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MESQUITA, Ivo e RIVITTI, Thaís. “Carmela gross: a body of works”, a discussion. In: GROSS, Carmela. Um corpo de idéias. São Paulo: Pinacoteca do Estado de São Paulo, 2010.
This interview with Ivo Mesquita, curator of Carmela Gross’s exhibition at Estação Pinacoteca, was conducted by Thais Rivitti, editor of this publication, a few days after the show first opened. Their dialogue brings to light some significant moments in the process of developing the curatorial work, as well as commentaries about the works on display and some issues regarding the creation of this catalogue.
Thais Rivitti: In the early discussions we had about Carmela Gross’s exhibition, which you were organizing, I remember you saying it would have only sixteen works, a small number considering her forty years of production. How did you start to elaborate this list of works?
Ivo Mesquita: When I start an exhibition project, it is crucial to know the space where it will take place. More important than imagining specific contents of the work that will be on show, I need to know where the exhibition will take place. The first image a visitor sees has to take him into the space, into the artist’s work. Because this specific exhibition takes place at Estação Pinacoteca, a place I’m very familiar with, I already knew the possibilities of discourse I could have there as curator: a possible number of pieces, possible different routes. In Carmela Gross’s specific case, the issue was to choose a trend, as she is an artist with an extended and diversified production, both regarding support – painting, printing, stamps, installations, urban interventions, works with light, videotext, film – and the issues with which she works: landscapes, urban spaces, construction of forms of representation, image systems, art itself. Carmela goes through more formal developments, such as in her series Facas (Knives, 1994) and Trem (Train, 1990), and more extreme strategies, such as in Buracos (Holes, 1994) or in her interventions with fluorescent lamps such as AURORA (2003). On the other hand, these are often ambitious, extended works: many unfolded chairs, many knives, many spears, many rocks. This made me consider a great deal of different factors, facing so many possibilities.
Parallel to that, there was an issue about painting, particularly painting from 1980 on, a theme to which Pinacoteca has been dedicating many different exhibitions to. On my part, I have previously realized two projects within this theme: Beatriz Milhazes’s and Leda Catunda’s exhibitions. I must say that painting is my favorite part in art history – without any loss regarding other media, issues or strategies. Therefore, I initially thought about approaching the issue of painting in Carmela’s work, as she deals with it in a most conceptual, analytic form, as constitutive part of her system of images and representations, taking it as historical reference, such as in Projeto para construção de um Céu (Project for the construction of a sky, 1980-1981), or many times using it to make ironic remarks, such as in Hélices (Propellers, 1993) or Fonte (Fountain, 1987). Differently from the two artists previously mentioned – who, although they also have a conceptual basis, are involved with pictorial practice, even though they do so through appropriations and collages, procedures characteristic of the generation they belong to – Carmela is not a painter. Carmela belongs to a previous generation, for whom painting is object of institutional criticism.
TR: The issue of painting is more evident in the first exhibition room, where we see the works Corpo de ideias (Body of ideas, 1981), Carimbos (Stamps,1977-1978), Hélices and Recorte preto I (Black cut-out I, 1995).
IM: Exactly. My idea was to choose a theme, an issue, a trend that would cover a path of her work in a precise manner. This is another interesting aspect in a curator’s point of view, this exercise in synthesizing, in speaking with little. Gallery spaces have their limits, evidently, and the greatest challenge when preparing a panoramic exhibition is to present a synthesis of the artist’s work. The first room is a kind of introduction to the artist’s repertoire. This idea of drawing as project, or representation as construction; a narrative, even though it is a form of fiction.
TR: Would painting fit in there, as a way of questioning representation, possibilities and impossibilities of representing something?
IM: Projeto para a construção de um céu is about representing clouds; painting, the clouds in the landscape are brought about. The sky where artists show themselves: this one does it like this, that other one does it more smoothly… At the same time, it is a completely transitory thing, there is no permanent form of cloud, it is in constant movement, thus we have the theme of what is ephemeral. Time, which is a theme in painting, is present.
TR: Projeto para a construção de um céu presents, let’s say, a field of interest in which many works by the artist are developed…
IM: In a certain sense, the show takes the work Projeto para a construção de um céu, of 1980- 1981, as a privileged point. From this work emerged the main theme of the show, that is, transition from the representation plan to materialization in a real presence in space, which transforms perception. Even though the artist’s earlier works date from the late 1960s, we can say that the following decade is characterized as an experimental period, in which the artist accomplishes works on image and representation construction through media such as rubber stamps, heliography, projections, thus constructing a repertoire of strategic issues. With Projeto para a construção de um céu, the artist asserts the issue of drawing as thread in her work, as conceptual basis for any project, and as primary reference for reflecting about art and artistic practice. This is an affirmative, ample, consistent work; a dissertation – a role it actually had in the artist’s academic life. Beyond that, within my initial idea of an exhibition centered on painting, it presents a classic theme: landscape. However, this theme is not explored in a traditional manner, from impressions of observation of reality, but from standardized and catalogued procedures in order to build some representation of nature and landscape, considered more “real”, according to topographic procedures. This is how it oriented the selection for this exhibition: it describes a path that goes from representing a landscape to more recent works, which are interventions in urban spaces and in specific sites.
Still about painting, her Carimbos are crucial as well, as they decode drawing procedures – types of lines, of brush strokes – in a cold manner, with rubber stamps, in order to construct some mechanical painting – which even then is manual. This work is a painting containing gesture, it is a drawing containing gesture, it is still done by a hand, even though in a repetitive or mechanical manner. And this idea of repetition, which I also consider quite important, this multiplication, occurs in Carmela’s whole body of work.
It also happens in Corpo de ideias, which gives the exhibition its title. In this work, the artist reproduces images from books thousands of times, juxtaposing them through heliography, creating this large platform, this large heliographic monochrome formed by images accumulation. In my view, it has a certain demarcation of an artificial territory, which is completely constructed, manipulated. It is a combinatory issue. Corpo de ideias is a large monochrome, it has this memory of a paint ing, and, again, because it is a heliography and because it is exposed to light, it is natural that it becomes bluer and bluer. Time is marked, it is a painting that attests its passage. I think this aspect of her work is very beautiful.
TR: Does it change throughout the exhibition?
IM: It gets darker. In the process of heliography, paper is sensitized by a product that burns the image superposed by the incidence of sunlight. Therefore, every time the image is shown, it is exposed to sunlight and keeps on burning. The paper is sensitized and that process keeps on going. It is even curious when you see old plants that have some sides burnt darker than others. Corpo de ideias keeps burning in the process of exhibition, as record of time passing since the work came into existence.
