São Paulo, Brasil
30/08/2018 - 15/10/2018

Notes by the sea

Agnaldo Farias

”The waves roll out your arms

And white people fall face down. ”

The beach. Sophia de Mello Breyner Andresen

The change in the state of the materials, or their treatment, in order to contradict the vocations usually associated with them, is one of the foundations of José Spaniol’s poetics, which has been manifested since always and not only now, in this exhibition, in which his works assume a body similar to sea water that dies on the shore, as with the iridescent, smooth and light floor, on which we step as if on the thin films of waves when they break in short and intermittent advances and retreats, neither there nor here , washing and bringing light to the sand, and with this succession of paintings – we can call them that, although they are not made of canvas and paints -, in frank dialogue with the floor, all of them made of colored acrylic sheets, for itself a hardened, transparent and reflective liquid resin, which the artist fixes slightly away from the wall, taking advantage of the thin and translucent mass that casts pigmented shadows on the walls.

This interest of the artist has an unexpected amplitude, since it includes solid, liquid and gaseous substances. A good example is the way it faces the earth, a recurring matter in its trajectory. Exploring it in different directions, changing its physical states, facing it as a disintegrated surface floor, reduced to dust, rising and saturating the atmosphere due to the effect of wind or simple stepping, or moistened to the point of becoming pasty, slippery, soft and malleable clay, and still hard, as when dried out by excessive sun. This vector includes the compact hardness of the stones, such as the marble slabs that he used as a support in his series of paintings presented at the São Paulo Biennial of 2002 (installation Vista thus, consisting of slates and stairs). Would they be paintings or would it be better to refer to them as paintings / sculptures? The artist’s attention to the states of matter unfolds in the concepts with which he operates; thus, it can be perfectly concluded that these marbles are painted sculptures, strictly speaking an extension of his first works, even in the 1980s, paintings made on successions of small wooden battens. In place of the submissive placidity of the canvas drawn in hidden wooden frames, the artist preferred the property of straight, vertical and horizontal bundles, competing for space with the paints applied on them.

Back to the marble paintings / sculptures, they also refer to the series of paintings / sculptures made in ceramics, entitled Mirrors, from 2000. Small pieces, 40 x 40 cm, protruding from the upper extremities, something around 15 cm, pointing down like a wedge and accentuating the falling sensation. If the color, any one of them, is of an atmospheric, intangible nature, in this series it gains mass and weight and seems to be at risk of a fall. The painted marble slates were so heavy that they could not be suspended; the walls would not support them, so they were accommodated along the two parallel walls that, together with a third, made of glass, made up the space of 10 x 10 m2 reserved for the artist. Leaning against each other, the slates, which did not offer resistance to the force of gravity, faced a staircase that diagonally occupied the space, a staircase made of red earth, compacted using the traditional technique of rammed earth, ground pounded into wooden forms, and which , against the weight announced by the marble slabs, he propelled the room upwards, as if he spoke of the will and the possibility of rising.

If the exhibition now refers to the floor by the sea, which is intermittently covered with sheets of water and which breaks apart in irregular circles when the waves break up in a confusion of foam, it must be considered that, according to the artist’s logic on the change in the state of affairs and on the versatility of his physical behavior, the floor, in this exhibition, is raised and extends across the wall in paintings / sculptures made of acrylic sheets placed before the public eye.

In this exhibition, as in previous series, the works are organized by the tension between the vertical and horizontal planes and lines. Unexpectedly, the ground runs upwards, subverting the impulse of gravity. In it there is a reasoning similar to that used in the series of objects The rest of the room, from 2006, a set of wooden tables, chairs and beds, whose feet and backrests extended upwards, until they were amended in other tables, chairs and beds, same but inverted reproductions of those below, positioned as if seeking to sit on the ceiling of the room in which they were being exposed, or in the sky, when arranged in free areas.

In any of these vectors there is a taste for instability, for unbalanced or precariously balanced structures, the understanding that everything is fluctuating, as is the case with installations made up of scales, equipped with rods fixed by cables placed off center, as in the instruments used in street fairs to measure weight, and that the artist uses to find the balance between totally different things, such as a pile of books and ceramic balls (Biblioteca e balanças, 1999; Balanças e lousas, 2009 ).

Among the most fluid substances and structures, splendid ones are those that affect water, changing surfaces that react to light as if they shatter, producing reflections. As part of this family, as one of the highlights of the artist’s long and complex investigation, the words, composed of printed letters, molded or sculpted in various materials.

The starting point of attention to words is a 1992 piece, entitled The condition of the flight is not physical, neither the air nor the wings. It is the memory of when José Spaniol still lived in Germany and studied at the Dusseldorf Academy. A phrase printed on waxed paper (“It was just a beautiful phrase. There alone. No previous or later thought. A beauty with no place to exist”), accommodated in a small box with thick walls, made of paraffin (30 x 12 x 9 cm) ). An urn, a shelter for words, a strategy that sought to prevent its dissolution in space, given that a text is nothing more than a current. From then on, the artist explored the text from both angles, physical and semantic, and ended up throwing words to the floor, making the floor a role, a space proper to the proliferation of parataxes, riddled syntaxes, sentences passed by puns, palindromes and onomatopoeias, in short, a source of movement of meanings. Texts that in general made wide use of paraffin, a cunning material when heated, which liquefies and then, at the speed dictated by the temperature of the air, starts to stiffen, imprisoning the body that perhaps wets, creating an opaque, translucent skin , cold, fogging and softening the pulse of what is inside. Just the opposite of the semantic potency they raise, the plethora of meanings that radiate from the submerged body.

This is the case of the letters at the feet of the two drunken boats, perched on top of crisscrossed bundles of bamboo, a superlative installation presented at the São Paulo State Pinacoteca in 2016, named Tiamm Schuoomm Cash !, a sound similar to the noise, the rumor sometimes imperceptible from the short waves that join the land with the moving part of the world.

We walked through the exhibition now as on the surface of the waters, on a floor ruled by impermanence, a floating floor composed of black granite, marbled by irregular, circular, ellipsoid portions of white marble. On the four walls that define the environment, four sets of acrylic paintings / sculptures, in violet, yellow, blue and orange colors. Each of them, in the manner of the floor, inlaid with milky white acrylic plans. They are colored boxes: the plates are fixed by screws that make them 7 cm apart from a white support with the same measures. Henri Matisse warned that the first streak on a sheet of paper was the fifth. Edges count. Also the rectangular edges of an acrylic sheet, even more so when they are 6 mm thick, as is the case. They are thick edges and in them the colors intensify, the design of the piece is even clearer, as well as the sinuous contours of the inserted white planes. The gaze drifts drifting over each of them, gliding along the paths opened by these graphics. And the color, grain of the resinous material, dissolves inside, dyeing the support behind it, raising it gently, attracting the eye, making it pass through the plate and continuing through an impalpable layer. The visitor walks slowly through the gallery, as there is no way not to give in to the sight of such an eloquent floor, while floating on the surfaces of the paintings. He sees through them and sees himself reflected in them. There is something in this experience when we enter the sea, when we keep the water around our waist and half of our body disappears, and, in awe, we play with the changing surface that divides us, making us inhabit two worlds, the water turbid by the white of the waves crashing, perpetually crashing.