Art as a Mask (Ligia Canongia)
Marcos Chaves is an artist whose work always bears a latent critical sense in it, albeit distilled by the world of poetry. His critical poetics simultaneously touches three spheres: the lyrical self of the artist, the world as a political instance, and art as the expression of this ‘self’ and of this ‘world’, that is to say, as a moral expression. Nevertheless, the complexity of these relationships always seems to lie in the shade of ample doses of humor, an instrument with which the artist circumvents the tragical sense of the world, conferring a playful appearance to it. The viewer needs to place himself beyond this initial simulation, beyond the laughter, in order to find the gloomy aspect of the work behind the trick with which one is confronted.
In the exhibition on view, Chaves uses the figure of the mask as a synthesis-sign that is present in the photos and the videos, a figure that condenses the semantic play of the works in a masterly way, for the mask carries, in the origin of its representation, the moral, political and poetic functions. Still, the mask has the potential of absorbing many of the issues that arouse the interest of the art territory in its modern acceptation: illusion, myth, allegory and simulacrum. In an even broader sphere, the mask touches the true/false dichotomy, a dilemma that, since Plato, has substantiated the aesthetic universe.
The figure of the mask is not extraneous to the work of Marcos Chaves, and this has already been observed in the interventions that he carried out at Castelinho do Flamengo in 2000 when, using make-up, false eyelashes and other adornments, he transformed the eclectic-style sculptures into lively and hilarious images, like transvestites. There, he effected a deviation of the static nature of the statues, updating and ironizing the obsolete character of academic art, in addition to underscoring how much from eclecticism – which transits amidst various styles – was appropriated by the post-modern world.
In another recent work, Morrendo de rir [Laughing myself to death], exhibited at the 2002 São Paulo Biennial, Marcos Chaves also used the mask as an underlying element, albeit disguised on the artist’s face. Numerous monumental images of Chaves bursting with laughter were juxtaposed in the exhibition space, conferring a disconcerting and ghostly aspect to the figure and to the laughter. The monumentality of the photographs thoroughly deconstructed the notion of self-portrait, causing the images to acquire the status of masks. The ambiguity of the title and its tragicomic sense found its most perfect correspondent in the sign of the mask. There was not only the transvestitism of the ‘self’ into a fictional being, but also laughter masked as death, and death as laughter.
His current artistic output is akin to those works, to the extent that they play with morbidity, or in the sense that they equate the universe of passion to the death wish. Formally, however, they take on the overt presence of the mask as an expressive go-between that is necessary for the effects of ambivalence.
In this show, one of the videos stems from a 1988 photograph by Robert Mapplethorpe taken one year before the artist’s death, where RM himself is depicted onto an infinite black background beside a walking stick whose knob is a skull. From this image, and as a tribute to the American photographer, Marcos Chaves elaborated the first of the two videos being shown. In them, Chaves is self-portrayed – half artist/impersonation, half carnival mask – illustrating, respectively, death and passion. In the first one, Mapplethorpe’s photograph comes immediately to mind, but MC disrupts the grim seriousness of this reference by using a walking stick that is also a toy and a horn. After the initial moments of absolute morbid concentration, the sound of the horn flings open the laughter and its power of derision. In the second one, there is an opposite movement. When one faces the image of the artist donning a popular folk mask and flaunting a fleshy and funny feminine mouth, one switches from the initial laughter to silent observation. Laughter subsides, for the exaggeratedly prolonged duration of the same image ends up by imparting an absurd and smashing sense to it.
The observation that only the lower half of the artist’s face is masked and that his eyes remain ‘real’ is a relevant one. Firstly, because it corroborates the original function of the mask, that of separating two antagonistic universes: the persona and the impersonation. Secondly, because it retains only the eyes as a ‘reality’, the gaze being an essential organic function for the fruition of the aesthetic phenomenon and a channel via which both the artist and the public filter what is visible. Lastly, the idea of the ‘other half’ is significant, that is, of someone who is equivalent to someone else or is its absolute similar, because it makes the two halves correspond – persona and impersonation – and undoes the concept of mask while simultaneously appropriating it. The ‘other half’ is thus a sort of visual pun that is a reference within Chaves’s artistic corpus, one that is structured by visual and textual plays that are anchored to the pun, with the flavor of the Duchampian calembours.
The photographic works, in turn, expand and direct the death and passion themes towards a support that is, tautologically and in its technical origin, related with these ideas. With no possibility of unfoldment, as is the case in the videos, the photographs petrify the image. They are more synthetic and emblematic and congeal the theater of masks into the actual ‘death’ originated by the photographic cut that stabilizes everything. After all, as Philippe Dubois puts it, the essential play of photography is ‘to play statue’, that is, to freeze like a statue, like playing possum.
In the photographs, as well as in the drawings, Marcos Chaves once more uses the mask, mouth and skull figures and creates some anamorphoses, such as the one that transforms the mouth into other banal signs of the world of passion: the heart and the apple. And it is important to note that the word apple is contained inside the name Mapplethorpe, which sends us back to the wordplays and puns that are of great interest to Chaves, as well making us realize the circularity that exists in the whole set of these works.
Two large-sized photos draw our attention, for they bring back the presence of objects with which Chaves initiated his career and that have been absent from his artistic output for quite some time. Curiously enough, however, these objects are displayed in the form of photographs, once more deformed by the same monumentality that encircled the images at the Biennial. The use of photography is supported by two essential argumentations. Firstly, because when flattening the object onto the photographic surface, and by eternalizing in time only its frontal image, the artist nullifies the three-dimensional aspect of that object-sculpture and also the viewer’s possibility of circulating around it. With this, he conveys an incongruity into the very concept of object, reducing it to a planar survival. Secondly, because only its enlarged photographic reproduction could confer to this ‘object’ the monumental attribute that renders it un-verisimilar, in addition to the already un-verisimilar articulation of the assemblage. Thus, Chaves duplicates the imponderable character of these objects, congealing their existence in time and amplifying their presence in space.
These works, besides illustrating the witty and clever way in which Marcos Chaves has been making use of the photographic support, bear reference to the overall theme of the show, reiterating the ‘comedy’ of the mask. Moreover, the circularity that pervades the universe of the exhibition encircles the work of Marcos Chaves in its entirety and explains the attraction of the artist for the phenomenon of tautology, which remains as a suggestion and is never accomplished, for Marcos Chaves always disrupts its self-referential completion by deviating it via the pun and interrupting its predictability. All in all, the mask and the pun may find their meeting points: both are deviations from the ‘truth’ and they alter the straight line of the world into amazing bifurcations, changing the carriage into a pumpkin and death into laughter.
February 2005
Translated by Paulo Andrade Lemos
Rio de Janeiro, March 2005