TR: And there is a painting on the floor, and because of this, it has a different rapport to the visitors.
IM: It is not some conventional painting. Even those two Hélices, they are two moving blue colors.
TR: Unstable paintings, in constant mutation, you cannot freeze one particular image of them.
IM: Exactly. And there is the work in fabric, which I like a great deal, Recorte preto I, which is topography permitting a flow from conceptual wall painting (that is in Cascata [Waterfall, 2005] and sometimes in older paintings such as Luar [Moonlight, 1987]) to volume, real topography.
TR: Recorte preto I also makes us think of Buracos, don’t you think? There is some space beyond the plane.
IM: Yes, it projects itself, you don’t know if it goes towards the inside or the outside. This same aspect appears again in Quasares (Quasars, 1983) and in A negra (The negress, 1987), which evokes this shadow, this denial of space.
TR: In this sense, the title Corpo de ideias is also curious, because it is a completely flat, superficial work, which she calls “corpo” [body], thus creating some ambiguity between two-dimensional and three-dimensional.
IM: It is curious. You look at the work and you see juxtaposed images, so it offers itself as a vision of the plane with some depth, something that turns inside, but it is almost a denial of this presence, in order to allude to the idea’s immateriality.
TR: For the other room, your choice was oriented in a different sense, without having the issue of painting as reference, it seems to me.
IM: I have to say that I worked a little based on the works I liked most. Of course, all of this was discussed with the artist. In many of the meetings we held at her studio, we wouldn’t even mention the exhibition, we just considered this or that work. Naturally, there are works to which I feel closer to or in which I am more interested in – something that is normal for any curator – without displaying any disinterest for the others, obviously. However, some of them are part of my own background, they constitute my visual experience, they are part of my professional background. Coincidentally, the first time I worked as a monitor – or educator, as we say now – at Bienal de São Paulo, in 1969, her works A carga (The load, 1968) and Presunto (1968) were on display. They were in front of a large iron panel, a painting by Roberto Aguilar made with a blowlamp, perforating the surface such as a graffiti mask; and, sometimes, because it wouldn’t always work, we inflated Marcelo Nitsche’s large yellow Bolha amarela (Yellow bubble, 1968), which would grow and occupy the space in the pavilion in a never-before-seen manner. These three works together brought something from the street – scale and content – to that Bienal, something fresh in a show boycotted by international artists due to beforehand censorship imposed by the military regime. They were among the best things in that exhibition.
Carmela is an artist whose work I have followed, but in a relationship a little different from the one I have with the works by Iran [do Espírito Santo], Beatriz [Milhazes] or Leda [Catunda], who, let’s say, are artists belonging to my generation. Not Carmela, she already was The artist, The young artist at that time, and I was only seventeen.
TR: A carga and Presunto, then, allude to production more inclined towards sculpture, another one of the artist’s lines of investigation.
IM: There is another issue in Carmela’s work, which is the body. A feminine body that is not feminist, a body that derives from sculpture, it is a body related to sculpture. In the same way, it is something she takes from painting. As I say, actually, she talks about painting, she has a painting memory, but she is not a painter. She is a sculptor. Drawing is the basis of her work, but she is a sculptor, because her work brings space into question. I believe A carga, most of all, shows this. The work comes forward in its presentation, it confronts the viewer. The canvas is modeled in pleats, folds, a body created by accumulation of calculated gestures. In the same way as Presunto, which makes use of the form of an industrialized ham, a transformed body.
TR: In A negra we can also see these characteristics derived from sculpture, isn’t it so?
IM: A negra, certainly, has the characteristics of traditional sculpture as well, but it is a volume on wheels, which can be moved, and in this sense it has a little irony as work of art, such as the paintings in the series Hélices, that rotate on the wall and create with their movement a color spot that is larger than their physical presence. However, A negra has qualities and issues that are present in other works. It floats like a shadow, it has an evanescent presence due to its tulle, which adds some diffuse materiality to it, just like the line of light in Uma casa (One house, 2006), where limits seem to be vibrating instead of defining volume. The opening on the top of A negra seems to suck in external space, reminding us of Quasares, which are these negative spaces, thus going against the affirmation of a sculpture-like body. At the same time, it can be seen as an opposite of Compactos (Compacts, 1991-1992), as they are projections of a painting that goes outside a plane, bodies that throw themselves from the wall into space, creating protuberances as pregnantbodies – to use a feminine image.
TR: Thus, the act of taking out the panels from one of the exhibition rooms, so that the space in the gallery would be connected to the exterior of the building, could be read as a decision derived from this narrow connection Carmela’s works have with the city.
IM: The idea of opening one of the galleries so that we could see the city, the space of work, was present since the beginning. In the process, there was a time when we gathered a set of projects, models, records and documentation about specific works or those that were related to this idea of intervention in the city’s architecture, and we thought about making a great glass window that would occupy the whole extension of the central room, so that we could highlight this relationship. Then the other two galleries, lateral to that space, would have to be turned into rooms presenting a synthesis of the artist’s path, with selected works. However, for me, this organization would be a little repetitive of my curatorial strategy used at Leda [Catunda]’s exhibition: a central room with projects, drawings explaining two ends defined by time. It was Carmela’s idea to use her work Hotel balsa (Ferry hotel, 2003), which belongs to Pinacoteca’s collection, to make the connection between the two rooms, opening the last one so that the works on the exterior could be seen, Iluminuras (Illuminations, 2010) and Se vende (For sale, 2008). In this way, we shrunk the exhibition even further, and the work assumed a crucial role within the curatorial discourse: it makes the link between the first room, an internal space for contemplation directly linked to the experience in the studio, to more conceptual and elaborated works, to the other gallery totally open to the city, with pieces created through direct and sharp gestures, which face the visitors directly. When you look outside, then, you can se fragments of Iluminuras and Se vende, a work that is ironic and challenges a specific situation in movements of urbanization and city development policies.
TR: Iluminuras is a new work, made especially for this exhibition. Se vende had never been displayed in Brazil. They have a more direct relationship with the city, they are inserted into urban spaces. Maybe they are the tip of a process initiated with A carga and Presunto.
IM: A carga and Presunto bring a street experience to an institutional art space. Works accomplished by Carmela from the 1990s on come back to this space as pointed and specific interventions, asserting themselves more and more as a commentary about real landscapes and about possibilities of exercising art. Iluminuras is a particularly meaningful work. Evidently, it has more narrative aspects, related to the history of the building (which used to be the DEOPS, State Departament of Public and Social Order). The character of warning emanating from the yellow lights marks this reference. However, it can be regarded as a great sculpture as well. The building of Estação Pinacoteca is from 1911 and, today, it is part of São Paulo’s historic heritage. However, the city has grown and developed, transforming the scale of its buildings, its urban planning, relationships within this space. When you look at this work, particularly in the evening, you see a large volume, an urban sculpture, according to the city’s current dimensions. It is as if it were a new version of A carga, or a new load.
