"Thus, new, graceful and spectacular scenarios alternated without interruption in front of our astonished eyes, until finally the capital of the new kingdom, festively lit by the setting sun, has been patented in our sight (...). An indescribable feeling came over us all at the time when the anchor hit the bottom of another continent and the thunder of cannons, with the outbreak of war music, saluted the desired target, the successful conclusion of the sea journey." (1)
The place is not only a fragment of space or an imaginary point. It is in itself a form of seeing, knowing and understanding the world. In fact, thinking and seeing the world as a set of places fixes a very particular perspective: we begin to discern the unique aspects, to notice connections and distances between people, things and places, to assimilate personal experiences and meanings. When we think of types of places, like a forest, a street, a school, a room, a city, we associate ideas that activate our voluntary and involuntary memories; images, concepts and circumstances appear to us." (2)
When arriving in Japan, the glance of Ilana Lichtenstein certainly approached the enchanting tone with which Rio de Janeiro was immortalized in books by naturalists of the 19th century. But the experience of the contemporary artist-traveler is also binded to sites of all kinds, and, perhaps, that experience linked to memory is remarkable. For this reason, some of the inaugural images of Presenças, group show which opens a new exhibition room at Zipper Galeria, are by this artist from São Paulo.
If the ordinary photography activity by Lichtenstein in São Paulo deals especially with portrait, her focus in the cities of Tokyo and Kyoto captures its urban-spatial singularities. However, time is an essential component of the elements tenderly captured by the artist. A staircase, a water tower, a boulevard, for examples, gains a rare, unique status. Despite the predominance of green, there are other colors in the compositions - such as red - which materialize and break the neutrality of the "inexpressive"3 current highlighted by Charlotte Cotton in The Photograph as Contemporary Art.
Also in Presenças, Angela Varela contributes to a certain narrative of displacement with the video Considerações no Meio da Noite (considerations in the middle of the night). This artist from Rio Grande do Sul, based in São Paulo, produced this audiovisual work during her residency in the French city of Marnay-sur-Seine. There is a lack of control in the protagonist's walk, with a somewhat shaky filming, camera in hand, which, despite being a video artwork, may refer to homemade recording procedures displayed on YouTube or to praised titles of terror/fantasy, like The Blair Witch Project (1999) by Daniel Myrick and Eduardo Sánchez, and Lost Highway (1997) by David Lynch. "I dove into unknown situations in which, given the low light and the lack of prior knowledge of the place, my spatial references (the horizon, the ground, etc.) were temporarily blurred, suspended, allowing the experience of something unknown", Varela notes.
Through the corridors and corners of memory, the pencil of Tatiana Dalla Bona traces its forms. Childhood resurfaces enigmatically through coats without people to wear them. Another series by the artist - who moved frequently from town to town, in a continuous circulation through Brazil and France - displays familiar images almost undone, of blurred outlines, since they were created from computer screens connected to Skype. A teddy bear, but with a gloomy face, is the focus of other drawings by Dalla Bona. "The suffering - that is, having a hard time - is an aid to memory (...). The great illusion is that globalization is an improvement." (4)
Pedro Cappeletti conducts his research on drawing presenting in Presenças works in which the process becomes the aim of his poetics. With the examples of his participation in group shows like SP Arte Specific and Ateliê Fidalga no Paço das Artes, the crinkling of a sheet of paper with a line drawn onto it, the "subversive" insertion of displaced trivial elements, like a hinge, in a neutral space and the transmutation of light materials (the air of balloons) into denser mass (plaster sculptures) attest the multiple sight of the artist on the environment and the transformation of the commonplace into something that craves for more.
Bettina Vaz Guimarães undertakes a pictorial "invasion" in the small room on the second floor of the building designed by Marcelo Rosenbaum, continuing her chromatic interventions presented in previous exhibitions such as Aluga-se. The artist uses small MDF structures, which gain tones similar to the color scale of the room in accordance with the different lights that the two tiny glass windows provide to the regular shapes of the exhibition space. The gallery also becomes field of experimentation with its everyday objects turned into representations created by the artist. In a kind of "Suite Pantone", Vaz Guimarães ends Presenças with a vigorous poetic project of unrestricted visual range.
Mario Gioia
(1) SPIX, Johann Baptist Von & MARTIUS, Carl Friedrich Von. Viagem pelo Brasil – Livro Primeiro. Melhoramentos, São Paulo, p.42
(2) MAH, Sergio (org.). Lugar/Place. La Fábrica, Madri, 2008, p.7
(3) COTTON, Charlotte. A Fotografia como Arte Contemporânea. Martins Fontes, São Paulo, 2010, p.81
(4) BRASIL, Ubiratan. "Paul Theroux e a busca do tempo vivido". O Estado de S.Paulo, Sabático, feb.26.2011, p.S3