This collection of works by José Bechara exhibited at the Fundação Iberê Camargo does not intend to be a retrospective. His career spans almost 30 years and this section seeks to account for the determining elements of his poetics, without wanting to exhaust every moment and phase of his work. His training as a painter in the 1980s was soon displaced due to having to move away from paints and solvents. Since the beginning of the 1990s, the used truck tarpaulin and oxidation interventions have defined a new and very fertile pictorial field. The novelty does not concern the materials, but the way in which he appropriates them and mobilizes unique pictorial functions. The attention to the material elements of the world, the experience of time and its forms of inscription on the surface of things, constituted a mode of poetic operation that had appropriation as a method and precision as a ruler.
If the work with canvas was notable for what I consider to be the first authorial moment of his poetics, the experimentation with the House, which began at the Faxinal do Céu artistic residency, in the interior of Paraná, in the early 2000s, triggered a new production, marked by a more radical use of what we could call the expanded field of painting, acting directly in space.
In his 1998 exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in Rio de Janeiro, the extrapolation of the pictorial plane was visible. Its oxidations regurgitated in agglomerations of high material density and the scale became monumental, abandoning the scale of the wall and interfering in the architecture itself. Facing the monumental room of the Rio museum, Reidy's masterpiece of brutalism, forced Bechara to give muscle to the clusters of rust, which were confused with the scars on the concrete wall. The works and their flesh of oxidized time seemed to sprout inside like mold spat out by the brutal wall of the room. At that moment a limit would have been crossed – that of the wall itself and the pictorial object. It was necessary to take the painting out of this conventional place – without making it an imperative, just an internal necessity of the work. The time to declare any death to art and its languages had already expired decades ago.
From this moment until Faxinal do Céu's residence, the work in the studio went from facing internal unrest to mobilizing new paths. In this 2002 residency, together with dozens of other artists invited by curator Agnaldo Farias, came the opportunity to respond to this demand posed by the work itself. With a prefabricated house at his disposal, he decided to experiment with his own furniture, throwing cabinets, chairs, beds and mattresses out the windows, folding the house inside out. A series of photographs and drawings were made on the occasion and a whole new material and poetic repertoire became available. On the one hand, photography ensured visualization and organized the gesture that turned the house inside out. From there, on the one hand, a production of quick drawings unfolded, articulating geometric insinuations with stains that shake the paper surface. On the other hand, a series of sculpture-installations that disseminate cubic forms and house-objects, which appear as small expanded fragments of the constructive cell of his poetics.
As a new appropriative move, common objects are reorganized based on the plastic gesture and take on mutant forms. As in his paintings and installations, there is an action that geometrizes and another that upsets the form, a game between balance and instability. At the same time that they lose their utilitarian functions, they take on a mutant plastic form. The house was deconstructed as a dwelling to be reconstructed as a modulated geometric unit, expanding between the object and the installation.
In an installation titled ok, ok, lets talk, tables and chairs accumulate and create an absurd space where there is no sitting, no conversation and any mediation is prohibited. The somewhat Beckettian impression of communicative suspension and expressive density arises from the perception that the plastic act is disconnected from discursive production. This disconnection seems like a metaphor for our everyday disorientation, where we talk a lot and understand little. May the poetic act assert itself before interpretative voracity.
The next step was to use a new support, glass. A fragile, transparent and difficult to handle material. The contained noise, which in the canvas came from the accumulated density of the material, here is introduced by the sum of heterogeneous elements that combine through conflict and not through harmonious fusion – a hanging head, a loose cube, a volume of paper, a light tube , a pictorial or chromatic insertion on the wall. Everything comes together around the glass that is the plastic catalyst of the installation.
In a way, we can say that these glass installations synthesize much of José Bechara's poetic trajectory. There is an expressive compression in them that articulates the fragile and the raw, the impersonality and the drama. Something that already appeared on the canvas with the geometry introduced by oxidation, but which is made explicit here without ceremony. The dramatic dimension acquired by the work seems to me to be produced by the insertion of light, which plays a decisive role: not only due to the temperature it gives to the installation, heating the glass, but also through the play of shadows and reflections that is introduced. It is also here that the aesthetic experience, mentioned at the beginning, takes on affective tones unknown in his previous work – more speculative, more symbolist, full of scenic suggestions. A trajectory that completes three decades and, thus, already allows us to have a more integrated view of poetic paths that have been unfolding and moving. Some movements can be seen here, with the game between appropriation and construction as a recurring productive principle. Sliding between distinct materialities and plastic effects, this principle relies on the opacity inherent to high modernity, in which saying and showing are in constant tension, without isolating themselves from the noise around them. Mainly, he believes that artistic expression should not be reduced to discursive forms, thus expanding our semantic repertoire and our ways of seeing and thinking about the contemporary world.
Luiz Camillo Osório