TR: Se vende is probably the most polemic work, because it mobilizes political contents that can be more easily perceived in a more direct manner. Particularly because it was a provocation to set it between two public buildings in downtown São Paulo.
IM: Se vende is an augmented sign, just like Uma casa. And it is due to its urban scale that it resists to its literal meaning and opens itself up for its specific poetic: choice of color – red – irregular gesture of handwriting, memory of something common and impersonal but precise in its sense. The idea of sign is greatly present in Carmela’s work. Uma casa is a sign, the stamps are a sign, this is something issued from her generation, who worked largely with semiotics in the 1970s. The idea of meta-representation itself, as in Carimbos or Projeto para a construção de um céu, is due to the presence of semiotics in articulating issues and debates about image, language, emergence of new media such as video, electronic copy and experimental cinema at that time. In the same way, her interest in landscape comes from the same period. In 1968, Robert Smithson published The Sedimentation of the Mind, in which he discusses landscape as an idea; at the same time he was starting to develop his land art projects. This notion can also be perceived in her Projeto para a construção de um céu, just as in works by other artists belonging to the same generation, such as Luiz Alphonsus, Mario Cravo Neto (before he committed himself completely to photograph), and Marcelo Nitsche, among others.
Coming back to Se vende, however, it is at once sculpture and red painting, which makes everything colorful… Evidently, if it was placed in the Bom Retiro District, in São Paulo, fifty years from now, maybe it wouldn’t make sense. Not the same sense it makes now, when the area has been going through changes, seeking renovations and valorization. It is curious to think that, within the context it was exhibited for the first time, in Madrid, where it was part of the special projects section at art fair ARCO, it was perceived as something ironic about the nature of the event, where everything may be or is for sale. However, when it was displayed at Matadero, a newly created cultural center at Arganzuela District, it alluded to strategies used in re-urbanization and revitalization projects of degraded areas in the city, in any city, through creation of highly powerful cultural devices and equipment, adding value and promoting changes in quality of life in those neighborhoods.
TR: Uma casa belongs to Pinacoteca’s collection as well, and it isn’t in the first or the second room, but between them.
IM: Uma casa is a light sign. Someone has said this before, its drawing does not have determined, precise lines, because it is light. However, at the same time, its sign is so precise [that] a kind of play is constructed once again.
TR: Something quite concrete, solid, such as a house, presented in an evanescent form. And here again, just like in A carga and Presunto, an industrialized material is used, and she did not order customized lamps of a certain length, she used what was available.
IM: Just like the music stands she adapted to support the fluorescent tube lamps. The option for pink, a quite artificial color that once again alludes to painting – as it puts color on its whole space and spills into others. At the same time, this work has a huge amount of wires – silver-colored wires! They work as “spilling,” as if they were a wall covered in graffiti; if you look at it suddenly and upfront, the work gives you this impression of being graffiti.
TR: Uma casa is a work in space that can be seen as painting, in a certain sense… Alagados [Flooded, 2000] also does this same thing, it seems to me: from drawing, from line to tridimensional.
IM: Yes, Alagados is also a fundamental piece there, because it creates those contours and at the same time adds weight to the room. It brings about an idea of drawing, of trace, of a well-limited line, because it is a line of small iron bars hooked to each other. It is a fundamental piece.
TR: What about the catalogue? How can you preserve all these connections between the works in a book?
IM: Yes, the project is not only about the exhibition. It is a seminar, it is this publication. This is part of it, all these choices made come from movements seeking to affirm this reading, this interpretation of her work Pinacoteca do Estado is promoting, at this time, through our curatorial work. In order to open this reading, it is very important that we had two new texts, which were commissioned, in the publication. We start to offer more reading possibilities of the work, together with the exhibition’s reading. You need things as complements, because that exhibition is not final, total, definitive. It is a selection. The book has in large part this function of alluding, of presenting the context in which the work was produced.
TR: About these texts, you asked Marta Bogéa, an architect, to write one of them.
IM: She, curiously, adopted a strategy of constructing her text by accompanying it with images. I think it was extremely productive, she brings us again to that kind of street view. However, she talks according to a perspective of experience. And of networks, of maps built by the work.
TR: There is also a text by Carla Zaccagnini, an artist, which brings a very different view from that of an art critic. She allows herself to have more personal readings, less committed to art history.
IM: I always think that an artist regards the work of another artist in a different way from anyone else. I pay much attention to comments artists make about other artists, they come through some other place that is not that of a critic or of a historian.
Carla’s text talks about a certain notion of belonging, which I believe artists have and maybe we don’t know. This is important, also because it is a form of recognition that these works, these oeuvres, let’s say, are present, constituted, and how other generations look at them, how they realize they have a connection with them. In this case, Carmela is an artist of whom Pinacoteca possesses many works, from different moments. She is an artist who is within this great narrative that Pinacoteca builds through its collection, an artist who is often referred to by other artists; she is influent and, also in this sense, a reference. It was important that the book covered this issue. I believe this is fundamental in the museum’s work, not only to accumulate, but to propose different reflections on its works.
TR: And the book stays, while the exhibition is temporary. In this sense, its reach is greater and its unfolding happens through a longer period.
IM: Exactly, I think this is a second curatorial work. It’s not only about choosing works in a certain sequence, it is something pertaining to the total sense of the work, to what we want it to cover. The publication needs to articulate itself as another narrative, it does not have the same resources of an exhibition.
In this case, it was so evident in this project… When, in the first draft of the book, the gallery views seemed to be framed by the white of the pages, it seemed those were pictures about an exhibition; however, if you expand and bleed [the images], the whole page becomes the exhibition.
TR: These are editorial options that really change the way of reading. In this book, it was important to give priority to the photos of views, the relationships between different works. Of course, they will be seen again in the check list, enlarged and sharp, as well.
IM: It is true. In a way, the eyes do not dominate a bleed page, the same way they cannot dominate a room when we walk in. In a framed photo, everything is there. When the exhibition is very concise, it has to offer an experience. And Hotel balsa, in this sense, has a powerful role, which is the idea of an interactive experience of the exhibition, of interaction between the exhibition and the visitor. And it has to do with the work itself. It talks about this, about works over the past ten years, they have acted in this relationship, an almost corporal battle with visitors, which is what we have in the last room. It is a corporal battle, it is an urban experience, where subjects have to take a stand. I think it was important that the book would slightly convey this possibility. This is what we are talking about, this passage from representation to reality.
