When I found myself on my feet, I looked about me, and must confess I never beheld a more entertaining prospect. The country round appeared like a continued garden; and the inclosed fields, which were generally forty feet square, resembled so many beds of flowers. These fields were intermingled with woods o f half a stang, and the tallest trees, as I could judge, appeared to be seven feet high. I viewed the town on my left hand, which looked like the painted scene of a city in a theatre.” Jonathan Swift

One might say that “This is not a model” (just as, in the case of René Magritte, it was not a pipe) or, having entered that realm of resemblance in which the surrealist painter identified the essential act of thought as “one of resembling”, we might say the opposite.(1) Nonetheless, one field leads to another, to a combined game of resembling and appearing in which nothing is what it seems to be. Both the work of translating the image and the investigation of its double-replica lead us initially to Magritte, to his word games (abysses of signifiers and signifieds) and, above all, to his doubts in the matter of representation. Perhaps even more than the rest of his work, Eduardo Coimbra’s models appropriate this double condition, this intermezzo, or, better yet, both create it and cast permanent doubt as to its nature - they are and are not models. These “meta-models” which dialogue with themselves, present themselves as stages, settings for situations which transcend their initial dimensions outside a legitimizing visual empiricism.

The artist’s most recent objects, the earliest of which appeared in 1999, soon became a significant feature of his work, a fact which does not necessarily preclude points of contact with certain earlier works since there is, in fact, a connection between the object and real, inhabited space; a starting point for the object, using the space of the landscape as before. We might say that objects were increasingly evident as landscapes, as were the models. As a first point of contact, one might look to their kinship with the Asteroids series, which marked the beginning of a certain use of nature which would lead to another reading. These UFO-like rock-groves (which are also Magritte-like floating landscapes), a dialectic reference in the artist’s poetics – are converted into converse territories, kept in visual suspension, now as constructions. It is based on the dialogue of those ´objects´ (collage, light box) with the landscape, with external space, that a first necessity of the models presents itself parallel to a recognition: the artist’s feeling that the landscape is concave and the object of the work is convex: In the case of the drawing-reliefs (Hall, Drawings, and others), the relationship surmised is quite another. They already evince architectures which are either invisible or in initial stages, drawings that are simultaneously two and three-dimensional by dint of the presence of shingles-reliefs and cracks-empty spaces which bear an undeniable echo of Neoconcretism and even a certain synchrony with Mira Schendel’s last drawings – the “sarrafos” It is the establishment of a clash between space and its renewal within concentrated boundaries, which approximates the latter configuring step of the models in which the gaps/cracks present themselves in the ‘constructions’ almost as constants (many of the models contain pierced, empty spaces and superimposed geometric lines).

A third linking aspect, at first glance perhaps less relatable, is the presence of clouds – these “islands of the sky”, in the words of Octavio Paz – in many of the artist’s works. It might even be said that their polymorphous inclusion of clouds in Eduardo Coimbra’s work amounts to a small treatise on that subject, of which Isthmus, Horizons, Silent Steps, Welcome Rio, Natural Light, Landscape-eruption, and Aerial Image are expressive examples. As regards the models, the value of the clouds and the sky lies in the fact that, as nature, both have the attraction of containing virtuality in their representation. The very blue of the sky is not blue, but a refractory effect and the clouds themselves are only deceptively solid. This celestial condition of fiction versus construction joins previous ones in bringing the models together with that which will be their greater spirit: the sabotaged logic of the image and the search for another point of entry.

