O Peso do Intangível / The Weight of the Intangible

by Sylvia Werneck, 2018

Babel Art Magazine

Felippe Moraes marks 10 years of his career. Our fondness for “round” numbers gives the occasion the status of a milestone, especially for an artist who uses the mechanisms of mathematics to investigate our human condition – what moves us, what paralyzes us. In numerology, this number 10 becomes 1 + 0 = 1. The meaning of 1 is unity, wholeness, and also a new beginning. Even if we don’t think mystically, all cultures tend to regard certain passages of time as fitting moments to take stock of the past and choose which new paths to follow.

Every milestone carries an air of ending, at least the end of a cycle, and invites retrospection. Looking back over Felippe Moraes’s ten years of work makes a lot of sense, given his way of creating. The “objects” we see in his exhibitions and call works of art are, in fact, only the materialization of the final result of a whole process that took place much earlier – each work is almost a residue, a trace. And it is from there that we follow the clues left along the way, until we can arrive back at the beginning, at the genesis of the idea.

The Realm of Impossibilities

What gets us out of bed in the morning? What are we doing here? These are questions we ask ourselves with greater or lesser frequency. “I think, therefore I am.” They say Descartes’s original phrase was actually “I doubt, therefore I think, therefore I am.” To doubt, that is, to question, is characteristic of human nature, regardless of culture, upbringing, or social condition. It is also a continuous exercise – every question answered leads to more challenges, more doubts, more reasons to keep going, always in the expectation that someday we will arrive somewhere – wherever that may be.

Despite his youth, Felippe Moraes is extremely prolific, having produced a considerable body of work across the most varied media and techniques. What they have in common is an evident care in execution, an attention to every detail and finish. Conceptually, the artist is drawn to subjects surrounding the human condition – that tireless search for something we cannot name. He himself states that he is drawn “to what surpasses him,” by the desire to grasp the ungraspable. Yes, the sublime lies beneath, breathing and pulsing under every work of this restless thinker, who seeks, through art, to do philosophy. It is no accident that he makes clear, without hesitation, that what interests him least is knowing about art itself – this is a means, not an end. His works are traces, and the piece has existed long before as thought, as question, as desire.

Always a Little Further

“A Distância do Horizonte” (2009–2010) is a paradigmatic work at the core of Felippe’s research – it deals with continuous movement toward somewhere. It consists of a formula developed in cooperation with a mathematician to calculate the distance in kilometers between any person and the horizon. The answer to this poetic curiosity can be found by applying the following formula to the individual’s measurements:

ht = total height (in meters)
ho = distance between the center of the eyes and the top of the head (in meters)

Since each person is different, the distance to the horizon is, therefore, different for each one, but the impossibility of reaching it is the same for everyone. No matter how much we move, the distance remains the same: our “search for the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow” is doomed to fail. Even so, aware of this impossibility, we insist.

Felippe is interested in the big questions, those that concern humanity as a whole and whose answers are as desired as they are unreachable. Perhaps that is why his method is to ground his inquiries in something universal – namely, science, more specifically mathematics. His approach to it, however, is quite peculiar. We were dogmatically taught to respect this science – held in ancient Greece as the noblest of all – as absolute, unquestionable knowledge. The disturbance the artist introduces is that mathematics, too, is nothing more than a language – tautologically, its laws apply to problems that were fitted to the logic of mathematics’s own universe. This arbitrariness is made explicit, for example, in “Divisão” (2011), in which a log of wood is cut in different ways to illustrate the operation, while making clear that a given “solution” was favored over others equally applicable.

With each work, the search for a definition that cannot be defined is refounded, using a science that, even as it answers the questions posed, never reaches its core, since that core is always, like the horizon, a little further off – the sublime that always eludes us. “Verbo” (2009–2010) is a frustrated attempt to mathematically analyze a theological proposition: for seven months the artist pored over a Catholic bible to cut out every occurrence of the word “Deus” [“God”] from the text. He arrived at a count of 5,101 mentions, which were classified by typography (italic, bold, uppercase, etc.). In the unfolding of this work, “O Peso do Verbo” (2010–2014), the cut-out words were weighed, totaling 15 g. The installation contains, in addition to the scale, 72 glass vessels with electricity-conducting materials of this exact weight.

A point (to use a mathematical concept) common to the entire body of Felippe Moraes’s work is the concern with what is strictly necessary in the composition. The material trace that is presented – the clue that calls for a path to be traced back to the founding idea – is treated with the care not to let it become more important than the whole process that made its existence possible. Because these are thoughts that do not stand in isolation, but weave connections with other ideas, it is not uncommon for the artist’s projects to unfold, always a little further.

Such is the case with the continuation of the search for the horizon, carried out in 2016 on Caminho Niemeyer, in Rio de Janeiro. This is the “Monumento ao Horizonte,” a steel structure resembling a ship’s bow, but open at the back. Inside it is a staircase, on whose landing a horizontal slit was cut, framing a fixed view of Guanabara Bay. In this case, the horizon on offer is at once arbitrary, since it is the same for anyone, and democratic, since it is the same for anyone. The interval of time between the two works, and the direction each one takes, says something about the artist’s own trajectory. Felippe Moraes turns 30 in 2018, reaching, just as his body of work does, a milestone. Even though one can foresee that his investigative spirit will hardly change, since such an appetite is in the nature of every artist, it is possible that some changes are beginning to show – not in the power of his discourse, but perhaps in his own way of handling the work process, with more room for chance, as has already happened recently in some projects. Maturity often leads to a more serene approach to one’s passions. And incredible things can happen.

Sylvia Werneck
2018

Originally published in Babel Art Magazine – Edição 10 – 2018