|
A sculpture sprawls through all the exhibition spaces of the Casa de Cultura Laura Alvim. Neither sculpted nor modelled, but rather built from hollow iron cubes, at times overlapping or at ground level, painted in black and white stripes, or just in black and white, it forms the exhibition A Sculpture in the Room, by Eduardo Coimbra. Other formations with these same cubes were presented as urban interventions in the exhibition entitled The Experience of Art, in Brasília in 2014, and at the Praça Tiradentes, as part of the artist’s exhibition 2 Sculptures in 2013. Here, it becomes a kind of indoor intervention, or, to use Rosalind Krauss’ terms, a sculpture in the expanded field. Relations with the sculpture are recurrent in Edu Coimbra’s poetics. According to the artist, “even with only cut-out photos grouped together, in Asteroids the procedure bears an aspect of the sculptural gesture of accommodating volumes, promoting the inversion of the concave sense of landscape into the convex of the object.”(1) A Sculpture in the Room maintains a strong relationship with the architecture and with the industrial object, creating a new connection with the space, with new flows, as if it were “de-architecting it” to “rearchitect it”. There are 29 cubes in all, measuring 0.5, 1 and 2 metres; with two of the large ones encrusted into walls. The 10 cm wide black and white stripes create a measure of the space. A rhythmic sensation is given by the direction of the stripes: vertical when the cube is striped all over, and horizontal when it has white or black plated faces. Iron is a sculptural element of the structure, and its weight requires the lower slabs to be propped up. Hollowed out, the cubes shape a path, enabling people to walk on them, crossing spaces, or simply to sit on them and appreciate the landscape of Ipanema beach. If when assembled in Brasília they brought a more playful aspect, with children climbing up and down them, and at Praça Tiradentes, they offered shelter, above all to street dwellers, in A Sculpture in the Room they refer, in a certain way, to Hélio Oiticica’s Nests, which allowed the public to lie, cuddle or just chat on their mattresses. The plays on meanings and attention to interaction with the spectator, ever-present in Edu Coimbra’s work, create possibilities in the scenic atmosphere of A Sculpture in the Room that enable one to enjoy the experience of the work and the experience of oneself. 2015 obs: text written for the folder of the Uma Escultura na Sala (A Sculpture in the Room) exhibition, held at Casa de Cultura Laura Alvim, Rio de Janeiro, in May 2015 note:
|