When I suggested the name of Eduardo Coimbra to join the Açude Installations Space, I thought of him because he is one of the few Brazilian artists to whom landscape is an issue. The relationship that initially seemed obvious to me – Tijuca Forest / Installations Space equalling the artist who works with the idea of landscape – was found to be complex; destabilizing the evidence of this certainty and revealing subtleties and perceptions that, I imagine, will be important both to the Açude project and to the artist’s work.
The contemplation of landscape in Eduardo Coimbra’s work, as he himself explains, “emerges from the duality between landscape as image and landscape as matter.” To some of his works this duplicity attributes a Magrittian resonance: “this is not a pipe”. Landscape to him is a vision whereby we are inserted into the game of perspective. It is like a first surface of representation that captures us, enveloping and marking the human order as the order of representation, establishing an irreducibility between matter and image.
Through Coimbra’s work we perceive ourselves to be prisoners of an underlying impossibility that prevents us from reaching the thing in itself: the real of the landscape is the reality of its image. It is a game with no return, a journey toward a horizon of incessant displacements. In Isthmus, for example, this journey is brought into the present in the suitcases that come to life. They are pulsating beings, that imitate lungs, capable of breathing through a mechanism installed in them, and their leather surfaces regain the characteristic of skin and fur. Gathered in a corner of the exhibition room, they nostalgically point toward a window that, opening inwards, presents a photograph of a blue sky, indicative of the depth of the infinite, reinstating the atmosphere of apartness implicit in the act of looking. In this work we are surprised by the radicalness of our solitary condition in nature - stray travellers who will never step on the solid ground of the landscape as matter because we are inscribed in the order of landscape as image.
Our journey is a shaky one, consisting of continuous shifts, that at each new stop mislead our original shortcoming of not being able to directly relate to the order of matter. Landscape is a nostalgia of a condition that we crave and that we have, in fact, never experienced. The human adventure therefore deals with creating mechanisms that allow us to mix with this material reality and recompose the meaning of lost unity.
One of these mechanisms is art. Perhaps the most paradoxical and pretentious because it proposes this approximation based on articulating the very matter of the world. And that is where Coimbra’s and Magritte’s artistic perspectives touch: they both point to the solidity of this impossibility; it is not a question of the presence of the unconscious in art, but rather the lack as a founding void of human order.
In Silent Steps, this lack is presented to us in an afflictive manner by the incompleteness of the animal that, once reduced to stuffed paws and frozen movement, was disassociated from any intentionality. A movement that is not aimed at anything and crudely presents (in the absence of the animal’s body) the emptiness of our wayward condition.
For an artist whose imagination is an essential factor, the challenge that the Açude Installation Space brings is how to confront landscape no longer as idea/image, but rather as real thing. I had not realised this fact prior to the conception and creation of his proposal. When I did realise it, I felt guilty, as if it were a snare that would force him into creating a twist in the internal logic of his work. How would he face this challenge? Deep down, it is simpler for an artist to whom landscape is not a matter of setting a work in the Tijuca Forest – contemporary thinking, in fact, is shaped to this attitude because it is permeable to games of overlap.
However, the question becomes more complex for an artist who, more often than not, opts to address landscape as image and not as direct insertion into the actual space of nature. And what is asked for at the Açude Museum is the work's insertion in the outside space. And it was precisely Eduardo Coimbra’s proposal in Walkway - an idea of insertion (or immersion, as he referred to) and not of overlapping, which is what naturally occurs in the majority of works at the Açude - that brought back to mind one of his first works: Cabin. It was from this work that I could perceive the relationship between the inside and outside, between what contains and what is contained, as coextensive to his idea of landscape and as a possible overcoming of the dichotomy, which I expounded above.
Cabin is one of his earliest works, and I remember that at the time it interested me because it operated as a kind of communication vessel between two worlds, or rather, between two depths. The spectator is invited to look through an orifice and discover on the other side an infinite depth made of mirror games. It is as if he were positioned at the point where two worlds converge. As if the depth of the world culminated in him and from his vision, through the orifice, a new depth opened up. Two depths that converge to the observer’s spot and that diverge away from him into two realities (real and fictional). Just as occurs with each of us, the result as we are of the conflux of forces of the exterior and interior reality, of the inner and the outer.
At that time I was very interested in the post-neoconcrete rupture and engaged by the idea that, with the diluted boundary between art and life, we would be a kind of inner/outer of exteriority or an outer/inner of our interiority. And Cabin, in a way, materialized that process and clarified “the place of the observer and the place of the work and the relationship between those spaces that the work provokes,” as Eduardo Coimbra wrote in an email to me.
The explicit demonstration of the place or position of the observer in the world scene is, in Eduardo Coimbra’s work, a requirement for coping with the shortcoming to which we referred above. Let me explain: Eduardo rejects the renaissance solution of landscape as a front on view of the world from a fixed observation point, and the cubist solution of fragmenting the object from multiple reference viewpoints. Even we he flirts with cubism, like in the Asteroids series, the sum of the multiple viewpoints found in them aimed at creating an image with unity and sharpness that, only at a second instant, do we note that it is composed of fragments.
