Felippe Moraes: All That Surpasses Us

by Susana Rocha, 2017

Revista :Estúdio, Artistas sobre outras Obras – Portugal

Art and science have, throughout history, oscillated between an intimate and convergent relationship and a conflicting, dissonant one, revealing the possible asymmetries between two great fields that accompany the course of humanity. If we add faith to these, as a third great driving force of human impetus and as a third great product of our intellect, we are faced with a trinity of complex and profound relationships, with multiple nuances and idiosyncrasies, which make it possible to formulate all the great questions about each of the equations that surpass us.

It is at this crossroads of universes that we can find the work of Felippe Moraes, a Brazilian artist from Rio de Janeiro, the city where he was born in 1988.

Currently a doctoral candidate in Contemporary Art at the College of Arts of the University of Coimbra, Felippe Moraes is a visual artist represented by the prominent Galeria Baró in São Paulo, and has been, among other notable distinctions, chosen as a finalist for the EDP Award (SP) and funded by the 2016 Art Monument Award (FUNARTE).

1. Science as a Method for Questioning Science

Not even by cataloguing can I grasp the subjective dimension of the world.

(Moraes, 2017)

Felippe Moraes has, over recent years, built a body of work that combines two foundational aspects of our culture: a methodical scientific rationality focused on process and measurable values, and the search for something transcendent that explains what reason cannot.

Feeling the world as the continuity of a spiritual dimension, yet aware that contemporary society tends to value and operate from concrete, absolute truths, Felippe Moraes accepts the challenge, and seems to start from a place of distrust of this strictly rational system – where everything must be logically proven and answered – in order to instrumentalize and use scientific rules and processes in a subversive way, arriving at a place of faith in something greater and nameless.

Thus, mathematics as a language limited by its own rules and vocabulary becomes, in this context, insufficient rather than a provider of absolute truth. And faith, in a belief that is not limited to the idea of God, can translate simply into a desire for the infinite.

Apparently paradoxical, the two ambivalences – the methodological-scientific imperative and the will to believe in an infinite transcendence – sustain a metric and procedural search that questions science through science itself. In this process we begin to understand that, even within the scientific domain, there are questions left unanswered due to the limits of an inherently rational knowledge which we have grown accustomed to trusting as the sole and constant source of answers – a habit that Moraes permanently counters, striving to make visible the immaterial forces that take part in, and perhaps sustain, our existence.

In a delicate poetics attentive to small subtleties, the scientific formulations evoked become entropic fictions, and thus wholly contrary to the positivism one might deduce from the formal aspect of the works created by the artist. In the end, what seems to matter most to Moraes is the search for answers, the triggering of internal resonances that awaken humanity’s deepest and most universal questions – questions for which a verifiable answer is not necessarily offered.

In the words of curator Alexandre Sá, the work of Felippe Moraes:

(…) has science as its semantic material. 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 (Sá: 2005). (free translation)

2. A Web of References

The introduction of mathematical or scientific statements as a means of trying to understand and express the spiritual through artistic creation allows us to trace an extensive and ancient genealogical tree for Felippe Moraes’s practice.

The influence of theosophy on art has existed since time immemorial; the representation of sacred geometry in art has continued for centuries; mathematics and the golden ratio were essential to the Renaissance; universalizing geometric symbolism took part in Constructivism; musical metrics were deeply associated with Lyrical Abstraction… However, all these moments are part of a long history that has already been well told.

Although the influence of ancient masters such as Euclid or Leonardo da Vinci is clearly evident in Moraes’s work, as well as the later influence of Kazimir Malevich or even Piet Mondrian, if we want to name artistic relatives closer to Felippe Moraes we must focus, above all, on contemporaneity.

Conceptual artists such as Walter De Maria, Joseph Kosuth, and Sol LeWitt opened the way and proved decisive in establishing method as an artistic possibility, and it is in them that Felippe Moraes’s network of references truly takes root.

“I believe that, without these artists, I might not have arrived at my conclusions. It’s like the metaphor of standing on the shoulders of giants: we only see certain horizons at a given historical moment because others laid down a road for us to walk.

Walter De Maria is particularly important to me for the work “Broken Kilometer,” which discusses the notion of size, proportion, and the arbitrariness of units of measurement. Sol LeWitt interests me greatly in the sense of the rules he establishes for drawing and how, in that way, drawing becomes a direct manifestation of the application of a method. Kosuth, in turn, interests me for reflecting on language and its different manifestations. (…)

In the more transcendental sense of my work, I would include, for example, Kazimir Malevich, Mondrian, Yves Klein, and Anish Kapoor. I believe that these artists, over the span of a little more than a century, are, in the end, speaking of the same things, but with languages proper to their own times. They speak of a certain capacity to surpass the tangible world through form and its experience.

