milk) policy of the First Brazilian Republic (1889-1930), is now a land of mass-produced sugar cane, dotted with processing plants of still considerable economic power. In these privately-owned fields, the Morlan plant, founded by Tassinari’s grandfather, has a particularly interesting history. The building was designed by Eduardo de Almeida, one of the leading names from the paulista school of architecture, highlighting structures and choosing concrete as one of the artistic elements of the works, and it combines simplicity with a permeable character that runs through the whole construction. This is evident in Tassinari’s photographs, with an obvious affective connection – having spent several holidays in the regions as a child and teenager – in relation to the building, and carefully extracts images that serve as the basis for her series.
The grey walls, the green blocks, the faded yellow posters, the ochre armchairs, and especially, the ice-white stone fittings generate chromatic relations that drive the visual seduction of the ensemble. Combined in a melancholic atmosphere, these elements emphasise a moment of particular fragility in the paulista school of architecture, an offshoot of the brutalism and modernism in the region, demonstrating the robust nature of the materials and dialogues between this presence and the empty spaces created in the buildings. It is as if this line of Brazilian architecture, which enjoyed its heyday of international acknowledgement up to the 1960s, were no longer welcomed, lost interlocution and crumbled on its own forms. It seems that the egalitarian aspect, effectively reflected in the designs of Almeida and other great names, has retreated and nowadays, with the odd honourable exception, has succumbed to far more individualist and less public projects – one can cite the neoclassic style, closed condominiums, shopping malls and skyscrapers on the verge of ‘marginal’ highways to witness the decline of the model. Therefore, the splendour of an authentic, auteurist movement in the area seems to live on only in memory, making the remnant character so highlighted by photography theorists such as Susan Sontag and François Soulages, and developed by Tassinari, an attitude of resistance and political expression. “A photo is not a proof, but a trace of the object to be photographed [...]; it is, therefore, the articulation of two enigmas, that of the object and that of the subject” (1), Soulages underlines.
The sensitive geometry created by the artist is gradually revealed. Whereas in Requadros the coloured interventions are less present, the work applied over the pictures, using superimposition, reframing, cutting and off-field references, remains strong, but is not visible a priori to the observer. In diptychs, triptychs and polyptychs done in 2008, one of her most productive years, there was a redefinition of the trivial registrations that, through her edition and reordering, moved towards questions of painting, for example. In other series, Tassinari seemed to be emphasising that she was not simply a post-production artist, and inserted over photographic images the mark of highly delicate drawings. Today, in Requadros, she seems to have assimilated more of what is given, of that, in view of the chaos of information and images, could be collected and reinterpreted, but from a less ostensive angle. She speaks to the solidity that surrounds us, embodied in the sober furnishings she creates as a multidisciplinary proposition, comforting and stimulating our vision in the most ordinary, but no less powerful moments.
Mario Gioia
(1) SOULAGES, François. Estética da Fotografia – Perda e Permanência. São Paulo, Senac SP, 2010, p. 346