The astuteness of Eduardo Coimbra’s Project for Capanema Palace is initially found in its reproduction of the window frames of the old Ministry of Education – in their detail, material, colour, proportions and scale. Thus the work is clearly bound to the architecture that precedes and shelters it. The precision in the drawing of the details and in the assembly of the metal frames, the respect for the proportions, for the modulation and the existing axes; all this explicitly alludes to the inaugural and most significant work of modern architecture in Brazil, and attests to the extent to which the artist took his time over it, resolute in understanding it from the point of view of its spatial conception and of each of its atomic elements. Even the decision to stay just a few centimetres from touching the columns acknowledges and pays tribute to one of the basic principles of rationalist architecture of which this building wants to be, and is, a legitimate representative: independence between structure and sealing, made clear precisely on the floor plan of the exhibition hall.

Yes one soon sees that the work seeks a denser relationship with the architecture: in truth, as soon as we recognise the folding down of the existing frames, the game begins. Transported to inside the building and arranged transversally in relation to the continuous windows of the mezzanine, the new frames end up challenging the customary way of seeing the architecture. To a more attentive eye, the four rows of panels are found to be only apparently equal: vertically split into unequal yet proportional strips, they connect to the dynamism generated by the alternance between the static and moving panes of the original window frames, and to the, so to speak, uncontrollable frequency of the façade surfaces in view of the opening and closing of their numerous guillotine windows.

The corps-à-corps with the work thus gradually reveals almost a violation of the Le Corbusier architectonic system, from which this building derives. And it is not only the functionalist order that finds itself disturbed by the displacement of the window frames to inside (for which the elimination of the handles is also a decisive factor, as elements that give away the practical purpose of the windows). Contained, in principle, within the boundaries extracted from the architecture – the internal space between the columns, both transversally and longitudinally – the work obstructs the continuous flow promised by the free plan, and ends up defining a circulation parallel to the vertical film that the exhibitions block intercepts and announces. Even though the space continues to spill out beyond the panel-partition-window frames, the result is a short circuit of obliquity suggested by the piloti, the emptiness of which unequivocally discourages a frontal appreciation of the architecture, opening itself up to the dynamics inherent to the city.

Despite its discretion, and the sympathetic relationship with the building designed by Lucio Costa, Oscar Niemeyer, Affonso Eduardo Reidy and others, Eduardo Coimbra’s work is, therefore, far from allowing itself to dissolve into the architecture. And if at first glance it hardly exists, it quietly takes shape as we walk through it, emerging in tandem with those willing to practice it.

Gradually, what were simple iron profile squares become windows, frameworks, frames to glance through. And when we realise that we are already fully involved in the unique experience of the work, grappling with terms that are inseparable from the field of art and architecture, without escaping, through our own body’s movements and displacements, from a kind of trompe l’oeil that plays with the void and the “deepest space that exists”, in the words of Clarice Lispector: the mirror.

In this “crystallized void” the “unutterable space” of Corbusierian architecture folds over itself ad infinitum, now reengaged (and shuffled) by our own body, cut out into fragmentary and elusive images that provoke a strange displacement and, nonetheless, constantly repose the problems of frontality, planarity and totality in art.

The whole, if it exists, resides in the limit to be guillotined. It will be mentally reconstructed, perhaps as we circumvent the work, pass through it, bend over it. There is not a lot, in any case, that we can see of ourselves in the time lapse in which we are caught there, with a shiver that leaves no marks, but only traces.

2011

obs: text written for the catalog of the work Project for Capanema Palace, installed in the Gustavo Capanema Building, Rio de Janeiro, in November 2010