ZACCAGNINI, Carla. Drawing, Drawings: By the Way of a Prologue. In: GROSS, Carmela. Um corpo de idéias. São Paulo: Pinacoteca do Estado de São Paulo, 2010.
While she was signing my copy of her insert for Bravo! magazine, Carmela remembered that afternoon’s class with a smile, between accomplice and provocative, playing on her lips: It had been good, right? A few hours before, the presentation of my project had been received in class with exclamations of “I won’t swallow that!”
The class had indeed been good. Because of what was discussed, having that project as an excuse: the limits of art and the role of an artist, the social places of the one and the other, the boundaries that define and delimit them and embrace other issues of the same caliber or fundament. And we were even debating stands that had a great deal to negotiate before they found a common language through which nominate discordances; this forced us all to re-elaborate thoughts that had already solidified and to find new ways of expressing them.
And, largely, that was what the matter (this word is preferable to the term discipline if we compare their collateral meanings) was about. On the first class, Desenho, desenhos (Drawing, drawings), we had been presented with not so much a contents plan, but a Carmela plan designed to make us work slowly, step by step. A proposal of dissection of the conception and development process of a work, in order to see it and treat it frame by frame. The idea was fairly simple: each person would propose a project and commit her/himself to develop it throughout the semester. The condition was the time: the dilated time. We would not have any time frame to attain any result, as it usually happens, a condition that make us feel time flying by since the beginning until the moment when it is over – we would have, however and differently, to slowly elaborate each phase and clarify decisions we took in each fork of the road we encountered. And, every time the project seemed to get to its end before the course was over, we would have to disassemble it and reassemble it again by starting with a different piece, tackling it from another side, giving it a spin.
That course resulted, she explained, from her concern relative to her impression (repeated, as it happens with other impressions) that the works she saw in exhibitions were not ready, or had been finished in a hurry. As if there had not been enough time to mature, to exercise, to experiment. As if, between the first idea and the final form, distilling stages were missing; sometimes ebullition; other times, condensation; in the worst of instances, both. And her course resulted also from a bet or a will to prove that by thickening the process, the visible result would be modified.
There is no doubt that exposing the process while it is in progress alters it. Thoughts and actions are transformed beforehand, in order to be shared with sense through discourse; and they change again, back again, responding to issues that emerge when we speak and listen. However, what was at play was, also, how much comings and goings and circular paths that compose a dilated path end up impressed, maybe in an invisible or unspeakable manner, but always present, in what results from them¹.
If, on the one hand, the issue was to dilate the elaboration time of a project as a strategy to make it thicker; on the other hand, it was interesting to think about coherence between process construction and work conception (or however you want to recombine these four words). To investigate how the structure of the result finds itself impressed in the procedures that lead to it and vice-versa; how the process reflects and informs its consequences, how paths taken announce and echo the place of arrival. How, lastly, a work defines and redefines itself in each moment of its construction, departing from the same desires and the same obsessions, from the same symptoms, from the same questions; in a word, from the same position.
If we widen our thinking, it was also about finding a certain coherence (I mean it as a relative coherence) that, with any luck, echoes in each concretion of an artist’s discourse: in his/her works of different scales and supports, in each phase of the process that constitute them, in his/her speech for different viewers, in his/her choices, in his/her writings, in his/her courses (regarding the various meanings of this term).
WHY I WRITE: THIS IS NOT A JUSTIFICATION , BUT AN INTRODUCTION
This is why, I gather, the bibliography for Desenho, desenhos was composed by writings by artists describing their process of work. I remember particularly Akira Kurosawa’s autobiography and Gustave Flaubert’s letters. It was most revealing to find in these texts similar metaphors regarding the first’s films, or a descriptive rigor characteristically detailing the second’s books; to perceive a way of seeing and of narrating, that we can identify in the finished works, taking form throughout both these narrations. This realization was probably responsible for my interest in this genre and for the fact that I started a collection of artists’ writings about art, which takes a whole bookcase, on the eyes’ level, in my library.
I am currently reading a collection of essays by George Orwell² and I just read a text entitled Why I Write, originally published in 1946. Taking aside his need for survival, Orwell distinguishes four great motives for his activity, which cohabit, in different degrees and oscillating proportions according to context, in every and all writers (I believe the term can be expanded to artists, with a few parallel adjustments in the text). They are, as follows:
1. Sheer egoism. Desire to seem clever, to be talked about, to be remembered after death, to get your own back on grown-ups who snubbed you on childhood etc. etc.
2. Aesthetic enthusiasm. Perception of beauty in the external world, or, on the other hand, in words and their right arrangement. Pleasure in the impact of one sound on another, in the firmness of good prose or the rhythm of a good story. Desire to share an experience which one feels is valuable and ought not to be missed.
3. Historical impulse. Desire to see things as they are, to find out true facts and store them up for the use of posterity.
4.Political purpose – using the word “political” in the widest possible sense. Desire to push the world in a certain direction, to alter other people’s idea of the kind of society that they should strive after.
Except the third item, which is summed-up like this, each one of these motives have their descriptions followed by clarifications about their forms of manifestation, which I excluded from this account without exempting myself from recommending the reading of the whole essay, where we can see the author’s quest in seeing his four motives fulfilled in form and content.
What is interesting here, I feel, is to think about these desires of different orders and about their many combinations, all of them impure. How can one mix this desire for revenge that is almost loving with a desire to provoke an aesthetic experience such that it is able to recreate our excitement before something beautiful; how can one mix both of them to the desire of recording facts, events, episodes or habits for posterior analysis that will be able to rewrite history; how can one combine these to a desire of altering the political consciousness of others and therefore their will and their actions? How do the mixing of these desires, sometimes manifest, other times latent, results in a movement that condenses itself sometimes in work, sometimes in text, sometimes in lecture? And how does each one of these desires can be more or less fierce, on the same artist, in different moments?
In a supposed confession with a touch of false testimony, Orwell says that by nature, and he understands “nature” to be state you have attained when you are first adult, the first three motives would outweigh the fourth. “Then came Hitler, the Spanish Civil War etc.” and, from 1936 on, each line he wrote was against totalitarianism.
PERO NADA PUEDEN BOMBAS, RUMBA LA RUMBA LA RUMBA LA, DONDE SOBRA CORAZÓN, ¡AY CARMELA! ¡AY CARMELA!³
The fact that there are figures that are only possible in text is curious; they build themselves as they mold language, they outline paragraphs and trigger conclusions or new assumptions traced within their logic, temporary and tenuous, which is created by one word followed by another and reopened with each new phrase that, at the same time, allows and asks for it. Each written affirmation results from a field prepared by those that came before it and redefines them, limiting possibilities of what can be said after, allowing ideas that could not become material before. Drawing, drawings, drawings, drawings etc.
