In the short story “A Sound of Thunder” (1952), by science fiction writer Ray Bradbury, one small event—the main character treading on a butterfly—has some major, unexpected effects, including the rise to power of a fascist leader. The message of the story is that one small detail, however innocuous or banal it may seem, could be enough to trigger a cascade of events with quite unpredictable consequences. In 1961, when the meteorologist Edward Lorenz was working on a mathematical model for forecasting the weather, he observed something similar. He saw that minimal changes in the data inputted into the model, such as temperature, humidity, and air pressure, could cause great changes in the forecast weather as time progressed, making it behave in ways that defied expectations. The precepts of Newtonian physics and the predictability they provided were in jeopardy. Lorenz baptized the phenomenon he had discovered the “butterfly effect,” which is part of chaos theory.
It is perhaps strange or, at least, inappropriate to talk about predictability in art, at least since the bankruptcy of the academies of fine arts from the nineteenth century (in Brazil). Even so, there was a brief period in 1950s Brazil when an attempt was made, under the inspiration of Gestalt theory and Max Bill’s cerebral art, to revive a constructive art guided solely by rationalism. Such was the case of Concretism, proposed by Waldemar Cordeiro and his Ruptura [Rupture] group. However, the movements that came afterwards, all of which drew on geometric abstraction to investigate the potential for a constructive experience of art, shared the same requirement of active participation by the viewer.
José Bechara’s interest in geometric construction stems from this second moment (spearheaded by Hélio Oiticica, Lygia Clark, and others), but he takes it in a diametrically opposite direction. As we know, Kandinsky’s, Mondrian’s, and Malevich’s spiritual experiments in the field of abstraction were very significant for the Neoconcretists, because they brought together the purity of basic geometric forms and the potential for asceticism, making the artist (or viewer) a “subject of pure knowledge,” according to the idea expressed by Schopenhauer, whom all the artists read.
However, Bechara’s work in painting and sculpture does not move in this direction, towards some metaphysical (or cathartic) plane accessible via Euclidean geometry and mathematics, lending a degree of certainty to the order of the world. He does not see geometry as an index of purity or perfection, something that represents the permanence of an immutable pattern to which the artist must bend in order to achieve the ultimate purity of Spirit.
We might start with his choice of support, already impregnated, as it were, with worldly experiences: used tarps (which Bechara procures from truckers in exchange for new ones). He applies copper or iron to the tarp surface, and the metal then breaks down, oxidizes, becoming part of the supporting material.
At the same time that these alchemical transformations are taking place, Bechara makes a metaphor of his own restlessness as an artist who travels wherever his work takes him, superimposing this on the traces of all the nameless journeys imprinted on the worn, dirty tarps he trades from truck drivers.
His interventions on these tarps are arranged along horizontal or vertical strips, allowing us to glimpse in between them parts of the support, whose surface layer, rendered by exposure to the wind, rain, mud, and pollution, is already sealed on. This results in a kind of apparition, as if the structures that emerged from the strips, reinforced by layers and layers of color, were spawned by a violent conflict within the material itself. This is what interests Bechara: this idea of apparition, even after a sometimes lengthy process of generation and formation that impregnates elementary yet imperfect geometric forms, like those of planets, moons, and other celestial bodies. And so his work emerges through chance and the outcomes of decisions or directions taken in the studio, yielding often quite unpredictable results.
For Bechara, his geometries are the effects of this process of intervening in the materiality of the world, in things, rather than working from pre-arranged starting points, which would imply a status quo for the work before it even happened (or arose from that conflict).
Any idea that the use of old, weather-beaten tarps might indicate some affinity to Duchamp’s ready-mades would be mistaken, since Bechara confesses an emotional attachment to them. His use of these materials is indicative of his interest in art for its ability to undergo constant transformations. It is as if, through his action, he sectioned the material at some point in its lifespan, adding this new experience to all those that came before, and that this might itself be overlaid in the future by other interventions of different kinds. Unlike Duchamp, Bechara does not select the objects on which to intervene for their visual indifference. For him, it is not so much that they are found or ready-made objects, but that they help us perceive time and contemplate the creation and degeneration of beings and things.
Space, as we conceive it, is simply one of the effects of time—the trace or mark it leaves in a given moment, transformed into place. Therefore, even after they are completed, Bechara’s paintings are not finished, set in stone. Rather, they serve as signposts for us to perceive the action of time on them and on ourselves, as well as how this action affects a certain space, filling it provisionally (in an instantaneous experience).
Something similar happens in his sculptures: Bechara rolls the cube shape as if it were a dice, whose twirls and pirouettes leave other marks, like traces in space, which are later transformed into three-dimensional signs, linked to the source or target form. In this process, Bechara sees the space around the cube as something that accompanies it, connecting it with unseen forces—forces of attraction and repulsion (that he or the process makes visible)—which in turn set off other reactions around them. It is no longer a matter of understanding the artwork for its power to rouse a response, to attract the viewer’s attention or even their participation (seeing, touching, hearing, and smelling it), as the Neoconcretists did, because such participation is already a given. There is an active response to the work that may be from up close or from afar (even if unsuspected), since Bechara’s intervention catalyzes reverberations and interactions that set off a host of other developments, even if this is not part of the declared purpose.
We might consider Bechara’s constructive strategy in the light of Mallarmé’s poem Un coup de dés jamais n'abolira le hasard (“A throw of the dice will never abolish chance”). It is an experimental work from the perspective of both the letter (grámma), the sound of the words, and the gaps left between them. He called these gaps “prismatic subdivisions”—spaces that are not neutral, but active, because they silently impose a force of attraction on words ending with certain vowels, less so on others, making reading the poem a unique, unpredictable experience every time.
Similarly, Bechara’s works engage with the transformative effects of oxidation over time, juxtaposing one painting with another while leaving small gaps of wall to interfere either with the field of vision inside the painting or with what is alongside it, making us aware of the space we occupy together with the work. As we move around in front of the wall, in front of the paintings, we become part in a chain of events that began much earlier, culminating in their installation on that wall and proceeding into the future with other events that will lead who knows where. But we will always be part of that future, without even knowing it. Like the man who trod on the butterfly.
Luiz Armando Bagolin
July 2024
Translation: Rebecca Atkinson
