“Os homini sublime dedit coelumque
tueri [the creator] gave man a faced turned
toward the sky so he can look at Him face to face.”
OVID

“...Vers le ciel quelquefois, comme l’homme d’Ovide,
Vers le ciel ironoique et cruellement bleu,
Sur son cou convulsif tendant sa tête avide,
Comme s’il adressait des reproches à Dieu!”
BAUDELAIRE

“Sky, so vast is the sky.
With faraway clouds just wandering by.”
TOM JOBIM, ALOYSIO DE OLIVEIRA, RAY GILBERT.
 

Cloud, a project by Eduardo Coimbra destined to occupy Praça XV, a piazza located in Rio de Janeiro’s downtown, is related with some questions present in other works of the artist, either in direct interventions in public spaces, or in others accomplished by thought through the meeting with his maquettes or objects or installations and that, also, baptizes one of his 1998 works: invention of landscape.

The proposal for Praça XV consists of a series of backlights almost three times the height of an average person, in which the image of a cloud is printed in each one of the boxes, a small heaven on earth, that appeals to the imagination (not evoking evasion). Its potency becomes clear by bringing near that which is far away, incorporating it in our varied surroundings. The passerby goes through them in its daily trajectory. From above the viaduct – whether in a bottleneck or not – one may see the sky down below… It is about displacing the landscape from its supposed naturality, whether due to its place or to its consistency (that is, the assemblage of conceptual injunctions that constitute a visual model by the means of determined formal codes), and to relate with another invention, the one of space.

If the torsion of space was already present in Landscape (2000) and Asteroids (1999), as a kind of infinite and continuous surface that amalgamated the spherical quality of Earth of Columbus into the eternal return of a Moebius strip, in which the ground is simultaneously above and below, in Landscape-Eruption (1997) and Horizons (2000-2002), just the opposite happens: the sky becomes floor. The question raised by such device resides in the tension of granting to an entity that the common sense perceives as emptiness the role of being fixed as the physical foundation for those worlds. As measurement, the sky is zero and infinite. Being essential for the definition of space, since it’s due to its capacity of occupying the surrounding space between bodies that everything becomes feasible for the delimitation of places and the configuration of things, it ends up existing as negation itself, that is, the nothingness that is materialized thanks to its supposed absence. And, curiously, the only object that we believe is apt to naturally occupy such vastness is another one of an apparently equally implausible measurement, the cloud. Even if reciprocally dependent and coexisting, cloud and sky, more than antithesis of the solidity of our bare space, are also opposite among themselves: they would be two modalities of ineptitude for form par excellence – to which we could attribute the French word informe (i.e. formless). In Horizons as well in Landscape-eruption, nevertheless, both emerge from the ground, surfacing from their depthness – atmospheric pressure, instead of molding the bodies from the outside, does it from inside out – and keep the ground stable as if they (cloud and sky) were their foundation, or, at least, in a state of stable suspension, besides invoking an enigmatic recognition of which air is not the sky, although formed by the same physical matter, but dissident in relation to that poetics that envelops them (air being whether is banal and commonplace around us, whereas the sky the projection of the highest aspirations of transcending our mundane contingencies), as it becomes clear in the direct confrontation between the emptiness of the space that separates the peak from the base of a mountain and the images of skies and clouds seem in their interior. The gap between base and peak, this strange solid-hollowness is categorically distinct from the full-emptiness of the interior. In short, they evoke the paradoxes of emptiness demanding for its visualization the presence of an image (a double emptiness) in order to be apprehensible and the immeasurable to sustain and to occupy a metric volume of contained, configurated and man-controlled space.

We can assume these instances in order to reflect on that which happens with the Praça XV’s Cloud. As we have noticed before, they do not only deal with the invention of space and landscape, but also make the inventory of their models. The point goes from the capacity of constructing a measurable presential objectuality for vastness and the infinite, turning them able of being rationalized (and here we have another founding dilemma), to its confront with the world. In fact, the cloud was the decisive element for the existence of the sky in the visual space of painting. It was installed as an index for the signification of that portion projected beyond the planes, discerning and conferring to each one of them their appropriate position. The problem, nevertheless, at least for the Renaissancist space (as pointed out by the French philosopher Hubert Damisch) resides in the formal “inadequation” of the cloud to that geometric grid, in the sense that its hesitant configuration cannot peacefully fit in the cubic pattern of the scenario, but is, on the other hand, fundamental for its mechanics. If the sky announces the infinite, the cloud is the zero, that is, that objective value (and, curiously, profoundly abstract) able to organize the permutation among the variables of an equation. In a way, Cloud is a ground zero in Praça XV’s urban fabric, is our solidified parameter of calculation and passage of that territory, the assimilation of the itinerary, of the route as matter, as it is perceived by contemporary art, both in Smithson and in Acconci.