When I started this text with accounts from those classes, I did not know it was going to end up with Orwell’s book; even less that through it I would get to a Spanish Civil War song I started to listen to as a distraction and which now presents itself as key to understanding the work to which this writing is dedicated, which had been discussing other things up until now.
Maybe this happened because I saw before, without realizing it, the Chansons de la guerre d’Espagne LP, with Guernica on the cover and red letters, propped as a decoration piece in the almost empty library in this apartment someone let me borrow. Of course the memory of the song was present because of the echoing name: Carmela. I researched to find out who that character praised on the song of combat and resistance was, but apparently no one knows. Or it does not matter.
To evoke a first name, in this repeated and rhythmic lament, seems to have a function here: it reminds us of daily relationships and resizes the war in this manner. They sing about dread for bombardments (“Ay Carmela!”), they sing about the power of their troops (“Ay Carmela!”), they sing about recent victories and the next battles (“Ay Carmela! Ay Carmela!”). It is Carmela for some reason that did not become history. It is Carmela, but it could be either Pilar or Dolores.
In 2002, Carmela Gross wrote in red fluorescent bulbs, those that quickly make us think of signs used in large stores, and with all capitals: EU SOU DOLORES (I AM DOLORES). The phrase, larger that the room it occupied, went out through the window, going beyond the boundaries of the building and those existing between public and private spaces. From memory, I could say that Dolores was the name of a fortuneteller, one of those who offer services with a warranty on pamphlets distributed on the streets, delivered by hand and read at bus stops.
But the occupation of this second character probably does not matter here either. What matters is the alteration in scale and support, the transmutation between announce and enunciation, a change in communication mechanics and a transformation in the reading that operates through this change. The same Dolores who all of us are not, which we cease to be when her identity affirmation gains public view, just like that same Carmela to whom a whole army direct their laments, she has a dimension of being a bridge between irreconcilable spaces.
Public and private co-exist here, though without agreeing on a truce; but not only that: there are also references and abstractions co-habiting or defining this place with its ambivalent power that can be identified as forming this and other works by Carmela. Her Quasares (Quasars, 1983), for instance, or her Projeto para a construção de um céu (Project for the construction of a sky, 1980-1981). The last is probably her work that most directly refers to relationships between the act of seeing and other actions capable of creating images.
Her Projeto para a construção de um céu is among the works that occupy my imaginary museum. I once remembered these drawings, suddenly, when I was going back home by bicycle, in a very white afternoon – as they can be in the north. My path went through a port area, with a regular horizon in which a great smokestack was highlighted in the distance, much taller and vigorous than the cranes marking the waterline. The color of the smoke, solid, slightly darker than the background sky, mimicked the clouds. I thought: “This is it, Carmela’s factory,” or something to that effect, and took a picture less clarifying than this chapter.
Not only the title, but also part of the means of representation used in this series belongs to the repertoire of technical drawing. Vertical and horizontal lines in regular intervals and notes written in black ink on the bottom of the page remind us of those drawings whose aim is to guarantee an unmistaken comprehension, with instructions that are more precise than words, so that they can direct the construction or building of a certain structure in a way that it will have the anticipated result. They can be architects’ plans, or those that come with industrial furniture to be assembled at home, safety information on flights or instructions on aircraft model kits.
On the other hand, to the notes and lines in black ink, she added areas filled in color pencil, using just a few shades. This material is associated mainly to drawing made by or for children. Children’s drawings have a relationship with the world external to the paper’s surface that is almost antagonistic to that of technical drawings. Where the last is iconic, the first is metonymic. Technical drawings get closer to what is portrayed through unmistakable abbreviations and summaries, which will forcefully derive on a given, or, better yet, preconceived consequence. Children’s drawings are generalizations, they do not portray this or that specific individual, but a group, a species, a set of individuals under the same name, focusing on some specific detail that characterizes them as symbols: the alligator’s great mouth with many teeth, the snail’s spiraled home on its back, a feather headdress on an Indian’s head.
There is also a time or, yet, a causality difference between these two styles of representation. While a child aims at recognizing and being able to give a name, on paper, to a being like others he/she has seen before, either in a zoo, in a garden, in the television or in books; an architect plans something he/she wants to see built, and with luck it will bring some kind of novelty. In the first case, it is the experience before a tiger or a tiger image that one seeks to reproduce (maybe moved by the same excitement before beauty described by Orwell); in the last, the drawing is an inaugural tool that regulates actions and causes concretions that did not exist before. In the first case, the drawing goes after its reference, it aims at getting to it, it hunts a tiger, an alligator, a snail, and an Indian (and it is likely that the snail will be the first to be captured). In the last case, a drawing is a command, a word of order.
In Projeto para a construção de um céu, her drawing is these two drawings at the same time, one together with the other. That project is portrait. Maybe it is thirty three different portraits of the sky in precise and fleeting moments. Maybe it results from an experience (repeated on a daily basis) of watching and comparing colors and diffuse forms we recognize as being the one sky, despite its variations, and thus being the representation of a sum of juxtaposed skies; a portrait of a sky told from memory. In that sense, it gets closer to a children’s drawing. However, this portrait is also a plan, just like the architect’s drawing. A plan for a (special or temporal) sky, numbered from 1 to 33, on the various boards composing the series. This construction project is a representation of skies previously seen and, at the same time, it indicates shapes and colors, still diffuse, but fierce, of subsequent skies.
It is impossible to affirm that the project has not been finished because it was built step by step, that the sky has not assumed or adopted, in thirty three posterior instants, each one of those configurations. It would be beautiful to look for and photograph thirty three skies or sky details that would reproduce those drawings. I may start to do it, even though this probably is, as many others, a plan with faults (of record and interpretation), which will result on skies slightly different from those that were expected. And, therefore, unrecognizable.
Differently form these drawings that are inserted into indefinite time, which happens before and after a concomitant reality, these supposed pictures would freeze the instant in which the clouds would assume the shape to be sought after, in which light would give them the necessary or desired colors. We have seen clouds thus frozen before. However, Nuvens (Clouds), from 1967, is, actually, a planned construction, each part was meticulously cut, one by one, in rigid material, with a thickness adequate for a stage set and supposedly flesh-colored in their interior.
Formed by almost regular undulations in waxed turquoise blue, these Nuvens are closer to cumulus- nimbus drawn by hand than to those announcing a storm. Their bear a certain character borrowed from children’s drawings in which clouds become a closed outline, easily identifiable, in a blue tone that jumps from the white background. An exemplary cloud, almost. Its construction is like transforming into gigantic tridimensional shapes some clouds that were drawn onto paper on a table and then they fell upright from the sheet when we shook the paper to cast off eraser bits, after erasing so many other clouds that were not approved.
