Progressão

by Michelle Sommer, 2016

Progressão – Solo Exhibition
MAC Niterói

Twenty-six flags rest upon the modernist ramp, juxtaposed against the monumental landscape of Guanabara Bay. In the movement of going up and down the ramp, the experiential dimension of the architecture is activated, connecting flags, ramp, and landscape, and giving meaning to the artistic proposition.

Felippe Moraes, through rigorous calculations of color gradation, presents a progression of flags in tones from black to white (for the ascent) or from white to black (for the descent). Flags are visual symbols representing some sovereignty or constituted entity. Flags call to mind territoriality, the black dividing lines of borders between countries on cartographic maps. At sea borders, the dividing lines, though invisible, do not signify nonexistence. Flags are, at once, indicators of territory and symbolic representations.

A black flag is mourning, and a white flag is peace – or surrender to superior forces. Between these extremes – on one side, mourning for our present political moment, and on the other, neutrality or immobile apathy – lie many shades of gray. The gradual scale of grays indicates that not everything is as determined as the extremes suggest; but everything is in the process of becoming determined along the way. Along the way, on the sinuous curve of the ramp, precisely calculated, with an organic landscape dispersed in the background, Felippe Moraes intervenes and, progressively, sets in motion movements that dissolve absolutes.

Michelle Sommer
2016