Perambulante (Luisa Duarte)
“Tighten your fingers around a teaspoon, feel its metal pulse, tis mistrustful warning. How it hurts to refuse a spoon, to say no to a door, to deny everything that habit has licked to a suitable smoothness. How much simpler to accept the easy request of the spoon, to use it, to stir the coffee.” Julio Cortázar, Stories of Cronopios and Famas.
It could be said that the guiding compass of his oeuvre is deviation. Through appropriation or intervention, Marcos Chaves displaces current, commonplace significance, causing previously-unheard-of meanings to surface. It’s about the sharp gaze that departs from the habitual to reflect and produce the new in language, driven by a piercing mix of humor and irony. These resources are chosen not casually, but consistently, since they carry a high degree of deviant potency: humor and irony are devices that hit the target through the least obvious path.
The artworks featured in Perambulante bring to mind a passage by Carlos Drummond de Andrade according to which words are all initially in their “dictionary state.” What the poet does is withdraw them from that initial mute status and combine them in such a way that, together, they become poetry. Perambulante can be seen as one big movement of articulation that pulls the more prosaic entities of urban living out of their “dictionary state.”
Let us begin from the beginning, by checking the dictionary for the meaning of the word perambulate. There it is: to roam aimlessly; to wander. And now for ambler: one who moves, walks, migrates; one who has no fixed address, who is always moving from place to place; one or something that does not settle in one place, that constantly travels from here to there; one who does not settle in one place, as a buyer or seller, to ply their trade. Instead of the French flâneur, the Brazilian perambulante, but in the end it’s the same roamer of the world. But unlike the vast majority of the big city dwellers who walk about hurriedly with their backs hunched, gazing ceaselessly at their cell phones, as they lose sight of the landscape around them, Chaves walks the streets with his head up and his eyes at once distracted and attentive, able to make out, between the lines of the day-to-day, a fertile ground to be poetically cultivated.
Look at the pair of photographs that feature the image of a white wall with the inscription Não Percam (Don’t Miss Out); right underneath, the balloon that was supposed to advertise whatever was supposed to not be missed is empty. In the other photograph, a gigantic iron structure mimics a doll holding a poster, like a makeshift roadside billboard. Once again, the expectation intrinsic to that type of scene gets frustrated, since the figure finds itself empty-handed, without any brand new event to be seen, bought or experienced.
This piece sums up much of the artist’s trademark procedure. In a time when photographs get reproduced by the billions, when everyone’s a photographer capturing images not so that they’re seen, or so they’ll have a keepsake from that moment years afterwards, but more often than not out of a compulsion fueled by the desire to say I was here and to bask momentarily in likes on social media; in times like these, not falling prey to ennui in the face of the world, even when one’s memory card is full, and being able to connect different scenes seemingly worthy of the utmost indifference means being able to give meaning to the world on a daily basis without having to resort to any grand themes, but drawing from the smallest of narratives. The commonplace pictures of deactivated advertising spaces, when linked to one another by the artist, take on an unexpected connotation and become true must-sees. Mostly, Chaves finds his leitmotiv in the streets, constantly armed with a sharp gaze that is able to see the surroundings, assimilate randomness and thereby put a new, unexpected spin on things to create a new meaning.
He toys with an intelligentsia more commonly associated with high-brow art, and this is featured in numerous artworks in Perambulante, as is a relationship with the pictorial dimension of the photographs’ subjects. Whether through humor and irony or when taking the formal route, there’s this constant attitude of refusing the teaspoon’s easier plea, which is to use it to stir the coffee. Put another way, it’s all about being able to disable the automatic mode that we deal with the world in, as if it had a user manual that one must follow. We forget it’s up to us to write it out every day. Chaves’ works remind us of that realization as obvious as it is hard to assimilate. The artist creates different ways of relating to reality, by affecting and allowing himself to be affected by the context he is in, and by making precisely that living relationship with his surroundings the source of each of his works.
Featuring a generous set of photographs and videos, Perambulante reaffirms one of Chaves’ greatest strengths, namely that which, in a time when image overload leads to blindness, can see what harbors the promise of vitality and meaning in the most commonplace aspects of daily life, unmuting what is still in a “dictionary state.” In keeping with William Blake’s verses, Marcos Chaves is able To see a world in a grain of sand / And a heaven in a wild flower / Hold infinity in the palm of your hand / And eternity in an hour.
All without ever losing humor.