Walking at night through Augusto de Lima Avenue, in Belo Horizonte, you’ll possibly see an apartment facing the Maleta Building, with the lights on in the living room almost all of the time. There lives a person who, not happy with the experiences lived under the sun, tries to create nocturnal answers for the anxieties of our existence. He writes, photographs, paints, sews; he creates images that temporarily give him some strength, takes a nape and the cycle begins anew the following day.
Would this description fit Randolpho Lamonier’s life, research and creative process? Yes and no; affirmation and negation walk hand in hand in the game the artist suggests between fiction and documentation.
It is not by accident that one of the longest works in this exhibition is the series Crônicas de retalhos (Patchwork Chronicles). Using rugs and fabrics, the artist sews scenes, characters and sentences that indicate narratives. These rough-looking objects catch our eye because they concentrate representations of violence and craftsmanship. There is a fineness in the way in which the artist composes the lines that form the gun, but the tragedy of depicting a gun also resides over these details. They are patches of life, scraps in themselves – the murdered body; the body that returns to avenge its traumas; the cry that is silenced in public.
The relation between narrative and the banality of life emerges in a more explicit manner in the photographs and videos presented here. His Diários.mpeg (Diaries.mpeg) are fragments of videos realized in different moments over the last years in VHS, photographic cameras and webcams. Lost in a hard disk, they were recently found and are now displayed in different TV sets. Friends, parties, leisure and gaming moments are concentrated in an area in the exhibition, reminding us of a not so far away period in the history of sociability in which being with friends doing nothing was more important than many of the apps in our smartphones. Small intimacies pour from these shreds of reality and we are all voyeurs.
There is a tendency in the works in the exhibition revolve around the first-person singular. The merging of the artist’s autobiographic character and the spectator who enjoys the images and goes through a cathartic process is very welcome. Siso (Wisdom tooth) is a video created from excerpts with a narrative about the solitude in large urban centers. The sequence of images comes guided by subtitles that affirm his biographic self-reference in a manner similar to the Polaroid shots that depict the artist’s body immerses in binging and partying that Belo Horizonte offers. As Leonilson’s famous drawing, “Truth fiction”, states: a word in each of our legs.
Even with such diverse languages, it is clear that from the works here that the relation between chronicles and diaries, between images of others and of himself, as well as the importance of writing, are some of the essential elements for Randolpho’s research. The words in his rugs, photographs and videos offer us more layers of uncertainty as to the understanding his images. It isn’t a writing that directs our gaze, but the sorting of the words activates our baggage as readers. There is a lot of artistic coefficient to be pondered and whenever we read them, we get different results.
Caio Fernando Abreu, Dalton Trevisan and Plínio Marcos and their Dois perdidos numa noite suja (Two people lost in the dirty night) seems to be one of the echoes of his research on regular characters who don’t have rich-people-last-names and who sometimes bleed, cry and enjoy – they are flesh and bone and this transpires in an oscillating manner between raw gaze and suburban romanticism. This element comes from the title of the exhibition – who are the rats that don’t fear the dark? The artist and who else? Or would it be a reference to the spectators who, somehow, sometimes passes by and other times wallows in these images?
With no fixed answers, what remains is the desire to be besides Randolpho Lamonier until dawn, to see what happens when the rain stops. Where will the rats go?
Raphael Fonseca