Hommage aux mariages
The mellifluous title, Hommage aux Mariages, has a common melody: the color yellow.
Although it varies in scale, the set of yellows chosen by the artist is the
the objects in the series. Fresh out of painting classes at the end of the
1980s, a period known in artistic production in the southeast of Brazil for its approach to the medium support, the artist sets up a game for himself and takes to the streets in search of the individuation of color, in this case yellow.
At first, it was a joke – a way of thinking about painting beyond paint on canvas.
canvas. Derived from his field of vision, compositions with objects emerged little by little. It was in this way, soaked in this state of attention, that the idea was embodied in the first pieces collected by chance: two yellow bags that had been abandoned on the sidewalk in front of his house and two chairs, also homochromic, found in a junkyard.
The homage to weddings (Hommage aux Mariages), however, is not just about only to the union of objects through color and formal relationships, it also circumscribes the intimate plane of desires, tensioning elective affinities by declaring that to love (amar) is a link (elo), to love is the link.
amarelo=yellow
Yan Braz
There is always the possibility of a double reading, a double meaning and, not infrequently, the artist has worked with the combination of two objects. The idea of the double was always intended to create a third from two things.
The entire series developed under the title Hommage aux Mariages (homage to weddings), 1989, is based on this principle. And the meanings proliferate. We’ll try to touch on a few.
First, the title. The sound of words in French is so similar that it’s almost as if we’re repeating the same word twice. It’s a single sound chain. Two different words and two identical sounds highlight the very idea of “marriage”, understood as the distinction lost in symbiosis. The word “hommage” also refers to “homme” (man), just as “mariage” contains Mary, a feminine name. Hommage aux Mariages, due to its indistinct chain of sounds, indicates, by extension, the indistinctness between people and sexual indeterminacy. Hommage aux Mariages is thus a tribute to the impossibility of marriage and, in this respect, a tribute to Duchamp and his Grand Verre.
Then there’s color. All the works in this series, and there are many, are yellow. The same color, in several “marriages”, unifies the variety, indistinguishes the pairs, reduces the double to a single one. Next, the nature of the objects chosen. Examples: two plastic hairbrushes, one of those very popular round ones from the street, joined together by their teeth and hanging from the ceiling; two baby food chairs, tied together by nylon threads; two razors, sewn together. Objects from everyday life, harmless, ordinary, that acquire an unusual sense of strangeness, which immediately kills the notion of the union, of the “mariage”, simply because it doesn’t make sense in this situation. In the proposed context, in “marriage”, the objects don’t fulfill the functions they came to perform in the world. Is marriage then an aberration? Are conventions aberrations? Wouldn’t it be up to art to comment on the purposelessness of the world, of conventional life? Convention, in principle, prevents agency, and art is pure agency, its decisions depend on a will. Basically, as we mentioned above, Marcos Chaves’ work is opposed to power, it is articulated in such a way as to react to conventional authority, be it psychological or social in nature, including the conventions of art itself.
Ligia Canongia