In addition to shaping the categories object, drawing, sculpture or installation, Eduardo Coimbra’s works can be experienced as apparatus that, reiterated and insistently, force us into confronting this eternal dual representation: the concept of reality. The nature of this clash, its intrinsic quality, is one that stokes reflexive critical examination of the underlying mental mechanisms of perceptive operation. As a strategy, Coimbra opts for strangeness in the reception and apprehension of images that are imposed on our eyes through the prior character of their truth, while also drawing us into a subtle game marked by irony. The explicit manipulation of “real” images does not have illusionist intentions, and the ironic game is placed at the service of a denaturalization of the eye, leading to mistrust in relation to the eminently organic pathos.

The power of the images is supported in this optical stalemate, without reducing it to pure optical quality. The manifest tangibility of the works, the brazen exposure of its wholly explicit technical procedures of construction – the cables visible in Natural Light, the puzzle that shapes Aerial Image – promote situations in which the subject-spectator is caught between seduction and discomfort: invited to enjoy a range that often brings to mind a certain idea of infinity, one is unfailingly led back to oneself. This mirror effect adds to the deconstruction of the spatial references – themed in Horizons, self-referent in the title work dialogue in Aerial Image – language resources placed at the service of na art that, without allusions to any psychology, are founded on a thorough analytics of how the eye beholds that art.

Invited to exercise a skewed view, the spectator is confronted by the loss of innocence relative to a possible transparency and transcendency of the images. Before the object – before the world – the references capable of configuring one’s perceptive horizons bear the thickness of surfaces and the density of mental constructs. Previously solar, the subject is led to assume the grief of his contemporary condition when finding himself faced with objects that emit their own light – even if they sustain a persistent and contradictory opacity.

Special “apparatus”, the works of art not only signal or amplify human possibilities, but also primarily unfold them. Criticizing perceptive faith while resting on sensory experience, Eduardo Coimbra’s work enables the subject-enjoyer to experience this radical contradiction himself – and frees him to sustain the coexistence, the crossover and overlapping of horizons.

2002

obs: text written for the folder of the Luz Natural (Natural Light) exhibition, held at Galeria Cândido Portinari, UERJ, Rio de Janeiro, in January 2002