Horizon Reflected (Daniel Rangel)
Horizon Reflected
The historical relationship between Brazil and Portugal, its contemporary aspects, the cultural permeability and the challenge proposed by the artistic director of the 17th Bienal de Cerveira with the concept of “Art: crisis and transformation” are the basis of this curatorial project.
Horizon Reflected,
a site specific work created by the Brazilian Artist Marcos Chaves for the Bienal de Cerveira – is the second act of a likely poetic triology, surreal, afro-baroque, with sound and time made in the lands of Bahia, in the city of Salvador, the colonial capital of Brazil.
The first act, named ‘Evento’ took place at the Palácio da Aclamação, a neo-classical style building decorated with beautiful, typical Portuguese frescos, garlands, bows and medallions. As the prior Governor’s house and currently a museum, it holds a collection of furniture in the style José and Luís XV, Persian carpets, paintings by European artists of the end of the XYX century and the beginning of the XX century and objects in porcelain, silver bronze and glass.
“Evento” employed the space, furniture and the decoration of the museum and the element wind to create installations of strong visual impact as a result of a precise paradox and artistic catharsis. Chairs, tables, curtains, beds, vases, bowls, and cutlery emerge suspended, scattered and overturned poetically by delicate hands and by the gaze of the artist.
The memory of ‘Evento’ is the starting point in the ‘Horizonte Refletido’ proposal. The metaphysical sensation is that the same wind that removed the furniture and the objects from the museum in Bahia also moved everything to Portugal in a kind of returning act or retribution of a permanent legacy.
A necessary return after beginning renamed – actions of the present that rummage the past but will only happen in the future, in the imagination of the public when enjoying the work.
Appropriation, intervention, imagination and humor are some of the features of the work of the carioca Marcos Chaves, also present in the curatorial proposal. ‘Horizonte Refletido’ appropriates the ‘Evento’ as Marcos Chaves appropriates himself and the curator of the other curatorial work.
The site specific photograph of ‘Evento’ that integrates the present exhibition rescues a scene that contains the memory of a situation that did not take place (could be a party that ended in a fight?). It activates the memory of the celebration, of the drinks, the wine, the beauty of chaos.
The portrait is the poetic and visual starting point of the proposed ‘Horizonte Refletido’ installation. The Chaotic image presents the banquet room devastated by the wind. Red glass cups, a detail of the image, are enlarged in the free and transparent Magic Box in Cerveira.
A white cube, an architectural and artistic work – space/expression considered ideal for the classic exhibition of fine arts. However “freedom is white”, “the box is magic” and the space becomes ideal for the imagination and artistic creation.
Cups “bico de jaca”’ typically Portuguese, are displayed broken on the floor. The wine, that once could have been in them becomes “vinho-tinta” (wine-ink) on the wall, shed as painting, and seen as blood. The sound, specially composed for the occasion amplifies the memory of what could have happened there, the day before or the site of the photo in a distant and remote time. Art transforms the apparent chaos in a poetic scene of a past that did not happen, but in fact did.
Daniel Rangel