This exhibition was conceived as a conceptual provocation, in which the artist consented to reduce her vocabulary to a minimum – whether in terms of format, colors or materials – articulating it through variations. In this way, the curator hoped to make the grammar of this process apparent.
By the way, it is important to recognize the fact that, over the last three decades, Elizabeth Jobim's work has gradually evolved from abstract expressionism to a constructive practice whose measured lexicon has some things in common with conceptualism. In fact, in her work, references to early concretism or neoconcretism have sometimes been recognized, while the artist's subtle manipulation of that tradition has gone unnoticed. Indeed, the work done by Jobim in this last decade is a consistent challenge to our expectations about how contemporary painting interacts with space, and his most recent production has led to the creation of objects that defy easy classification, blurring the separation between painting and sculpture. The spatial implications of this new approach have been radical, as her works have gradually left the walls and spilled onto the floor, in arrangements reminiscent of Barry Le Va installations.
Luiz Camillo Osorio had already noticed a new direction in Jobim's practice in 2013, when the painting was already detached from the wall to interact in the exhibition space. Osorio observed, with insight, that “the integral apprehension of the installed form” occurred in a fragmented way, step by step, as the viewer moved through the space. In a 2018 essay, written for the exhibition In this place, held at the Henrique Faria Fine Art gallery, in New York, Venezuelan art historian Juan Ledezma identified in Jobim's work a “visual concept of disjunction”, brought to light, less by “technical expedients”, rather than by cutting, cutting again and dismembering actions. More recently, Marta Mestre also addressed the “environmental character” of Jobim’s work, which gains “greater relevance” in his “sensory relationship with the spectator’s body”.
It is true that placing Jobim's process in the context of artists affiliated with concretism and neo-concretism yields a coherent argument. It is equally important, however, to remember that for his generation, the modernist legacy was compromised by artists such as Franz Erhard Walther, Franz West and Daniel Buren, whose works dangerously move between art and artifact. Her exploration of form, color and space seems to converge with the everyday aesthetics of Jean-Luc Godard, as can be seen in his disconcerting use of color in the film One Plus One, in which the Rolling Stones rehearse Sympathy for the Devil amidst a casual installation of monochromatic panels.
Lawrence Weiner gave a seminal 1991 work a title that doubles as a description of it: Bits & Pieces Put Together to Present a Semblance of a Whole. Painted on the red brick facade of the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, Weiner's text seems to suggest some deeper philosophical mystery, or perhaps just state a truism about building walls: pieces put together, etc. Weiner's wit in using language that is confused with objects is a constant throughout his career, as shown in a previous work entitled Many Colored Objects Placed Side by Side to Form a Row of Many Colored Objects.
These reflections on Lawrence Weiner came to mind a few months ago, when I began a dialogue with Elizabeth Jobim about her new series of sculptures. Although Jobim's work cannot, strictly, be considered conceptual in the same way as we consider Weiner's, it seems to me that there is a kinship between the processes of these two artists, which is not seen in terms of style, but in something that is deeply embedded in language. Both artists ask us, each in their own way, to think about how art is constructed, and, above all, how we, the public, produce meaning from specific arrangements and compositions. The contentment we feel when faced with works of this nature is reminiscent of Antonio Salieri's reaction, fictionalized in the film Amadeus (1979), when listening to Mozart's Gran Partita. Indeed, the success of bringing the work of art from the lyrics to life, from its conceptual phase, and making it resonate in real space, has always seemed to us like an act of magic. The power that art has to enchant us seems to lie in the seemingly infinite capacity of language to recombine its small repertoire of notes, words and forms into new variations.
Antonio Sérgio Bessa
Text from the exhibition Variações no Paço Imperial, Rio de Janeiro, 2019.
