The collective curation proposal brings together works by Isaura Pena, Pedro Motta, Francisco Magalhães, Renato Madureira, Júnia Penna, Ricardo Homen, and Rodrigo Borges.
After visiting the Murillo La Greca Museum (Recife, PE), the Genesco Murta Gallery and the Palácio das Artes (Belo Horizonte, MG) in 2006, and in 2009 the Bahia Museum of Modern Art (Salvador, BA), the exhibition Impure Geometry arrives in Rio de Janeiro, occupying the three floors of the Hélio Oiticica Art Center, presenting the recent production of these seven visual artists, all from Minas Gerais, with photographs, sculptures, paintings, drawings and installations.
“Geometry, according to one of its definitions, is the part of mathematics whose object is the study of space and the figures that can occupy it. Perhaps this is one of the keys to entering the multiple network of meanings that the works in the Geometria Impura exhibition introduce us to”, points out Eduardo de Jesus, member of the board of directors of Associação Cultural Videobrasil and professor at the Faculty of Communication and Arts at PUC Minas l, in text written when the exhibition was at MAM in Bahia.
Impure Geometry brings together works that reveal, through sometimes minimal differences, the limits between the work of art, the world of art and non-art, creating a state of tensions and changes, due to the nature of the works, which maintains space and surface at a level of suspension typical of the nature of art at the beginning of this century. The artists develop visual research that, despite the diversity of means and interests, points to some common procedures. These procedures reveal a poetic approach between the works, present in the spatiality, in the notion of emptiness and in the constructive sense.
“The works of Francisco Magalhães, Isaura Pena, Júnia Penna, Pedro Motta, Renato Madureira, Ricardo Homen and Rodrigo Borges seem to show us an effort to expand the boundaries of construction methods. What structures the works are flaws, absences and intervals, which, instead of preventing enjoyment, end up highlighting the qualities and powers of the works”, adds Eduardo de Jesus.
Francisco, Júnia and Pedro work at the limit, in this limit of such wide thickness, almost like a plateau, on which contemporary art is located, which does not establish criteria on what it should look like. For Júnia and Francisco, the limits between the different fields of work in the works and between them and the exhibition space appear to be frayed. Pedro turns his gaze to the breadth of the landscape, reconfiguring the place, establishing other possible constructions and symbols. The propositions of these three artists, clearly analytical, are presented in one way at a moment, reconfiguring themselves in another way ahead, in an inconclusive and moving process. Renato and Rodrigo discuss issues of three-dimensionality with works that highlight drawing as a possible matrix for a project for space, highlighting relationships between materials and the possibilities of tension on them. Over the chosen material, the permanence and traces of the artist's action are extended, added to the visible surface. Isaura and Ricardo work on the limit as a surface issue. They sometimes work through a permeable limit made by means of bars and gaps, sometimes through an opaque limit of flat planes. In both situations, the surface always reveals itself to be determined, but also, paradoxically, restless. His works include Painting and Drawing, but the limits of their locations in the world appear increasingly porous.
“Much more than proving the possible impurities of geometry, these artists invite us to think about the confrontations of contemporary artistic production in the times we live in, clearly oriented by control and functionality. Here it is worth the lack of control and the recurrence of breaking the limits of the form and making it appear in other and new compositions derived from risk and uncertainty, bringing us closer to chaos”, concludes Eduardo de Jesus.
The Geometria Impura exhibition – with free entry and free rating – is part of the Desvios Exhibition Project, sponsored by the Rouanet Law.
Isaura Pena presents a series of six, six 100 x 145 cm drawings that, placed side by side, propose a horizontal dialogue with the landscape, making an allusion to the surfaces of the lakes. They are ink washes on paper in thirteen different dilutions: from almost white to deep black. The first drawing, a layer of ink wash. The second, two layers of ink. The third, three layers. The fourth, three plus two, five layers. The fifth, three plus five, eight. The sixth drawing, five plus eight: thirteen layers of ink washes. As in the Fibonacci Sequence which consists of a series of numbers, defining the first two numbers as 0 and 1, the following are obtained through the sum of their two predecessors. Therefore: 0, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21, 34, 55, 89, 144, 233,.... The first layer was applied to all six prepared papers. The second, in all the other five, that is, in the second, third, fourth, fifth and sixth. Third in all remaining fours; the fourth in all the other three; the fifth in the last two. And the sixth, the seventh, the eighth, the ninth, the tenth, the eleventh, the twelfth and the thirteenth only on the sixth paper... This work was presented at the Pampulha Museum in 2007.