His plastic and visual impetus is closer to that of Turner who, wanting to fully capture the view from within the scene of the world, asked to be tied to the ship’s mast mid-storm so that he could paint it more directly and vividly. This is not a question of painting the “truth” of the optical perception as the impressionists wanted, but rather of experiencing the act of seeing that necessarily implies an exercise of being located in the depths of the world and of the multiple depths resulting therefrom (the invisible that allows the visible, recalling Merleau-Ponty).
I would like to reproduce some comments that Eduardo Coimbra made to me regarding some of the works that refer to this question:
Invisible Visible (...) these are pairs of instant, frontal photos, taken around the R. Freitas Lake. The title relates to the fact that they reveal the visible and the visible of each image, the condition of being inside the landscape revealed only by the other collaborative image, which captures its surroundings beyond the shared space.
(...) Here is a set of photos of the Santa Ifigênia viaduct, in downtown São Paulo, taken instantly from eight different vantage points. The location was chosen by virtue of the multiple and varied flows that fill all the visual fields. The set of photos presents a suspended moment in time, offering a voyage through the instant in recognition of the scenes and situations that are repeated due to the crossover of diverse points of view.
Sea Level is a set photographs of sea horizons taken from eleven points along the entire Brazilian coast. The points were chosen on the map in order to produce a visual spectrum in which each point intercepted the next within 500 miles of the Brazilian coast. The idea is that when one views the sequence of horizons, side by side, a vision of a “lateral border” of Brazil can be seen.
Within an approach of the temporal and spatial questions of landscape, one might conclude that in Aqui several viewpoints converge to a single point in time, whereas in Sea Level, several viewpoints converge to a single point in space.
The desire to surprise “the visible and the invisible of each image” is to resist the removal implied in the Renaissance act of seeing, inaugurated by the mathematization of the space of the central perspective. Not that we have to challenge it for the sake of challenging. But, since modernity, when knowledge was turned back on itself, the view from within became a necessity. We entered the crisis of the two dimensions and started to claim a three-dimensional space, which afforded us a more comfortable relationship with the current reality of the world: to no longer highlight the possible removal from depth, which engages frontality, but rather to seek experience of and in depth itself.
That is why, Walkway, in the broader context of Eduardo Coimbra's work, is like a vector that pierces the depth of the forest space and creates the conditions for us to enter that space – a rising platform that leads to nowhere – with no concerns other than that of enjoying the experience of coexistence in the interiority of the act of seeing and in the interiority of the landscape. A kind of inverse landscape. That is, instead of being a landscape that “escapes” us, it is a landscape which we appropriate and experience from within it, even though we are an external element to it.
This situation can be compared to works like Invisible Visible, Here or Sea Level, only, rather than the observation point and the observed point as interchanging places of exteriorities or of filling of voids, where the idea of vision is still associated to an experience of exteriority. In the case of Walkway there is the manifest desire to preserve the visual experience based on interiority in exteriority. The act of seeing as immersion in the physical world; as diving into the exteriority. As if it were possible for us to be the incarnation of a backwards cubist perspective or Borges’ Aleph. In Eduardo Coimbra’s work, this seeing as an experience of immersion is present in Asteroids, that has the cubist vocation of plural viewpoints (fragments of visions, which offer us a new totality, easily identifiable with the representation of something that seems to exist, but that in reality does not).
This game between reality and fiction can also be found in Walkway. This work is not a model, like so many that Eduardo Coimbra has produced, that have no objective of being prototypes of real constructions, but are architectural experiments that intend to materialize Magrittian paradoxical-absurd ideas.
Walkway, on the contrary, is a real architectural construction, but, like the models, has no objective intentions in the practical world. It is a construction that deals with the various possibilities of the gaze. When faced with it, at a first instant, we experience a frontal view. It is an apparition in the woods that attracts our eye. At a second instant, we discover that it is possible to follow an aerial path (atop the trees) and change the view from the outside for a view from within, the view from below for a view from above.
Conjugating several possible visions through Walkway, Eduardo Coimbra invites us to share a study that he has developed over the last ten years that, according to his own words: (...) explores in different ways matters of landscape and of the creation of architectural structures that enable differentiated experiments of the real space.
The Açude installation offers the experience of shifts in points of view. The architectural structure of Walkway allows us to experience the vision of inside the woods as we are suspended amid the trees. It is as if he wants to retrieve that radical experiment conducted by Turner, to whom landscape was neither as distant as it was for the impressionists, who needed to get close to it to paint it, nor as close as it was for the renaissance artists, who could distance themselves from it and paint it from memory in their ateliers. For Coimbra landscape is, before all else, an experience of the act of seeing (like a Turner, in practice, and like a Magritte, in idea) which brings with it the irreducibility (and perhaps anguish) between matter and image of that which is visible.
2008
obs: text written for the catalog of the work Walkway, installed at Museu do Açude, Rio de Janeiro, in May 2008