However, it is as if the other clouds, which are visible groups of minute water particles suspended on the atmosphere, had suddenly become solid and fell immediately on the ground with their increased density. And the straight base of those Nuvens must result from this fall, or from some other form of fall, with their lower face smooth against the concrete floor, which does not allow aerial fluctuations nor those that are always possible on paper. The second hypothesis, that of sudden solidification of a diffuse and transitory form, is something similar to what we see in Carimbos (Stamps, 1977-1978): expressive gestures crystallized and their mechanical repetition.
The eighty stamps composing this series reproduce streaks, short lines, bent straight lines, traces, scribbles, graphisms, scrawls, doodles, hurried writings, stains, smudges, blemishes, spots, brush strokes, and I wish I could find sixty six more words to describe the various consequences of typical or unexpected gestures of someone holding a pencil or an mechanical pencil, an ink pen, a ballpoint pen en or a water-based pen, a dry or an oily pastel stick, charcoal, chalk or a brush.
Materializing these fleeting gestures on a rubber matrix with a bureaucratic character, and their exhaustively repeated impressions, side by side, as if to methodically fill a sheet of paper, present on a sole surface representation means typical of conceptual art and informal abstractionism. There is some irony in the combination of these two legacies, but there is also, again or already, the act of establishing a co-habitation of irreconcilable spaces (or historic moments) in the same potential environment.
And there is, it seems to me, a certain perception of power in abstraction, and of political power, I dare say. The repetition of graphic elements reproduced on stamps has an analogous function to that of “rumba la rumba la rumba la” in the Republican Spanish song. In that song, “rumba la rumba la rumba la” is a rhythmic and melodic punctuation that could be marked by guitars or drums; however, it is chanted in a choir, maybe because it sounds better or it is better to listen to it like this, maybe because the musicians’ hands would be busy with other instruments. However, the recurrence of this abstract element also works as inclusion mechanism, we all can sing – “rumba la rumba la rumba la” – even if we do not know the lyrics, even if we do not speak the language.
And so are the shapes of Carimbos: abstract, repeated, and common (at least according to two meanings of this term). It is as if the aim here was to shorten the distance between those who speak the language and those who do not; those who know the lyrics and those who do not. These drawings do not have or allude to the commandeering power of technical drawings; they remind us, at most, the limited and boring power of a bureaucrat who masters the stamps that allow or deny entry, exit and stay. On the other hand, they do not contain, either, the admiration prompted by drawings capable of taking us back to a child’s position, amazed before some representation that presents him/her with a reference in an experience that has no intermediaries.
A recognizable simplicity of forms and a technicality related to office stamps that does not present any surprises or secrets build a bridge between the person who detains the discourse and those who hear or see it. We are all capable of producing brush strokes, spots, blemishes, smudges, stains, hurried writings, doodles, scrawls, graphisms, scribbles, traces, bent straight lines, short lines, or streaks such as those. And we know that. It would be beautiful, maybe, to copy the Carimbos by hand, using the various materials and gestures each one of them refers to.
To build a transit space between the one who generates the discourse sheltered by institutions, sealed and approved by the masters of stamps, and those who go there as listeners or observers is, I believe, to inaugurate a field of political power. A territory where subjectivities must be renegotiated, where history must be reviewed; a space of awareness.
Iluminuras (Illuminations, 2010), the work Carmela Gross idealized and accomplished for the exhibition this catalogue originally accompanies, transforms, with one sole gesture, the building occupied by the museum in an awareness space, by putting into ambiguous evidence everything it shelters. Be careful about what you keep and exhibit in here! But it is not only that. In this case, it regards also what this building has sheltered in the past.
Iluminuras consists in the installation of sixty six revolving signalization devices on the façade of the building currently occupied by Estação Pinacoteca, the same one Departamento Estadual de Ordem Pública e Social (DEOPS)4 occupied between 1940 and 1983. The action is simple and the object is well known. We all have seen, more than once, police cars or ambulances with those lights on, accompanied by a deafening sound. However they pass by, most times, the fastest they can.
Here, the urgency is static, it does not move from where it is. Day and night the lights are on, lighting up the street and the building, the street and the building, the street and the building, while they revolve. Most visible after the sun sets and the museum closes, when, it is said, ghosts wander. However, the affirmation is permanent. And silent. The sound we are used to hear whenever we see, in town or in a movie, these and other emergency lights, does not go together with them here. It is a silent scream. Urgency without any time frame, urgency regarding the past, without any possible solution.
The yellow lights revolve and the building throbs throbs throbs “rumba la rumba la rumba la”. “…pero nada pueden bombas (rumba la rumba la rumba la) donde sobra corazón…” It is hard to believe, actually. However, songs such as this one have contributed to form and to maintain resistance actions.
“It seems to me nonsense, in a period like our own, to think that one can avoid writing of such subjects. Everyone writes of them in one guise or another. It is simply a question of which side one takes and what approach one follows. And the more one is conscious of one’s political bias, the more chance one has of acting politically without sacrificing one’s aesthetic and intellectual integrity,” Orwell wrote in 1946, and he could have written it again in 1964, in 1968, in 1984, in 1991, in 2001, tomorrow, or yesterday.
¹ Writing now about this, which I cannot say I thought before, I remembered a work I did not know and I have not yet seen up close: 1,000 hours of staring (1992-1997), by Tom Friedman. Did he stare, exactly a thousand hours, at the same blank sheet of paper? Would this regard, juxtaposed to itself during five years, be capable of marking the surface with some charge that is not already transferred by the piece’s title? And would this character, if we want to go further, if it exists, be altered by the many other thousands of hours of stares aimed at the same sheet of paper, still blank, after it was framed?
² George ORWELL – Why I Write, Penguin Group, London, 2004.
³ Verse from El paso del Ebro, Republican song from the Spanish Civil War.
4 The State Department of Public and Social Order was a government organ for political repression, whose brutal activities had their heyday during the military regime in Brazil (1964-1985).
The Brazilian artist Carmela Gross began her career in the nineteen sixties, and her work has traveled through the last forty years of Brazilian art with a constant and striking presence in the context arising from the avant-gardes of the fifties and coming out into a new understanding of the scale and public nature of the work of art.
The work in the Coleção da Caixa Geral de Depósitos is entitled Ilha, and belongs to a series of works that deals with the outlining of spaces on walls or the floor through a drawing configured as a physical frontier between the outside and inside of a space defined as closed.
