Comfundo
They’re not bags of cats or buying cats for hares (Brazilian idiomatic expression). They’re not full of anything, but they are full of air. Architecture in balance. Pillars of an imaginary space that occurs between walls, between limits, in the void. How to sustain space? How to be the beam of a thought that deluded space as the servant of volume? Fragile structures, powerful columns of irony. Bags without brands, types or logos. Diverted functions, unforeseen logic. They are not there to fulfill their origin, much less to achieve an end. Just ironic means of altering the prediction of an art object and its function in space. Products of the imagination: fertile, dreamlike, perverse. And perverse because they deviate. They don’t support their original functions, as bags or as pillars. What’s more, they don’t support any values that want to bear anything more than pure physical or ideological precariousness. Above all, they are products designed to build a symbolic space, even if they assume, conversely, its ruin. For what symbology can be erected when the very notion of value is shaken? That’s the idea: to make the immobile, dominated space collapse. To shake the very supports of domination. To touch only the infinite possibilities of a relationship with emptiness. There would be no point in insisting on fullness, on volume in content, at the very moment when the image is only its continent, its appearance. The serial side of the work does insist on something: obsessively affirming that the object is just a link in a process without heroism. There is no utopia. What remains is the spirit of mordacity and humor, symptoms of post-Duchamp art. Ready-made perverted, re-signified; the pillar of an aesthetic that still shakes the world in its anti-institutional irreverence, that still shakes the models of an ideal construction. Inoperative, the columns reverse the expectation of support and, paradoxically, operate as supports of the symbolic, of the incongruous architecture of emptiness. There is order, there is clarity, there is intelligence and construction. However, there is the latent eminence that everything could be a lie, that “every solid falls apart in the air”. The distance between air and air can be a sheet of paper or a bag with a bottom.
Ligia Canongia
1990
