Cosmografia

by Julia Lima, 2017

Cosmografia – Solo Exhibition
Baró Galeria – São Paulo

One point six one eight zero three three nine eight eight seven four nine eight… The universe repeats patterns followed by galaxies, sunflowers, bees, and shells, uniting disparate and seemingly random structures under recurring laws of behavior. The Drag That Said Phi is one of Felippe Moraes’s videos presented in the exhibition Cosmografia, seen at the end of the path through the gallery. It is, in a way, also the trigger for all the other works we see first – and which were made afterward. But the concept of time is relative. On the screen, the superstar Alaska Thunderfuck, in full drag, faces the camera and slowly recites the digits of the golden ratio, sometimes modulating her voice, always accompanying the narration with her fingers. The set, the wig, the outfit, the lighting – everything is white, except for her red-varnished claws; she makes comedic pauses, faces, whispers and purrs, in a hypnotic performance built from the nonsensical repetition of numbers that lose their meaning and become words, interspersed with tongue clicks and affected gestures. Phi is an irrational constant, a ratio that recurs in mathematics and in nature, as well as in the ideal human body – such as the distance from the shoulder to the fingertip divided by the measure from the elbow to the fingertip. Yet Vitruvian Man does not exist, and Moraes takes this mathematical irrationality in its poetic sense: Phi is an arbitrary law that orders and harmonizes everything, but which, when applied to real bodies, is never exact, never precise. Patterns are ways of fitting things together that impose order, symmetry, and harmony, and help us make sense of the vicissitudes of a life that, were it not for this greater reason, would make no sense.

This pattern was used by the Greeks in the statues of the Parthenon, by Giotto in his Renaissance frescoes, and by physicists such as Johannes Kepler. Outside the gallery, in the container, we find a kind of epilogue or postscript that unfolds this concept twofold. First, because it derives from a book by Kepler on geometry and astronomy; second, because the film shares the same name as the book, Harmonices Mundi, and here the idea of harmony is reiterated, now in its musical sense. In his research into cosmological orders and patterns, Moraes came across the idea of the “music of the spheres,” formulated by ancient civilizations, which presupposed the existence of a universal mathematical harmony. Kepler deduced two principles about the motion of the planets and, echoing the idea of harmony, correlated music with the speed of the planets’ orbits around the sun – Saturn, Jupiter, Mars, Earth, Venus, and Mercury: the closer to the sun, the higher the pitch; the faster the speed of each planet, the faster the rhythm. Moraes appropriated this theoretical development to make the eponymous video during an artistic residency in Iran. In partnership with the band Bomrani, he performed the scores of the celestial bodies. Each member of the band interprets a different planet, performing individually and together, in a cacophonous (dis)harmony. Music is a kind of bridge between heaven and earth.

During this same residency, while researching the mosques of the city of Shiraz, the artist made photographic records of the geometric relief patterns integrated into the architecture of the Atiq Jame Mosque. Titled Keyhan (Cosmos in Farsi), the series presents the building’s ceilings and their regular lines, their symmetrical and perfect forms evoking mathematical relationships, the fabric of the weave that binds the universe together. The entirely white surface takes on shades of gray in the black-and-white photographic reproduction; the shadows draw out the volumes, and the images seem at times like lunar craters, at times like topographies, at times like fractals.

In parallel, Moraes also presents Movimento Pendular – photographic light experiments that trace rotational displacements generated by pendulums – and his Intangible Objects, a series of drawings on paper that describe, in words rather than images, situations that, for now, can only exist in mental speculation, since we remain bound to three palpable dimensions and to the laws of motion, gravity, and thermodynamics. These drawings create spaces that do not exist, parallel worlds where a prism of infinite dimensions, a solid with an undefined number of faces, a liquid substance with no weight, or perpendicular lines that do not form a right angle can coexist. These paradoxes are detailed in the same form as mathematical-philosophical statements, but take shape as small poems or pseudoscientific haikus staging impossible situations made possible within our imagination. Everything imaginable is real.

Thus, the intangible objects strangely draw close to The Drag That Said Phi – both sustain the distance between patterns and the desire for what-could-be (thereby moving away from what-should-be), and both reveal the tangible fissure in the rule that is meant to order everything but which, in the end, only ever attains imperfections or impossibilities. Indeed, the numbers of the ratio never repeat with exactness when we measure our own limbs, and our scientific paradigms are always being revised and expanded. After all, it is in the vicinity of the black hole on the gallery floor that the laws of physics become distorted.

For those averse to the exact sciences, this text may seem off-putting – after all, what does art have to do with mathematics, with physics? But Felippe Moraes is interested in science just as much as in language and poetry, always investigating the boundaries between expanded perception and objective rationality, between the spiritual and the scientific, the manual and the technological, the subject and the object.

Julia Lima
2017