Eduardo Coimbra’s models reflect two directions in contemporary sculpture – that of the object and that of nature, albeit in a very particular way for, the model (model-object-sculpture) being the former and the latter, a minimalist reading of landscapes – far removed from the actions of Land Art. These are works which seek to reflect the work of art in two spaces – that of art and that of intervention in urban/landscape territories, like two linkable imaginaries. Yet they are not merely models which await construction at another level of representation and realization for, ultimately, these constructions already present themselves as complete in their formal execution. The models are constructed in an imagistic territory and retain their own “test quality”” (Agnaldo Farias), though never in a strictly formal or architectural sense, but in another, broader way which lies closer to the meanings it proposes to reveal. These models may also be regarded as conceptual realizations which materialize another level of reality, as imaginary constructions which allow themselves to be contaminated by reality and lived experience – which explains why they are inhabited (and it must be recognized that the greatest architectural dilemma of our time is the distance between the mission of functional architecture, one of mere human storage, and another kind of architecture which allows for another type of dwelling place). There is no way to conceal that these models present a certain subversion of those values consecrated as our customary dwelling in the world. All the more so when Vitruvius, in De Arquitectura, deems the knowledge of philosophy, medicine or music, as well as "familiarity with the solar system" (Liber Primus), among other subjects, as the architect's professional obligation. As we have seen, the latter specification may be observed in several of Eduardo Coimbra's works and in some of his symbolic models (such as Horizons and Welcome Rio).

There is no paucity of critical observation regarding the contemporary metropolitan city, relating its fragmentation and new states of perception – the illusory locus of these models. The territory of the city which both surrounds the model and exists inside it as text and context experiences various circumstances in prodigious mutation. In our post-metropolitan era “the city undergoes continual fragmentation. What is interesting about this fragmentation, this constant process of fragmentation, is the immediate perception of the loss of the idea of everything and of reference”.(2) This diagnosis by anthropologist Antonio Augusto Arantes encompasses the artistic opportunity of these models. To which Nelson Brissac has added that “what lies at the bottom of these most recent great transformations are the impossible patterns imposed upon us by the tremendous growth of new experiences of time and space”. Just as our concept of territory has changed, the need for a new mapping of the world and its geography, for another articulation of distances has arisen. These models also correspond to this new urban cartography, like a new anthropology of the ground and of time. Thus, we are a long way from architecture as a symbol of power – although the times would appear to be running in this political direction – Eduardo Coimbra’s models make a tabula rasa of this correspondence.

If the scale of the models allows for a distancing and reduction not only of our own representation but of our symbology, it simultaneously forces us to look closely, to come nearer. As is the case with small scale sculptures (if Rudolf Oxenaar’s measure of one cubic meter still holds true as a reference), what is important is not external space but the relationship with the observer’s body. Thus, we see these works through Gulliver’s eyes, as though we were approaching them from another height, to another presence. If, as an expression of the object, the models take a stand against grandiosity, against the monumental, pointing to accomplishments which surpass their own scale and achieving the dimensions of another universe is their paradoxical nature.

In any event, one is reminded of the “miniaturist” tendency of artists such as Duchamp, Claes Oldenburg or Daniel Spoerri (not to mention Joseph Cornell) to construct scale museums of sorts, for models in our time have been gaining a new contextualizing presence as subgenre, as we shall see further ahead. The North American artist Cornell himself, for instance, who constructed a work cemented to the small dimensions of his mysterious boxes, brings us the idea of poetic stages. Similarly, Eduardo Coimbra’s models are also small stages in which the performance is not only architectural and urbanistic but theatrical and experiential. And it is this quality of stage setting that further emphasizes our optical and reflexive displacement, as space and the representation of an event converge, for there can be no doubt that, above all else, these models offer a scene/situation which they both invent and record. The model “moves”, it is a space in action. Eduardo Coimbra presents a theater/stage upon which the event is an architectural imaginary, at once imagistic and poetic.

Coimbra’s models are not models of a specific place. They belong to a space-time-event (despite references to a possible concreteness, as in the proposal of Welcome Rio).(3) They are models of a non-place, created situations whose poetic strength feeds on that which is suggested. The architectural proposal, whether urban or landscapist, is created outside functional, regulatory parameters. In fact, Eduardo Coimbra uses scale as to appropriate an architectural resource (the appearance of an objective reality) in order to de-naturalize it. Inhabited poem-objects? Landscape installations? In any case, these models dream of a real scale, but always in second place. Like the Stadiums, they are both urban objects and spaces/places where things happen that evoke the inside of life at play.

