A dimensão humana do mundo / The Human Dimension of the World
by Fernanda Lopes, 2012
Solo Exhibition “Construção”, 2011
Paço das Artes
“What is inside is also outside.” (free translation)
(Goethe)
“The problem of the senses’ apprehension of the object is problem number one of human knowledge. The first scientific acquisition, the first philosophical acquisition, and the first aesthetic acquisition are gathered from the outset in our power to perceive things through the senses. Man’s first glance contains within itself, in germ, the entire future of his civilization. What does this apprehension of the object through vision consist of? In distinguishing, out there, a given structure. Everything in the world is there to be seen, heard, smelled, touched, felt, perceived, in short. This is immediate experience. Upon it, man built empires, erected his monuments, organized life, elaborated science, invented religions with their gods, created art. From the summit of these immense achievements, man tends to forget the cell, the humble basis of all these conquests and marvels: perception.”1 (free translation)
This is an excerpt from the text Da natureza afetiva da forma na obra de arte [On the Affective Nature of Form in the Work of Art], written by the art critic Mario Pedrosa as part of the thesis he presented for the professorship competition in History of Art and Aesthetics at the National School of Architecture, in Rio de Janeiro. There, Pedrosa dwells on an analysis of what he calls “first experience.” “On the first day of life, children already make a crucial distinction: they perceive a point of light in the darkness. (…) And everything organizes itself around that structure,” he says, reinforcing that man’s first glance, the one driven by curiosity, by interest in the new, contains within itself, in germ, the entire future of his civilization. The critic also draws on Goethe to reinforce the importance of man’s relationship with the world: “Finally, have the courage to abandon yourselves to impressions, to let yourselves be distracted, moved, exalted, instructed, inflamed by something great, and do not always think that everything will be in vain unless it is some abstract thought or idea.” (free translation)
It is on this relationship between man and what surrounds him that Felippe Moraes’s young body of work seems to dwell. Today we live in a world where it seems that we increasingly need to distance ourselves from it in order to see it better. Aerial photographs and imaging programs like Google Maps give us the illusion of having absolute access to the world. Today, spaces are the result of a set of information. Visual references become numbers and coordinates. There is no horizon, perspective, limits, or center. Over time, the machine’s gaze has been building a world in which we recognize ourselves less and less as a part. A distant world, in which we seem incapable of intervening.
In Construção – an exhibition selected for the Paço das Artes 2011 Projects Season – Felippe Moraes reveals, through his body of work, the importance of proximity, of contact, of what is within the direct reach of our hands, our eyes, unmediated by machines or cameras. His works want to draw attention to the human dimension of the world. Technological advancement seems to expand our dimension of the world, but it impoverishes our relationship with it, now mediated, seen through filters. Man’s great advances came through his direct contact with the world, with the other: science, for example. Marveling at new technological possibilities, we forget that we only arrived at them thanks to our curiosity about the world, through direct contact with the world.2
At first glance, the exhibition already presented itself to the visitor as something in process – this the great motif of all the works on display. In the exhibition space, a kind of room built from the kind of wooden hoarding found around the city, marking areas under construction. Propped up by pine supports, the walls stood upright, forming sharp angles, uncomfortable to the body and to the visitors’ eyes. They already seemed to want to recover our wary, curious gaze upon the world. And perhaps that is why the works gathered in the show also had in common the importance of time and distance. The importance of dedicating a certain amount of time to each of the works on display, and needing to find the right distance to see them better. It is like the idea of “construction” evoked by the show’s title. Construction is the act or process, individual or collective, of building. And that is what seems to interest Felippe Moraes: not what is built, the final product, but the action.
“π” (2010), for example, the time demanded of the artist is revealed in the roughly seven-meter-long wall it occupied. On it were handwritten, in gold pens, the first roughly 2,800 decimal places of the number Pi. The imposing surface revealed itself gradually as the visitor approached and lingered over the numbers. The manual process, highly mechanical, repetitive, and silent, incorporated errors that arose precisely from repetition and from the use of the hand. The proportion of the distances between the lines and between the numbers was not maintained in some areas. In others, there were flaws in the ink that etched the number onto the wall. In this work, Felippe Moraes uses a numerical proportion that points, at once, to the full capacity and the full impotence of human rationality. After all, is there anything more precise and, at the same time, more abstract than a number with at least 1,241,100,000,000 decimal places?3
In the three videos of the series Encarnado (2010) presented in the show, the time it takes to perform absolutely mundane tasks, common to the everyday life of any person, of any generation, in any city in the world, is stretched. In these works, climbing stairs, changing light bulbs, walking down corridors, and going through doors take far longer than normal, and thus make us doubt that these situations are as simple as we think. The videos reveal to us nuances of these processes that go unnoticed in day-to-day life. The same happens with O Concreto e o Sutil, a polyptych of four screen prints. The set brings squares of different sizes, each in one screen print, positioned differently on each sheet. But it is upon coming closer and observing more carefully that we see the geometric shapes are not the only forms present in the prints.
Entranha (2010) also carries out a curious operation, since it leads the viewer to think about everything that is not inside that exhibition room. The tear forced open, with hammer blows, in the drywall panel that serves as the exhibition’s wall reveals a golden surface. What surface is that? Do all walls hide this other surface? Why was it hidden? Who hid it? How long ago? These are inevitable questions that displace us in time and space. They are also the kinds of questions that the artist seems interested in having us carry into our own lives, reminding us to doubt the “naturalness” we attribute to things.
Thus, in some way, Felippe Moraes seems to be connected to the Neoconcrete legacy. Not so much through the development of the works themselves, but through his dialogue with the thinking that sought to set aside limiting theory in favor of a liberating experience. “There is no doubt, however, that behind their theories, which enshrined the objectivity of science and the precision of mechanics, the true artists – as is the case, for example, of Mondrian or Pevsner – built their work and, in direct engagement with expression, often exceeded the limits imposed by theory. But the work of these artists has, to this day, been interpreted on the basis of the theoretical principles that the work itself denied. We propose a reinterpretation of Neoplasticism, Constructivism, and other related movements, based on their achievements in expression, giving precedence to the work over the theory. If we intend to understand Mondrian’s painting through his theories, we will be forced to choose between the two.”4 (free translation)
Between art as practical, direct, open experience, and art as theories and citations, Felippe Moraes prefers to devote himself to the former. So do I.
Fernanda Lopes
2012
1 PEDROSA, Mario. Da natureza afetiva da forma na obra de arte [On the Affective Nature of Form in the Work of Art]. [Thesis presented for the professorship competition in History of Art and Aesthetics at the National School of Architecture, Rio de Janeiro, 1949.] In: ARANTES, Otília (org.). Forma e percepção estética: textos escolhidos II – Mario Pedrosa. São Paulo: Edusp, 1995.
2 It is from this direct contact with the world that Felippe Moraes evokes the notion of religiosity in some of his works. Both in Malevich and in Felippe Moraes, when one speaks of spirituality, one speaks of the relationship between Man and the external world. Both share a belief in Man’s capacity for action and creation, and therefore in his capacity to intervene directly in the world, without the mediation of institutions such as religion (a system of codes of conduct like so many others).
3 This is the approximate number of digits calculated to date, since Pi is, as far as is known, infinite.
4 Neoconcrete Manifesto. Originally published in the Sunday Supplement of the Jornal do Brasil, on March 21, 1959.
Originally published in the catalogue of the Paço das Artes 2011 Projects Season, São Paulo.