Inner Sea
"But we do not exclude the possibility of a people who are configured according to what Rimbaud touched on when he talked of a free and open peuple de colombes."(1) This comment, written in cursive script and immersed in the surface of a blackboard, accompanied a set of thin lines, a sketch of an architectural structure that could equally represent the base of a construction or a pier.
The blackboard with the pier has become one of the highlights of Desvíos de la Deriva - Experiencias, Travesías y Morfologías, the impeccable exhibition curated by Lisette Lagnado and presented at the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, in Madrid, in 2010.The exhibition was a reconstitution of an element of the strong style developed by the Valparaíso School, dating back to 1972 and originally displayed at the Chilean National Museum of Fine Arts, in Santiago.
This is one of the most unique experiences in the crossroads between an urban utopia, poetry and architecture in Latin America, and contemporary echoes of the School resound in Laura Gorski's site specific in the Zip'Up room, the first to be presented in the space. The São Paulo artist centralizes her work around the representation of a pier that seems to have freed itself of the ropes, cables and piles connected to a sliding ground, resulting in the creation of a motion tending more toward levitation than enrooting.
An instant of poetic suspension amidst the strangulated urban web of São Paulo, this drawing demands collected appreciation, unhurried contemplation. The bank of strict lines help the spectator slow down. The black that invades the white walls of the space also helps generate a particular experience for each participant. "The more industrialized and technological human agglomerations are, the more indispensable it is to prepare an antidote for survival in the ants' nest"(2), underlines Lagnado.
Gorski succeeds in the difficult task of giving the quotidian new meaning, as witnessed in this solo exhibit Paragem, as well as her previous intervention Paisagens Construídas, made on the large walls of the SESC Pinheiros, also this year, and in Raízes Aéreas, another intervention in black and white at the Niemeyerian Biennial Pavilion, during the SP Art Fair 2010.
It is also noteworthy that alongside the immediately previous exhibition Perto Longe, by Aline van Langendonck, and Aéreos, by Fabio Flaks, this triad of propositions by these São Paulo artists forms an inventive investigation into the megalopolis that is São Paulo, tackling concepts, ideas and practices that are situated at the crossover points between visual arts and urban life. The empty skate parks in Flaks' paintings, the overlapping grids, lines and sounds of Van Langendonck, inside and outside the exhibition space, and now the lines that spill over onto the black layers that Gorski places in the room poses powerful questions regarding the relations between the subjective and the collective, the essential and the shared. "That is why we say NO to 'houses' and YES to inhabiting"(3), the Valparaíso School teases once again.
Mario Gioia
(1) LAGNADO, Lisette. Desvíos de la Deriva - Experiencias, Travesías y Morfologías. Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, Madrid, 2010, p. 36
(2) LAGNADO, Lisette, idem, p. 53
(3) LAGNADO, Lisette, ibidem, p. 39