The models function in this intermezzo between representation and reality; they are both fiction and distance. What we see is a “miniaturized” situation – a pocket installation for another Arte/Cidade [project] – in which what is presented as an idea can be transported to a possible circumstance. The space of the model walks a fine line between reality and fiction. We have grown used to two things – the most rational objectivity and the virtual imaginary over which we lean forward, even if the boundaries of both of these are never as clearly defined as we might like to believe. These models, which contain a certain surrealistic depth, point to an intercession between architecture and landscape like objects which propose an imaginary experience within itself. Such is the case with Amphitheater in Two Acts, in which the idea of the work intervenes to the point that the model is made for a performance which mirrors ordinary life. In Amphitheater in Two Acts, we, the public, are the work, the space inhabited and reflected in the mirror. In the intermezzo between reality and its reading, between the object and its meaning, a temporal latency may be found. And we are always part of this doubly created, re-dimensioned landscape. We place ourselves in it and outside it. Eduardo Coimbra’s models are limitary; as accomplices, they show us how we can both inhabit and see them.

Although constructed from fiction, the models draw their imagery from reality. As observed by Francisco Javier San Martin, they invert Kurt Schwitters’s Merzbau (that large-scale model which was inhabited, as an experienced fiction). “But the postmodern yearning to build models specifically designed to be photographed speaks to us once again of a weakness in real architecture and of the artist’s mistrust of constructed architectures”.(4) Despite the fact that many artists use photography in their models – often to records their work – the case of Eduardo Coimbra, like those of Langlands & Bell, James Casebere or Jordi Colomer, points to this critical direction, one that is partly shared by the models of Regina Silveira (although hers are of another artistic nature).(5) Because it appears as mediation for a fiction, architecture considered as a crystallization of reality finds new meaning, a new spin in Coimbra’s models.

In opposition to James Casebere, whose models are associated with closed spaces of reclusion, Coimbra presents other, less categorized, suspended, open ones, their meaning almost under construction. These ‘unknown’ models are almost mental spaces, sometimes reminiscent of De Chirico, but inhabited, tensioned, traversed. In fact, the most substantial difference between Coimbra’s models and those of Casebere is the presence of human figures. Coimbra’s models do not deal solely with space but also with their inhabitability. Another difference with the aforementioned artist is the fact that his models do not rest in the representation of photography. Whereas, in Casebere, one must imagine a situation in the empty spaces, in Coimbra one must imagine the situation treated in the models on another level, at the threshold of reality and fiction, since the imaginary is offered in the same work. Is there a hiatus between the perception of reality and the virtual space of the model? The answer might apply to both. “I am more interested in the area between the recognition of something as real and the eventual suspicion that this is not so”, is James Casebere’s reply. Coimbra’s models give rise to various dialectics (art and life, architecture and landscape) which, in any event, are removed from the negative-positive zones of Casebere’s reality. Somehow, like Schwitters’s Merzbau, Coimbra’s models contain something of sculpture and of architecture, a transit exposed in its potency and possibility.

By partly subverting both architecture and urbanism as rationalist disciplines, these models offer two horizons above all others – those of architecture and of the landscape. Certain other models, however, such as the ones made for sports, contain built-in landscapes. In this sense, the form of Stadium is quite unusual, for it also invents a new sport which has inherited features from other games. As may be seen in these ‘sports’ pieces, invented games are blended together (a field might contain both a soccer ball and a volleyball net, or combine features of soccer and rugby..). It is significant that the artist went so far as to outline rules for these possible games.

