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The feeling of another space, another perception of our spatial and architectonic coordinates has formed a constituent element of Eduardo Coimbra’s art since the last decade. And this phenomenological search to live-feel-read another idea of space passes through various experiences of site specific works and urban interventions, but, at the same time, through objects, sculptures, installations, where everything holds a certain and meticulously constructed mise em abisme, regardless of whether they are public works in the city or possible-impossible architectural models. Let us also not forget an almost silent humour, which mocks our visual statute and its cognitive attributes. One example of this can be found before the gallery entrance, with a large object that becomes an installation in the outer window, Pool with Passage; the visualisation of which announces the spatial ambiguity to which we are invited: the topos which changes through the artist’s visual and conceptual tropes. Another piece of evidence, now inside the exhibition space and always with works from 2011, is the subversion in the presentation of the models, which, fleeing from canonical horizontality and opting for a frontal presentation, produce a perceptive strangeness, as found in the new hybrid three-dimensional drawings, Shadow and Reflection and Spatial Situation, which dig out their outline off the wall, also confronting our mirror habitat. If the mismatch between appearance and reality is one of the aesthetic windows into Eduardo Coimbra’s work, a field of exploration that ranges from sculptures, models, drawings to urban or spatial strategies, then the precise content here is also the game – that symbolic place where we can be free between rules, free from the other contingent game of life – and the presence of the architecture. Thus the title given to the exhibition “Architecture of the Game”, so reversibly plausible, for it could also enunciate the game of architecture, both things end up being leveraged as semantic inventions for rotund examples. As we know, stadiums bear something of mythological monuments of contemporary civilization (as well as of barbarism) and are ritual spaces. The artist's continued production of models in Stadiums unfolds in an unintended manner with its visual arrangement, for they should be seen front on, eye to eye. Two aspects can be observed in them: the spatial alterities of the other, reinvented football and that the players-spectators interpenetration is also at stake – incidentally, as it is in art. In such a way that the spectators are placed in a dynamic similar to that experienced by the players, as the artist confesses: “the issue of Stadiums is to create a spatial condition for the audience that speak to the dynamic of the game”:(1) which means that the stadiums do not completely translate the same football, but other geometries and possibilities of the game patented by the English, as had been done in the artist’s three previous stadiums, in which the configuration of the field’s shape and its signalytics is mirrored in the structure of the stadium, on the stands, like a single topography. (Another suggestive question would be to know how the visual simulacrum of these unique stadiums, possibly more fortunate and less problematic than the World Cup venues of 2014, would be seen by the sports establishment itself of the CBF). Just as the Stadiums (III, IV and V) exist, the game changes shape with Blocks, other inverted models that reproduce a series of houses and streets in their brown planes. Therein, the structure of life is regulated by the habitat of the houses: the view from above of the tiles of mono-pitched or gabled roofs offers an ironic existential geometry (which could, in critical spirit, be added to the contributions of León Ferrari’s urban heliographs of the early 1980s). If the exhibition has an outside entrance with Pool with Passage, its passage is marked by Stairs and Hatches, genuine declaration pieces of this provoked “twist of space” (in the artist’s words).(2) Even more so when this series of hatches are territories of emblematic forms, an invitation to an ever-travelling, displaced eye. Although the exhibition seems to not want to offer a way out or simple solution, remaining in the visual rondo of the pieces in the central nave, where both a staircase and some post-minimalist cubes/dice meet (thrown à la Mallarmé, fighting to propagate the visual happenstance that they both generate). Dan Descending a Staircase is another, strictly speaking metalinguistic, floor piece, and whose internal simulacrum is confused with the external one by the existence of mirrors in its configuration. On the other hand, the resonance that the black and white stripes produce and the title manage to reconnect Daniel Buren to the famous Marcel Duchamp painting, to convert a staircase into an artefact that contains another staircase inside. Sometimes the space can be a representation of another space, containing a metaphorical side/dice. In this regard, a certain complicity with us is generated by the presence of two dice sculptures,(3) Two Dice, which are embroiled on the floor, in the space (as previously was the case with other pieces composed of flooring, of wooden blocks/floorboards), feeding new reflexes between them and the floor, a kind of mirage in our perceptive interlocution.(4) The “reproduction” of the representation that raises all these new images disassembles the original point of departure of reality, paradoxically with exciting approaches, where reality is mirrored, speculated, with its mirage in crescendo (be it the transparent light of the pool, the enigmatic inversion of the stairs, or the false backdrop of the hatches) and denounce the reversibility of any game (a core word in the artist’s vocabulary). These are images that bear traps, but that function, produce alterations in our aesthetic custom. And where the game with the wall, with the floor – with the dimensions – creates situations, demystifies our place of reference as the central axis. The artist manages to move the floor of perception, where we so often cast anchor. One can detach from all this an artistic and relativist visual philosophy that conjugates against the inevitable and the totalitarian standard of mimetic, categorized representation, and which Magritte himself would have scrutinised with the same heed as we do. The metaphorical nuances, the perceptive insinuations, what is said in a visually stimulating, let us go as far to say oblique, manner, is the operative target of this at once seductive, dense and enigmatic poetics, which always gives new meaning to all its objects/objectives in a characteristic cognitive diapason, and which here broadens its radius of action in eight groups of recent pieces, in a hatch-exhibition that strives for another idea of space. Indeed, Eduardo Coimbra always offer another hatch, an opportunity to once again see how we are seeing the same things. 2011 notes: |