Landscape is the primordial enigma. It has always surrounded us, indefatigable in its extent and variation. Landscape precedes us and someone will already have noticed, with a degree of surprise, that deep down it is always the same, although it varies depending on to the time of day, on the season, on what has been planted in it or on whether it is rain-soaked or dry, as when the sun beats down or when it lies covered by heavy clouds that then fall away, sending their plump, fleeting shadows sliding.

Whoever, like Phileas Fogg, has set out to travel around the world along the straightest line possible, whoever has advanced across it, has found over the course of a long period of time (80 days, in this case), that however far one moves, one is always moving on it. But is it really necessary to go so far? The fact that the landscape is always changing yet always the same had already been noted even by men who were far from engaged in adventure. Indeed, even the sheer mountains that form the Rio de Janeiro coastline, the “disjointed scale of the sierras, topped with ridges and eroded by coves”,(1) are nothing more than the same soft, sleek ground that smoothly emerges under the movement of the waves, becoming even more delicate as dry, loose sand to then, suddenly, shoot upwards, transformed into stone, adorned with thick vegetation, and later slide down, unwinding into valleys and plains, reinventing itself at new attitudes, expanding westwards. And even in the opposite direction, advancing over the sea, one observes the perpetual and elastic game of its translucid peaks and troughs; reverberations of submersed topography, of the hidden depressions that occasionally rise up in the form of islands that look more like chunks of floating land.

In view of these considerations, what is Edu Coimbra dealing with when he deals with landscape? Is he dealing with landscape itself or with the language resources, that is to say, the forms of representation – whether they be photographs, drawings or paintings – which we employ to speak of it? If that is the case, he deals with it remotely. And is there any other way of addressing it? According to the artist, yes, there is. This is affirmed in his installations, or to put it less technically, his interventions in closed environments or public areas, or even in his objects, miniature landscapes that may be superficially interpreted as models, thus representations. But this is not the focus here, since they are landscapes of a different scale and not that to which we are accustomed.

In both cases the artist seems to defend the idea that is both tangible to the external landscape, that through which we walk while taking it in with our eyes, and to the representations of landscape. Moreover, this is about two inseparable terms. That is because the earth’s skin consists equally of the ideas and images extracted from it. He who passes through the world is simultaneously and inevitably the centre of this world; it is he who founds it. This is about both a problem of position and a problem of the order of the sense; he who is surrounded by the landscape is the same person who pours meanings into it. It is he who reads it. It is he makes use of it to avoid losing himself.

The question is that ideas and images possess autonomy in relation to that which they represent. They have the arbitrary nature pertaining to language, they bear a logic which is both meticulous and flexible. One need only tense them, invert them, read them from back to front like a palindrome, for them to skew and point toward that which had erstwhile been unimaginable; for the meaning to divert in another, unusual, absurd direction. Produced in 2000, Tunnel places us before this situation of reversibility. It presents a train piercing a mountain. Piercing because on the one side we see a tunnel which the train has half entered, and on the other there is the mountain being blasted through by the front of the train. Culture and nature. Culture as a battering ram that cleaves through nature with hammer blows. Or is it nature that rebelliously collapses over the artifice? The train track suggests continuity. According to the laws of geometry, parallel lines meet in infinity. The train is going but could return. It is, therefore, a temporary, albeit dramatically essential, situation. A moment of paralysis on a greater voyage. Like a blockade on a bridge over an abyss; like speech that suddenly decides to obstruct the passage of the meaning of that which it is supposed to carry neutrally.

Because it depends on us, landscape is as fragile a field as the means which we use to move around in it. As delicate as the most abstract of representations. In Horizons we watch the ground breaking up. The crust that we deemed rigid, the first layer of a dense world, is a film that hides an underground sky. The landscape is therefore a fine plane that separates the sky from the sky. According to this work, we walk along suspended, compromised by the emptiness. All things considered, this situation is no different to when we stand encircled by the landscape, reduced to a vertical line through which all our surroundings flow.

Tunnel and Horizons have the mobility of representations, they are devices whose gears can be assembled and reassembled with different results. Just like the unusual images of the Landscape series, made on photographic paper and applied on light boxes. The large-scale format, 120 cm by 200 cm and 17 cm deep throughout, in itself only shifts the result to beyond a trivial image. On an epidermal and plausible plane we have an image-object in its place. As if this were not enough, the artist deconstructs the image of the landscape, generating unusual arrangements and demonstrating it not as a product that is subordinate to the external reference whence it came, but rather as a game that lends itself to ambivalent results, like the two portions of horizons with the sky in between, like the row of tree tops fanning out against the blue sky. These works, as if refusing to demarcate our movements, no longer reiterate our position in the world. Polarities between high and low, light and heavy are no longer valid in them. They remain landscapes, but invented landscapes.

Edu Coimbra’s art is pervaded by the idea that when we superimpose language on the world, this ends up causing an inevitable confusion between the two terms. This is the case of the white Drawings, the lines of which are made from small wooden slats. The ideal of the white and of geometry fails to impede their desire to gain shape. The drawing, generally an unpredictable construction, an absurd geometric solution when checked against the standards of representation, are converted into thing, into tangible object.

Language and the world are fertile in gaps. Like the ground that opens up to let the sky pass through, like the series of white drawers that protrude from the walls, belying their apparent white, opaque, planar integrity. There is a zone through which the mystery is insinuated. Like the colours contained in the four half-open drawers on each face of the work Night Stand. Drawers are signs of interiority, place of hidden things, kept or even forgotten. Yet, seen from above, the work shows us its interior. It explains to us that the white volume will be undone by the successive sliding of the drawers, that from each of them colours will spill out and spread into the environment.

2000

obs: text written for the catalog of the Paisagem Local (Local Landscape) exhibition, held at the Museum of Modern Art in Rio de Janeiro, MAM-Rio, in July 2000

note:
1 Euclides da Cunha in “Os Sertões”