RECUO - IRAN DO ESPÍRITO SANTO
Photos: Guilherme Gomes
[automatically translated]
Drawing seems to permeate Iran do Espírito Santo's work, in the more traditional way as an image that represents something, through the design of the objects used as a starting point for his work, or even through the architectural design, which the artist constantly borrows in his work. presentation of their works. His paintings are made on the walls of the exhibition space, his installations and objects are articulated with this environment and usually take their own consolidated way of displaying art to carry out such an operation.
Iran deals with elements inherited from minimalism, in its aesthetic refinement and formal refinement, and from pop art, in its universe of image-symbols, converting everyday elements - often extremely banal - into a model of how they should, or could be, pure form. As in a hyper realistic drawing, rules or formulas that say little about reality configure an image so harmonious and perfect that it starts to impress more than reality itself. In this way, the artist's objects lose their functions to gain formal perfection, such as the shoebox sculpted in marble in perfect, yet massive symmetry.
One of these rules, the perspective constructed through a vanishing point, is the artifice used for the installation created by the artist for Capela do Morumbi. Convinced by the Renaissance, perspective allowed painters greater illusionism, making painting a window to another reality. It was up to modern art to assert the flatness of the media, break with this procedure, and create other solutions for representation.
The installation consists of a mural painted in shades of gray on a panel made of wood and plaster in the dimensions of the back wall of the Chapel. Distributed in fifty-three precise strips, from the lightest to the darkest, the gray intensifies as it approaches the center of the panel, where a final tone, the darkest, reproduces in a reduced form the design of the wall, which is also a formal synthesis. of architectural space.
Thus, RECUO is created, a two-dimensional solution that proposes the extension of the nave of Capela do Morumbi by a few more meters, in an aseptic and geometric way, exactly the opposite of the real space. As in the artist's other works, in RECUO there is a duality between abstraction and reality. Result of the way it is done, with the painting of successive lines of grey, at the same time that it is abstract and superficial, and in the modernist way it affirms its flatness, from the distance of those who enter the Chapel what one sees is an image perspective.
More than answering or solving, Iran's work poses itself as a restless, suspicious and ironic question that, both attracts the viewer into a suspended experience for its instigating and elegant visuality - characteristics that the artist knew how to extract well from design -, how it creates noise in space and behaves like a paradoxical image, with no easy answer. It is a visual game of perception, as in the massive sculpture in the shape of the void of the keyhole made by the artist; one cannot see through it, but it reconfigures the space around it.
Douglas de Freitas