The Cloud is, in fact, a heterogeneous composition gathered by the fleeting presence of the passerby. It simultaneously exists as a sequence of individualized modules and as a greater form in which the backlights are integrated through the light generated from their interiors, occupying the gaps among them. It is the entry of the spectator in this double field that at last integrates and cuts that entity with a single and sole gesture – crossing it – making of it at the same time cloud and clouds. It is always a relational object; its visual meaning is never static or fixed (as the clouds in the sky are never immovable…), but dependent from the link established with the involved parts – the work, the spectator and the urban situation that mediates them. Everything turns out a question of point of view; or of passage. We may add as well: by crossing the air emptiness between the boxes, the spectator activates the fullness of the irradiated light, that inhabits those intervals in an ironically diaphanous, almost unthinkable, but also decidedly artificial way.

Cloud also problematizes the zero degree of modern space. Juxtaposing itself over the bird eye view, which for instance was fundamental for Malevich’s space, where the perceptive framing of things (and between them) was reinvented by the elevated distancing to the point of allowing the world to perceive itself by the unveiling of that which was voided through and beyond its immediate appearance, Coimbra’s work is interested in summoning it. On one hand, the cloud and the sky start to exist as an objectual experience exactly by becoming image. They depend of their shadow to become palpable, but by being visual doubles, they invite body and eye maintaining a minimum and sharp distance: the spectator’s hesitancy in knowing to what extent they are tactile, that is, the enigma between the proximity of the thing through its objectual portion and the distancing demarked by its existence only as a projection of something that remains distant. Thus, the point is to make this situation present not in a purely speculative or mental instance, but amidst the itinerary of this tropical, polluted and plastic fog. The physical crossing of the image brings with it another inversion born from this process of transference of visual materialities: if the clouds move loosened in the sky, here they are static, almost monumental, it is the spectator who moves and, we may add, it is this transit that activates the work, in the same way that, in a comparison made by the artist, the airplane pierces it high above.

Here we have then the other side of Coimbra’s displacement in relation to those modern and post-modern worlds. Even if maintained the vision that deciphers that which is below, there is its lowering, or, better saying, its immersion in the (in)finite, discontinuous and varied surface of the city. The bird eye view is replaced by the pedestrian view. If Ovid’s man, as Baudelaire pointed out mentioning one of the characters of the Latin poet, turned towards the sky to convey in it the face of the divinity, or the modern Malevichian subject searched the world by distancing himself from it – here sky and earth are mingled, and unveil themselves by contaminating each other: sky and clouds share our height and, seem from the elevated tracks of the viaduct, below us. The infinite can be fit in a light box placed in the middle of the city’s downtown, at our reach. Built as a monolith, it challenges our historical and sensible perception of the cloud as the sole thing that naturally seemed not submitted to the law of gravity, that could escape our desire of taking and retaining everything that surrounds us.

Due to how the work specifies itself, that is, given its sculptural character, it reveals as well the artist’s capacity of poetically experiencing another tradition from that withdrawn spatiality that was able to hide its suppression of the formless with the stratagem of oscillating between the tactile and the visual. In other words, the manifestation of the problem for the pictorial space and for the sculptural space, that is, among the clouds of Piero della Francesca, Constable and Magritte and those of Bernini, Warhol and Carmela Gross, to mention examples from different epochs and contexts (besides remembering, complementarily, the use of emptiness – that immeasurable – by Tatlin). If, according to what we said, the photo of the cloud is, given is imagetic condition, a traumatic partition of the thing that originated it, the box, as sculpture, restores its volumetric constitution, even if ironically held by its minimalist silhouette. As real as the clouds, as conceptual as its other representations throughout art history, Coimbra’s works falls on a third invention/inventory: literality as method.

We should understand such purpose, nevertheless, not as a visuality that, before the opposition between the evident and the apparent, needs to choose one of them in order to resume its project of form construction. In its case, there is both simultaneity and juxtaposition, making that its space always experiments a pulsion similar to that generated by the symptomatic foundation of the earth by the sky, as commented above.

How such latency takes place in Praça XV? Precisely in the topological reverse that took place due to the urban situation of the clouds. Let’s compare this case with previous works: if before sky and clouds were molded in the fissures of the grass, that is, if the shape of the earth depended on the expansion of the protuberant forces below it, here the solidness of both sky and cloud is achieved because, instead of emerging from the belly of the earth or being placed far above it, they are supported by it; earth supports the sky, not only the one that is contained inside the boxes, but equally the one who gave origin to the infinite and is prolonged by it. The cloud, that before harmonized the Renaissancist scenario with its morphological schizophrenia, now gains a silhouette by inhabiting the heterogeneous and errant stage of the formless of contemporary life. Ovid’s man looks up by looking at the dirty soles of his sneakers.

2008

obs: text written for the catalog of the work Cloud, installed at Praça XV de Novembro, Rio de Janeiro, in November 2008