Questões sem resposta, 2011 / Questions Without Answer, 2011
by Fernanda Lopes, 2011
Solo Exhibition “Construção”, 2011
Paço das Artes
[Song lyric excerpt – “Construção,” Chico Buarque, 1971; omitted here for copyright reasons.]
Construção (Chico Buarque)
Construção 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. Or rather, the possibility of acting, the individual choice to act, each person’s free will. In the exhibition Construção, the works make use of elements common to civil construction, such as plumb lines, floor plans, hoardings, calculations, and tools, which, through their arrangement and the combinations they establish among themselves, take on new configurations and meanings. Chico Buarque’s eponymous song, written in 1971, draws on this same dynamic. The same words constantly change position throughout the song, so that its fixed structure takes on new contours and meanings through small shifts of words.
Right upon arrival, the visitor is greeted by a room built from magenta hoardings. Forming sharp angles, uncomfortable to the body and the eyes, these precarious walls seem unable to stand on their own, held stable by pine supports. They seem to protect or prepare the space for what is yet to come, this time for good. Outside, projected directly onto the wood, are the three videos of the series Encarnado (2010), in which a person – the artist himself – wearing a red worker’s jumpsuit, inhabits environments of the same color, performing absolutely mundane, yet equally symbolic, tasks such as climbing stairs, changing light bulbs, walking down corridors, going through doors.
Inside, there are works such as π (2010). Here, more than a thousand of the first decimal places of the mathematical constant are handwritten directly on the wall with gold pens. What is revealed here is a manual process, highly mechanical, repetitive, and silent. Also revealed is a numerical proportion that points, at once, to the full capacity and the full impotence of human rationality. Pi is a number so precise that, in 2002, it reached 1,241,100,000,000 decimal places of accuracy. But is there anything more abstract than a number with at least 1,241,100,000,000 decimal places?
About a year ago, Felippe Moraes wrote a text titled Olhar para o Alto. In it, he began by recounting that, on the occasion of his first group exhibition, the curator asked him: “What moves you?” After much reflection, he answered: “Everything that surpasses us.” For the artist, from then on, this statement proved truer with each passing day, in the sense that his work is articulated around the eternal, the intangible – that is, everything that lies beyond our understanding and that we don’t even know how to name. Perhaps that is why Moraes’s body of work carries with it the idea of religion in its first sense: to re-link, to bind together again. Looking at Construção, I think that what moves the artist is, in truth, everything in us – in all of us – that is permanent. His subject is everything that constitutes us not as individuals, but as humanity. A humanity that, in looking upward, is in fact exercising the simple act of looking inward. After all, who invented the institutionalization of spirituality, and the need for it?
Fernanda Lopes
August 2011
Originally published on the website of the Paço das Artes 2011 Projects Season, São Paulo.