IMENSURÁVEL

by Alexandre Sá, 2018

CAIXA Cultural Fortaleza

“Imensurável” is the name of this solo exhibition by Felippe Moraes which, although not strictly a retrospective, sets out to establish an overview of an abundant trajectory, full of silences, unknowns, and suspended questions. Immeasurable is also the desire that drives him, in his furtive lines of fiction and in the infinite possibilities for intersecting science and art. Immeasurable, too, is the contemporary haze that floods us daily and leads us into a wandering, and inevitably rhizomatic, sensory state.

If, in everyday life, this rhizomatic logic ends up throwing us into a process of encounters, missed encounters, dispersions, numbings, and hiatuses, the work of Felippe Moraes is the reverse of that. It is an almost unconscious proposal to find, starting from entropy, a set of methodologies aimed at organizing the plastic and visual discourse that, throughout history, has run through the desire of artists, philosophers, scientists, and mathematicians in their infinite formulas, maps, and navigational charts.

The aesthetic question that guides his trajectory arises, then, through an intersection of references drawn from the most diverse fields, always populated by visual and formal responsibility, producing a new compendium of artistic propositions that, like much of the good recent production, promotes and provokes a suspended doubt, returning us to a zone of indeterminacy about the very end of existence, as in a philosophical back-and-forth that keeps asking, in an underground vibration, what the status of art is today.

The work is, in the first instance, populated by an almost hermeticism that could eventually provoke a certain kind of distancing common in contemporary art. On the other hand, this pseudo-hermeticism, which perhaps is also grounded in an absolute formal precision, quickly dissolves once we become interested in diving into its proposals and its games of interpretation. When this happens, the viewer lets themselves be flooded by a set of epistemological questions and wanderings that will not choose to bring any answer, but rather to provoke a lightly amused haze that, through its conjunction with the exhibited work, plays with and mocks its own presence and discusses the eagerness for scientificity running through this so-called contemporary man in search of infinite solutions to his eternal process of knowledge//non-knowledge.

This exhibition is that set of vanishing points which, instead of pointing to one specific horizon, end up creating multiple horizons and interpretive possibilities under a very particular methodology, in which the artist builds his fragmented, dense narrative, supported, through its quality and precision, by some art movements that were fundamental to the second half of the 20th century, such as minimalism, land art, and conceptual art.

On the other hand, this is not a nostalgic movement toward such a legacy, but a vigorous desire to reprocess these references and update these movements from a historical perspective that is also entropic and no longer linear. The contemporary becoming that emerges from the works feeds, without specific intention, on a past, but its unquestionable responsibility lies in aligning hybrid practices and relocating such questions within a more ambiguous, timeless, paradoxically formal, monumental, and auratic historical lineage of art.

His formulas and his fabulations are all there. The mathematical equations, the topologies of terrain (subjective and objective), the geology of space (between me and you), and all the other possibilities for understanding and using the quantitative eagerness that establishes itself as research. Yet Felippe Moraes makes use of this material in a playful, considerably fictional way, as if he knew the truth running through such calculations and, precisely for that reason, chose to openly distrust them, twisting them and applying them in another form, in the refined materiality of his objects and propositions; producing a kind of poetic ballast sustained by the courage of his doubt, by the ineluctable certainty of his anguishes, and by the instability of his plastic formulations.

In a certain sense, it is possible to say that this is the specificity of the artist’s work. If the 1960s and 1970s brought a power of dematerialization of the object, as well as an unquestioned belief in the process of dilution of form and in the primacy of process, for Felippe Moraes these elements serve as a compendium of paradigms to be eclipsed, reinvented, set into motion and into reflux, in an infinite game of mirrors that aims, in a Herculean way, to rediscover and excavate small fragments of eternity within the ephemerality of life and aesthetic experience, in his inaccessible and potentially graphic formulas. The conjunctive element that flourishes from the friction between word and image ends up slowly abandoning its conceptual power, pointing instead toward a return to the logic of fantasy born from the concreteness of the world, illuminating the symptom we have all inherited: having unlearned how to dream as the old encyclopedic artists once did.

Alexandre Sá
2018

Curatorial text for the solo exhibition IMENSURÁVEL (2018) by Felippe Moraes at CAIXA Cultural Fortaleza.