This work alludes to two ideas that run through Carmela Gross’s poetic approach: the limiting of a space – which she carries out in a literal manner, conditioning the spectator’s movement - and the idea of Utopia – I its ambivalence between an ideal and a non-existent space, as Thomas More defined it.
In Carmela Gross this Utopian place emerges in many forms throughout her work, with the word and drawing being the processes she seems to use most to do this. Drawing is a very peculiar device in the way it is used in her work, in the sense that it is often dematerialized into light or produced using three-dimensional constructions, most usually in the form of installations occupying the ground, and thus dealing directly with the spectator’s bodily presence, his movement in space, and therefore his freedom. This is what happened in the installation Em vão, presented in the Oficina Oswald de Andrade in 1999, in which a labyrint of black ribbons placed among the colonnade of an atrium conditioned the spectators’ movements.
However, the work that belongs to the Coleção da Caixa Geral de Depósitos is connected to the installation Alagados (produced later, in 2000), in which the three-dimentional nature of the drawing turned into a frontier, first on the wall and then on the floor, which guides the gaze and carries out the passage between the universe of the line and the space.
One can easily understand how the relationship between the place (present in the Utopian aspect), subjective marking out of the space through drawing (which Gross has developed since her works of the seventies) and the defining of public spaces, that are modified and transformed into a different physical experience on the part of the spectator, belongs to the same universe of relationship between the public and the private, between the social space and the intimate place.
That is what islands are: bordered places, great, fenced-off monads that may equally be metaphors for our personal condition as for the Utopia of a place in which intimacy is the final condition.
Let there be light? No – build light or choose it. When discovered and emancipated by Dan Flavin, the fluorescent light bulb was an emanation of red, white or blue color, its field of meaning reduced to zero, isolating the signifier to utter solitude. It eluded the eloquent meanings of Pop. Not always. There are tributes to Tatlin. Ascetic minimalism surrenders to History and pays tribute to the meeting of Reason and Art; beyond that, it emphasizes a moment in which art did not aspire to be alone but to achieve a utopian function of alliance with society and its revolutionary urgencies. Nowadays, Flavin’s extremely beautiful tributes, so well exhibited at Beacon, resonate as shallow memories of a distant past in a world governed, according to Sandra Bondarovsky, by “elevator economic analyses” in which the only thing that matters are numbers and indexes that go up and down.
Carmela Gross has revisited the fluorescent modules in their infernal rigidity; nothing to do with the flaccid submission of neon, so subtle and so opposed to resistance. Carmela preferred these store-bought rods of light, as did Flavin. Her phonemes might be ready-mades, were not the use of the linguistic conceit so inappropriate, since the light bulb is actually a particle of a letter, not a sound. This is an unprintable, luminescent typography, albeit one that expresses itself radiantly when it forms words such as HOTEL or AURORA within an irrelevant environment, a technological surface elicited by electric power. It spreads across façades, finding shelter in rooms, and emanating from ceilings; this poetry of morphemes is almost pictorial.
Now it floats; a dwelling place of light in air. The work process is inverted – not a radiant signifier in search of meaning, but an image that radiates in search of the word HOUSE – unwritten yet inscribed, sculpted in light, bulbs, wires, reactors, supports; in space. Instead of the plane of the word, we have an ineffable, empty mass surrounded by light. The house is sculpted from its architecture of elements, a childish drawing such as Klee might have made had he been given time to escape the modern ambush and its formal investigations. See how, as in the song, there is no roof, there are no walls, there is no floor, no one resting in a hammock and, yet, it inhabits us. This house of Carmela’s is not our dwelling place, a building of light in air – it inhabits us, its praise of drawing suspended in three dimensions may give us shelter, yet its dry whiteness penetrates us and the more we look at it, the more we incorporate it and think of the many unperceived houses that inhabit us. Instead of the ‘house’ that protects us, one in which we live, Carmela’s crude hideaway of light bulbs, with its wire intestines and exposed devices, is a delicate thing in search of a word we soon find. Which is why we keep it: this house is a piece of our very self, a perfect mirror of this imperfectly made being.
Rio de Janeiro, July, 2007.
During the second half of the year, thanks to CARMELA GROSS, visitors to the third floor of the GALERIA OLIDO will find it occupied by the word AURORA. A beautiful woman’s name that has currently fallen inexplicably out of use, perhaps because it has been overly associated with old-fashioned, innocent things such as the tune of that title made famous by songwriter Mario Lago during the carnival of 1941; or with the way girls wore their best outfits, painted their lips brightly and, eagerly seeking after illusion, frequented sold-out showings at São Paulo’s downtown film palaces such as, for example, the notoriously fashionable Cine Olido. But aurora is also one of the nouns used to designate daybreak. With the dewy tone that the [diacritic] tilde ensures the second “a” in manhã (the Portuguese word for morning), aurora possesses an open, reverberating sonority, the middle syllable of which contracts like the sun –before it rises above the horizon– is heralded by its luminosity.
And it would be no exaggeration to say that the room shall be inhabited by AURORA. The public will come across her; enormous, crossing the space diagonally, ingeniously spelled out in the hard, volatile calligraphy of fluorescent lamps, a succession of rosy scrawls from which hangs a head of hair made up of white wires through which flows the energy that feeds them. A body of light that occupies the environment, tinting its shadows pink and spilling through the large windows of the room out onto heedless passersby, unaware of so much beauty as they move across the sidewalks of the Avenida São João –on the corner of Dom José De Barros and the Largo do Paissandu– throughout the months of Spring.
Aurora is a radical exercise in poetry, a demonstration of what a poet such as CARMELA GROSS can do when she chooses volumetric ambient space over the two-dimensionality of paper. If, when endowed with density, the poetic word does not acquiesce to the demands of instant communication; offering up other meanings in its stead –and because of its expanded fleshliness, as is the case here –; what can be said of a word that takes on our physical dimension in order to traverse a room such as the one in the GALERIA OLIDO, interdicting it almost completely? As the artist shows us, a single word may suffice, as long as it is revisited from an original perspective, rewritten in relation to the city’s architecture or its very space, in order that it may renew itself fully so as to yield new meanings, inaugurating new worlds and days.
Agnaldo Farias
Professor, College of Architecture and Urbanism
Universidade de São Paulo.
Carmela Gross’ individual exhibition in 1990 once again brought the idea that the contribution if en artist cannot be evaluated based on a single exposition. When considering an artist, it is his trajectory that is important. The artist is contemplated for his trajectory that is important. The artist is contemplated for his vitality, resistance, the enthusiasm with which he works thought several periods of his life, circumstances of his cultural environment and the word in which he lives. Carmela Gross’ works reminded us of her beginning as an artist in the context of her generation, and the manner in which she grew and developed her artistic-poetic discourse. An individual exposition is a chapter; it does not refer to the trajectory, the telltale sing of the complete validity of the work of an artist.
