Blind date (Raphael Fonseca & Pablo Leon de La Barra)
What is striking about Marcos Chaves’ career is how he experiments with such different languages as object-making and photography, installation and vídeo. At any rate, in the last decade, it was inarguably in photography that he systematically developed his research and explored everyday life in his unusual way. A keen observer, he documents little moments that portray some of the day-to-day irreality of a complex city like Rio de Janeiro – from holes on the streets and how they are signaled to his framings of Pão de Açúcar as a placid postcard of chaos.
What his photographic practice and some of his installations have in common is a relationship between images and writing; Chaves is particularly interested in wordplay. The word “tuo,” applied to a revolving door, may turn to “out,” and the saying “Come into the hole,” with the help of the letter W and a slight change in color, becomes “Come into the whole.” This quest for dubious meaning is what led him to what is perhaps his best-known work in Brazil – the phrase “Eu só vendo a vista” added to a photographic postcard of Pão de Açúcar.
Created in 1997, this work was converted into a site-specific piece last year for the Verandah of the Niterói Contemporary Art Museum. Knowing that the museum is set along the Guanabara Bay and that some of its windows face Rio de Janeiro’s most iconic landscape, the artist chose to cover them with black stickers. A different letter was cut out and added to each window pane, and the audience could only get glimpses of the landscape through the gaps between the letters. Chaves literally “blindfolded the landscape” in one single action – just like the landscape itself, which was on sale upfront, rather than in instalments. The way the space was taken prompted admiration and awe from viewers; in a subtle way, the power games involved in showing, concealing and commercializing landscapes and mainstream ideas about the city are embodied by the multiple forms taken on by this series.
The artist took separate photographs of each of the letters in this installation, and he is presenting, at Galeria Nara Roesler | Rio de Janeiro, three versions which experiment with the results in different ways. One could argue that this is a project which photographically appropriates another work of his; in this sense, why not pay homage to the foremost appropriator in art history, Marcel Duchamp? Thus, an encounter is proposed between his installation and one of the best-known visual art pieces of the 20th century: Étant donnés, an installation by the Frenchman that was only shown to the public in 1969.
This artwork by Duchamp lures viewers’ gazes through two holes on a wooden door. In an act of voyeurism, one views a naked woman’s body with a landscape in the background. As in other works of his, this is a visual enigma where images often set out to confuse and prompt cerebral action from viewers, rather than to deliver an easy allegory of any sort. The very saying “Étant donnes” – which Augusto de Campos translated as “Sendo dados” (given that) – supposedly encompasses an anagram, “En attendons,” or “we shall wait,” also in French. Duchamp’s piece is delivered to the audience by light, just like the gaps that allow a view of Rio de Janeiro in Chaves’ installation.
In one of the artworks on show, the letters that make up the sentence “Eu só vendo a vista” are printed in small scale to compose, by themselves, Marcel Duchamp’s “Étant donnés.” In Marcos Chaves’ writing game, the coincidence between parts of sentences worked to his favor. When printed in large scale, each letter gets spatialized in the first room of the exhibit. Arranged in no a priori order, his composition of words or sentences will be left to the gallery staff. What are the ways to go about arranging them? Alphabetically? Composing pieces of words in Portuguese, English or other languages? Or would their randomness be the best solution to this equation of writing, photography and architecture? Only time will tell.
Finally, a third, previously unseen work created with a stereoscope and a slide disc likens Chaves’ creation to Marcel Duchamp in yet another way. By relying on analog technology contemporary with “Étant donnés,” the artist from Rio forces viewers to actively engage their bodies in order to compose and read the words. The saying “só vendo,” created from the seven spaces which the object earmarks for photographs, once again pays homage to sight, a crucial sense in Chaves’ research. Only by seeing (and reading) can one believe the power of images and words. One need no longer add “a vista” to this sentence; it’s already there, in the spaces of light within the letters. Likewise, the memory of Duchamp also echoes in these artworks.
One is left with the certainty that in the near future, other artworks and phrases by Marcos Chaves will surely bring us to other blind dates – or better yet, “blindfolded dates” – with the history of art and writing.