What is the difference between a human being and an animal? Does rationality, which distinguishes us, make us less animal? How certain are we that our human perception of the world is superior to that of a mouse, a cat, a dog, a chimpanzee or a pigeon?
These questions are central to the work of Iago Gouvea. The debate about the limits of human beings and their relationship with other creatures has intensified in recent decades in the most diverse areas of science and philosophy, but it dates back to Antiquity or Montaigne (1533-1592).
Iago Gouvea's curiosity and restlessness are noticeable when exploring a controversial field and presenting unusual formal solutions, which gives him a uniqueness in contemporary production.
After drawing, his research turned to the sculptural field, exploring different materials. Although his works bring different approaches to animality, the problematization of the exploitation of animals by man runs through all of his works.
In the exhibition More other than any other, Iago Gouvea shows three sets of works: The In vitro series, installed in an aseptic laboratory environment. Here, the use of rats as test subjects for scientific research is taken to the extreme. They are ceramic sculptures, in which deformities provoke strangeness to awaken a reflection, not without a dose of irony, on the limits of science in the relationship with animals.
The sculpture of a monkey, with its brain open and attached to a golden apparatus, subverts the European tradition of porcelain animals, in which such objects conferred status of nobility and good taste, to make an acid criticism of the values of the consumer and scientific society.
The second exhibition space is dedicated to animals that inhabit cities, highlighting the harshness of bird and mammal life in the urban environment. The sculptural design, especially the materials used – cement, steel beams, rust and broken glass – appropriate construction flaws and expose the city's scars.
Urban construction materials (cement, rust and tar) are also used in the paintings, which resume the scientific and industrial theme of mass reproduction originating from the Pigeon Making Machine and a reference to the poem High Surgery, by Carlos Drummond de Andrade, about a dog with two hearts. The tree, full of latex hoses, creates a contrast between nature and industry, the result of human culture, reinforced by the nature of traps and a threat to birds.
To close the exhibition, a panel of ceramic sculptures made up of 30 wall pieces. They are anthropomorphized animals, which refer to collections of scientists' records carried out on expeditions throughout Brazil. They compose, paradoxically, a futuristic archeology, in which men and animals merge and suggest another type of relationship between them and, perhaps, the end of this dichotomy that separates us.
Pablo Pires, 2023
Click here to download the exhibition's catalog (in portuguese).