Horizons for Vera continues to be the exception to these works, a life-scale model built for the 3rd Mercosul Biennial. The modification of its scale and context allowed for a reading different from the one which had been considered for the original model (another such successful example is Regina Silveira’s The Lesson – a model of sorts in its own way). The work incorporated variables from its urban and geographical contexts – the banks of the Guaíba River, the neighboring buildings and the sky of those days/months of the Porto Alegre event. In Horizons for Vera, the real sky was superimposed upon the one fictionally contained in the work, producing real/visual collages of the two. Whereas the dimensions changed so as to allow in situ experiences (which, until that moment belonged to the order of image and poetry), the conceptual power of the models was transferred to a territorial installation which had to be experienced, lived, in a triumph of imagination at the level of reality, generating a crossroads – culture versus nature, as pointed out by Agnaldo Farias.(6) The finest example of this may be the train which simultaneously comes out of both ends of a tunnel which does not exist as a whole (Tunnel).

These models may be fated to remain thus, as landscape-pieces or fictional architectures, a fact which does not prevent us from naming them “object-landscapes” or “model-landscapes”. Just as they maintain a critical stance with regard to the reality of everyday architecture and landscapes, within a context which is unavoidably cultural, these possible-impossible models are somehow melancholy in their poetic idealism (reminiscent of Richard Long’s utopia of primordial nature). Eduardo Coimbra uses models to reflect on our condition within urban, geographical spaces mostly linked to the city. Models usually represent explicitly closed, configured boundaries through representation and scale – they are replicas. Not so in Coimbra’s case, who uses the limit of representation to “de-limit” them.

His models are somehow unfinished, for they begin where they end, as opposed to what takes place in mere architectural representations. In this case, the models’ finite side deals with their infinite possibilities (as may be seen in the works’ appointed meaning of temporal latency and linguistic intermezzo). The models contain possibilities for lived experiences rather than structural possibilities. Their truth lies precisely in their imagination. They propose construction, rendering the imaginary possible – like the saying which says that “truth is sometimes stranger than fiction”. This is the territory of imagination, not of fantasy. In this sense, Coimbra’s works play meta-poetically with the idea of models. One might think of them as “meta-models”. In fact, their truth lies in their roundabout procedure. The classical function of the model has been altered; these works are neither mimetic nor expressly functional. They explore the boundary between representation and knowledge. Eduardo Coimbra’s oblique poetics always keeps a bias up his sleeve, a redemptive divergence. As dream-models which propose other readings of our most human landscape, they disclose a certain dose of humor. It isn’t hard to imagine how Julio Cortazar would have loved these model-landscapes, these accomplice architectures, ideal for cronópios.

2003

obs: text included in the book Eduardo Coimbra, publisher Casa da Palavra, 2004

notes:
1  René Magritte, preface to the Dallas exhibition, 1961; René Magritte, in Isto não é um cachimbo. Michel Foucault. Rio de Janeiro: Paz & Terra, 2002.
2  Segundas no Memorial – Depoimentos 6. Nelson Brissac/Antonio Augusto Arantes. São Paulo: Fundação Memorial da América Latina, 1996, p.10 e 18.
3  Welcome Rio was designed as an intervention in the landscape of Rio de Janeiro. The installation consisted of two elements – a portal on the Red Line expressway at the entrance to the city (model), and a set of light boxes positioned on Sugar Loaf (foto).
4  SAN MARTÍN, Francisco Javier. “Construyendo la ficción. Algunos ejemplos sobre arquitectura, ciudad y fotografia”, in Arquitecturas ficticias, EXIT, 6, May, 2002.
5  By virtue of their quantity as well as their autonomous identity as objects, Regina Silveira’s models are more than mere architectural projects and, as such, are a special case in Brazilian art. Other, similar examples are Waltercio Caldas’s two models (which currently exist only in project from) titled Museum of Sleep and Homage to Antônio Carlos Jobim, and Hélio Oiticica’s 1978 Magic Square model, not assembled until 2002 at the Museu do Açude, in Rio de Janeiro. Cildo Meireles’s Glasgow/Ghost House and Street Vendor, and, most recently, Marepe’s Embutidinho, belong in the same category.
6  FARIAS, Agnaldo. “Paisagem”, in Novas direções. São Paulo/Rio de Janeiro: Itáu Cultural/MAM, 2002, p.18.