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It always interested Eduardo Coimbra to understand and broaden the meanings concerning the significance of landscape. In an oneiric way the artist made heaven and earth meet in Cloud (2008) and, therefore, what belonged to the order of air and vision could poetically also finally be experienced through touch. In Asteroids (1999), a series of landscape cut-outs turns clear a puzzle that formally alludes to the star that entitles the artwork. It is the conception of a new mapping regarding the world, as if we had returned to Pangea: one and indivisible world, which for this very reason can only inhabit the territory of fiction. There are, however, two other artworks that seem to have a closer correspondence with 2 Sculptures (2013), work which is the issue of this brief essay, temporarily installed at Praça Tiradentes. They are: Through (2002) and Nature of Landscape (2007). In the first work – a project not yet carried out –, the artist suggests the construction of a hill which would be pierced by big pipes in thickness and height allowing the audience (an adult with his/her back slightly arched would be a parameter) to walk from one end to the other of that artificial nature. Nature of Landscape, on the other hand, performed in 2007 at MAM-RJ and in 2011 at the Museu de Arte da Pampulha, consisted of the symbolical displacement of the external landscape – or, in other words, the one neighboring the museum – into the institution. Thousands of small pots of grass were introduced inside the white cube, not as a situation of confrontation with the white cube but fundamentally as a situation of a fold, in the Deleuzian sense of the term, as if nothing could separate the two spaces, once they were “a space of continuous assembly”, constituting an “inside” which is the “fold of the outside”. The curvatures of the fold would interlace and we no longer would be able to tell in or out apart. And it is here that this short history of Coimbra’s artworks connects to 2 Sculptures. Installed in the center of Rio de Janeiro at a moment when the city undergoes a critical process of gentrification, real estate speculation, rent increase and geographical mobility of its inhabitants, it is curious how the geometry of the artist’s installation highlights the use of a sculpture as a house-shelter. The Sculptures discusses the place of art’s social practice and what differs and at the same time brings together public and private spaces (another recurrent theme in the artist’s work), as its hollow volume is constantly filled in by the square’s passers-by, who invest in that work as a playful space, or the homeless, who use it as a house. In addition, it questions a model of modernity that, with its perverse and globalizing ideology – visible in the precarious redistribution of the space, as well as of the political and economic power –, transmits signs of a collapse, as we have seen this year since June in Brazil with the street demonstrations. The Sculptures signals eloquently that the limits between public and citizen seem to have become blurred. There is a playful note to the work but fundamentally the positioning of art as an action that is coincident with politics. Here I refer to another political moment in the art world which formally echoes with this work. The Bauhaus, in an ideological attitude, and to a certain extent, utopian, aspired to contaminate the world with art. Geometry, associated to a process of industrialization and dispersal of the means of consumption, could be found in products that varied from a pen to the building of a house. Mutatis mutandis, geometry and politics meet once again in these Sculptures. The new configurations that an architectural thought promote in the city, such as the sculpture at issue, also mean to reflect on art’s political sphere. It’s remarkable that the two sculptures are placed next to one of the city’s oldest monuments (1) and how this opposition between the new and the old, the eternal and the transitory, the opaque and the translucent reverberates in the continuity of the transformation of a space (2) which becomes increasingly penetrable or fluid for members of the public. Furthermore, it involves a discussion that encompasses aesthetics and social themes, as free access to public leisure areas, citizenship and the feeling of belonging to the city. In the Sculptures, the landscape merges into the work. The entire surroundings are activated by the sculpture on account of the simple fact that it is a structure which is traversed by the eye. Its volume is “filled in” by emptiness, which in this case is the spectator’s very space of appropriation and experimentation. Then the sculpture is shaped by such dissimilar acts as transforming itself into a room or becoming a support for playing. It is the moment when the social and political space merge, simultaneously revealing one of the most significant contributions that Coimbra’s work offers to the art repertoire. 2013 obs: text written for the catalog of the 2 Esculturas (2 Sculptures) exhibition, installed at Praça Tiradentes, Rio de Janeiro, in September 2013 notes: |