Felippe Moraes

by Alexandre Sá, 2015

Solo Exhibition “Os Elementos”
Centro Municipal de Arte Hélio Oiticica – Rio de Janeiro

Few artists today manage to perceive their own work with such skill and pertinence, able to link each new proposal within a cohesive trajectory grounded in specific questions, without ever drifting from them. Felippe Moraes is an excellent example of this kind of artist, one who produces regularly while always keeping his aesthetic and philosophical concerns in mind.

His 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, as can be seen in much of the good production of the 20th century, 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.

The work 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.

Alexandre Sá
2015