As a reference in Brazilian art, Antônio Dias has always been an artist, like me, divided between pragmatism and the spiritual. What interests me most about him are his more conceptual phases, in which he establishes “grids” invoking human relationships and star maps” (Moraes, 2017).

Each of these strong examples echoes in the universe of references of the artist Felippe Moraes, and their influence can be sensed throughout the discovery of his work. It remains, then, for us to discover it.

3. The Word and Its Weight

In 2009, Felippe Moraes began the work “Verbo” (2009–2010). In an almost ritualistic process, taking about 7 months to complete, the artist cut out every occurrence of the word “Deus” [“God”] found in a Bible.

Drawing on the concept formulated in the first Gospel of John: “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God” (John 1:1), “And the Word became flesh, and dwelt among us” (John 1:4), Moraes attempts, through this phoneme that becomes a word, and which, once printed, becomes material, to find and extrapolate the “word” that is “God,” taking it out of the text – that is, to materialize this “word”; to make it “flesh”; to make the immaterial palpable. He then catalogs the 5,101 occurrences of the word on A4 sheets, arranging them in a grid of 5 by 12 pages.

When confronted with the empty spaces of the book, we realize that the word “Deus” seems truly to carry a power that has left the text, and which now confronts us, vertical, on the wall in front of us.

It is true that the idea of God, as with all things, is more powerful than the word that allows us to name it. However, the word does not dissolve when separated from the narrative. The narrative itself, with its empty spaces, seems to suggest that it could be filled with any other designation of this same God, or of some other God.

At a later moment, Felippe Moraes creates an unfolding of this work. He calls it “O Peso do Verbo” (2010–2014). In a continuous search to give form to the spiritual, the artist presents us with a scale that weighs the 5,101 cutouts of the word “Deus” – we thus discover that the various repetitions of the word, taken from a single Bible, weigh precisely 15 grams.

In this metaphorical game, worthy of a tireless alchemist, in which the artist shows that everything that has weight inevitably exists, methods considered scientific are used, which nevertheless lead us to discoveries without any greater result. Although “God” can be counted, materialized, and even weighed… we remain, at the end of the process, precisely where we began: with the suspicion that scientific methodology will not truly turn God into something concrete. Felippe Moraes’s work thus belongs more to the domain of phenomenology than to that of countable, palpable, or visible things. It is a work of evocations, where the failures of science become evidence of transcendence. Where what matters lies beyond us.

Yet Moraes does not give up on numbers.

4. Numbers, Infinities, and Divisions

Even though the relationship between science and spirituality sometimes proves difficult, Felippe Moraes uncovers ways to pay permanent tribute to mathematics when it points us toward the infinite sublime. That is what happens with the work “π” (2010–2011), in which we can see a few digits of this endless number, written in gold on a white wall.

It is also what can be deduced from the LED panels titled “π” (2016), “φ” (2016), and “Primos” (2016). In them we see, once again, the digits of the number pi (an infinite number, hence called irrational), the digits of the number phi (the number corresponding to the golden ratio), and different prime numbers (numbers divisible only by 1 or by themselves, giving whole-number results), respectively.

Through these strange numbers, charged with symbolic power, we are once again led to question how the universe works, our capacity to understand what surrounds us, and our difficulty in accepting the absence of verifiable explanations.

Felippe Moraes betrays our sense of security and stability, revealing to us a world in which not only does the macro universe of infinitely large numbers astonish us, but also a world where the tendency toward the sublime can still be found in the immeasurable division of things.

Moving toward this atomic context, in which we are all made of the same basic matter, it is worth reflecting on “Divisão” (2011). In it, a unit (a log) is presented whole, in 13 equal parts, halved, and divided into quarters. A unit is never just a unit, but rather all the possible divisions toward the atom. And still… the question seems to hover: in a constantly evolving body of knowledge, what might we find beyond the atom? Nothing? Or is it everything that resides in that possible discovery?

Not even Felippe Moraes would dare reduce a log to an atom in his obstinate search for answers. But the suggestion of that ambition lies in this sense of progression born from the growing division of the unit, reducing it, in the words of Raphael Fonseca, to “indices of existence that are not capable of replacing proper names” (Fonseca: 2012).

5. Invisible Patterns

In his ongoing and curious quest to know the hidden face of the world, Felippe Moraes has more recently focused on discovering the invisible patterns that surround us. The premises he uses are the same ones he has always used. However, the scientific semantics remain, for now, only implicit, allowing room for more sensory aspects, giving rise to hypnotic seductions born of movement or sound.

In “Movimento Pendular #1” (2014), the artist releases a glass pendulum which, losing sand, forms concentric circular drawings on the floor, with an increasingly smaller amplitude. The dance of this pendulum holds the gaze of each viewer, fixing it on the process of this ordered, precise drawing, created by the laws of physics.

The final result reveals a complex overlap of curves, which draws the eye toward the empty center. Through the rhizomatic thinking that characterizes it, our memory creates connections with cosmic movements, black holes, or the implosion of entire universes. Unlike Foucault’s pendulum, here, the movement of the earth does not seem to be the final destination.

In “Tubos Sonoros” (2014), it is the variation of sound that awakens us to the mystery that seems to hide inside each tube. Following the same logic that governs any wind instrument, the different lengths produce different sound variations.

The artist thus once again gives form to the immaterial. He summons it to reveal itself and take part in his works, allowing the public to make its own discovery in an active, participatory way.

Both “Movimento Pendular #1” and “Tubos Sonoros” are powerful experiences that seem to be born from the outside in. Hypnotic, they resonate visually and aurally in every viewer, echoing far beyond the moment we encounter the works. They are two examples in which Felippe Moraes becomes, for a moment, “a revealer, more than a creator” (Moraes, 2017).

6. Horizon

To close this brief journey through Felippe Moraes’s prolific body of work, it is essential to give attention to one of his most recent works, “Monumento ao Horizonte” (2016), which can be found on the Caminho Niemeyer pier, in Niterói – Rio de Janeiro. In a way, this work is the summation of all the principles that have guided this artist’s practice up to this point.

Building on an earlier work, “A Distância do Horizonte” (2010), in which the artist develops a mathematical formula to calculate the distance between an observer’s gaze and their optical horizon – the height of each observer’s eyes being what determines the distance their gaze can reach – Moraes offers, with “Monumento ao Horizonte,” a view grander than any other.

This steel structure lifts us, through an interior staircase, up to a slit that, fixing our gaze, offers a horizon 7 km farther than what would be visible from the ground.

This structure that lifts us seems to pay tribute not only to the horizon, but above all to the admirable human quest to “see farther,” to discover new shores, to look beyond borders, and to claim the right to a world where it is our latitude of knowledge that allows us to be great; and it is the eternal quest to expand it that guides us through time.

“Its already scratched and marked finish denotes the action of a time that has not yet passed, suggesting its existence in the world long before its installation. This proto-lookout faces west, as if it were the needle of a setting compass, and nothing could be more poetic than building an apparatus that defies chronological time by always pointing toward dusk (after all, it was in Rio that the applause for the sunset was invented).

Elongated in form, when seen from the front its appearance oscillates between totem and monolith: it can be seen as an object whose presence is ancestral, or as a natural element; something built by an ancient civilization or organic matter sprouting from the earth itself, erupting from the ground. On the other hand, it also seems to rise as an artificial place created outside our time, as if brought into the past-present to summon what is to come and make us face the future – in each distinct sphere of apprehending the work, we activate different ways of being, existing, and perceiving ourselves in the world.” (Lima, 2016) (free translation)

This work without time, without era, and therefore an eternal and futuristic ruin, which structurally offers a real possibility (that of seeing farther), but which does not seem to sustain any pragmatic consequence, draws on its poetic intent to remind us that the discovery of new horizons need not always be driven by functional purposes, but by inner callings, by impulses toward this infinite, which the horizon also is.

Conclusion

Felippe Moraes proposes thinking of art as a dialogue between science and spirituality, in a constant discovery that reveals beings oriented toward knowledge but also driven by a spiritual belief.

Summoning a vast array of references and self-references, the artist creates a poetic body of work that formally presents a scientific language in its methodological quest for something greater than reason can explain. In this ambivalence, Felippe Moraes pays tribute to a great duality of the human condition: the constant search for knowledge, both concrete and transcendent, about everything that seems to surpass us.

References

Fonseca, Raphael (2012) 1,04 Centímetros. [Accessed 2017-01-04]
Available at: http://www.mkgallery.org/downloads/137/104centmetrospt.pdf

Lima, Júlia (2016) Monumento ao Horizonte. [Accessed 2017-01-09]
Available at: http://cargocollective.com/felippemoraes/Monumento-ao-Horizonte

Moraes, Filipe (2017) – Personal source: Emails exchanged during the writing of this article.

Sá, Alexandre (2005) Felippe Moraes. [Accessed 2017-01-03]
Available at: http://cargocollective.com/felippemoraes/Obras/Texto

Originally published in Revista :Estúdio, Artistas sobre outras Obras – April-June 2017