Carmela Gross began her Brazilian artistic work at the end of a period, the late 60’s and early 70’s, a moment when traditional techniques (painting, engraving, drawing, sculpture) gave way unrestricted innovations possible, based on the examples of the works of English and North American pop artists, on the emergence of happenings and performances, of conceptual art, of the dematerialization of artistic work, lastly. In other words, a young artist who was revealing himself at that moment was motivated by age-old art such as painting, but found within his reach an opening to everything imaginable regarding alternative media. In Carmela pop period we see two objects/installations: Nuvens Azuis (Blue Clouds), 1987, which now belongs to the State Pinacotheca, made on lacquered wood, and Presunto (Ham), 1969, a soft form, on canvas, presented at the II Art Biennial of Salvador. The 70’s would be a continuous experiment for young artists, who would not approach brushes or oil. They are the times, also in Brazil, of new media: video, audiovisuals, super 8, photocopy, heliographs, records with sounds conceived by artists etc. it is the period of “experimental space” that the Museum of Modern Art of Rio de Janeiro opened for these artists, and in São Paulo, of ExpoProjeção 73, the first national gathering of artists working with new media, organized by Aracy Amaral, and JAC- Young Contemporary Art – at the Museum of Contemporary Art of the University of São Paulo, the museum under the direction of Walter Zanini.
In these years there was actually a kind of prejudice against painting or work “done” by the hands of an artist, even though we must not disregard a conversation with Mira Schendel, who told us that art could not be conceived if not done by an artist. Thinking is something that everyone does. But only an artist can organize these thoughts and make something concrete. For Carmela, in this effervescent period of free experimentation, the exercise was not only with multipliable images but also with the so-called “art of process”. That is, the art interfering in illustrations, images reproduced in books, or superposed images on oversized (5m x 5m) heliographic proofs.
The characteristic of discipline in the obsessive pace of the artist’s style can be seen in her exhibits in 1977 (Mônica Filgueiras and Raquel Arnauld Gallery), with drawings in colored pencil, shapes outlined by paper “masks”, rationality paired with conciseness, the latter already implicit in her work. As of 1978 in her so-called “stamp” phase, the multiplication of the graphic gesture stands out in strict order. The surface of the paper is covered by small repeating lines, or scribbles, outlines, strokes or textures, with a typology unique to each sheet. Certainly the word “stamp” has an ironic connotation peculiar to the era of multiple production, confronting a possible marked concerned with the uniqueness of works of art, and at the same time, of the image of an artist as a designer of a module that can in principal be repeated with the same quality, a isolating the creator of conventional work. The same motive on paper brings to mind this ever-present aspect in Carmela Gross: the repetitive, the reiterative, and the obsessive of her gesture. Even the artist asks herself: “isn’t this repetitiveness a feminine characteristic?” Perhaps. This quality in women’s work is also implicit in decoration: in the repeated motive of needlework, of edgings, of the daily table arrangement, of the flower vase, of the making of a bed. In all of these acts there is not an isolated task, but rituals, which are repeated continuously throughout a life time.
During the production of her well-known series Projeto para a Construção de um Céu (Project for the Construction of a Sky), we find Carmela Gross already experiencing a new phase, the drawing been introduced into the artistic environment as a sketch of the work which will be permanent. But the small marks providing the structure for these drawings remind as of certain image from her period of stamps, in her occupation of space. These apparent structure seems to exist as a basis for measuring in the un-measurable, the spatiality of the top of heaven which we imagine infinite. The artist leans over the paper (1m x 70cm) and in careful lines with colored pencils, tenaciously builds her thirty-three “skies”, a number corresponding to the artist’s division of the sky of the southern hemisphere. Likewise, in her professional course this moment bring other concerns. As a professor of the School of Communication and Arts of the University of São Paulo, the artist faces a challenge: that of obtaining a master’s degree as well as remaining faithful to her previous speculation, and in this case with drawing as a project. So her task was to find a theoretical foundation, which would allow her to realize her project without major changes. It is a work that reveals a great deal about her obsessiveness in the making of an extensive series like this, at the same time laden with visual poetics and imbued with a certain mystery in its designs.
The exposition Quasares (1983) had an enigmatic name, which according to the artist, meant “sound vibration captured by sound sensors”. Once again we are faced with experiments of the previous decade: off set prints registered apparitional images of inexact immateriality; they are allusive, despite the fact that their inherent indefiniteness did not lead us to the sources form which the artist extracted these forms interfered with by processes up to the graphic printing.
Only then were we able to realize the importance of paper in Carmela work: the stamp is brought to life on paper. Superposed images explore the possibilities of heliographic paper, the drawing for the construction of the sky occupies vast spaces on paper, and the “Quasars” prints were also on paper. In fact this sensitivity/intimacy with paper would prompt her, as of 1987, to research a work with crafted paper, producing textures using lead, pigments and glue, diversifying her materials. Even after the beginning of her series of paintings and more recently, painted relieves, drawing for Carmela Gross, emphasizing the conceptual character of her production, seems to be an exercise, discipline for the creation of a “larger” work, sometimes working together, sometimes alongside. But it is in this second half of the 80’s that strongly geometrized forms appear, contrasting the gesture facture of painting.
Would the change in painting be an influence from the 80’s, when the return to paints and to colors was so widespread abroad as well as in Brazil? It may be so, given that the artist is not immune to what happens in the artistic environment that surrounds him. In spite of the fact that in this case it is far from the sheer Dionysian pleasure of colors and pictorial gestures, in Carmela painting the concept always prevails, generation loyalty. Thus, in the painting exhibition of the Luisa Strina Gallery (1986) some classicism seemed to transpire in her canvasses cut in plays dominated by symmetry and composing centralization. Paradoxically there was also a gesture stroke, the curvilinear aspect of the shapes in contrast to the orthogonal once, to the basic dominating square, with chromatic reduction as an option.
The artist refers to this stage as a period of transition (“possible meeting”) between painting and drawing: “…a drawing which delineates, designs, establishes and is solidified in the strict a geometry of connections, and a painting which searches for expressiveness and the fluidity of the chromatic material in de-crystallizations of symbols and clichés” (Museum of Contemporary Art – University of São Paulo Catalogue, Pintura / Desenho – Painting / Drawing, 1987). From theses paintings with clipped borders outside the conventional pictorial rectangle, as well as connected or juxtaposed plays, free conceptions would begin to emerge concerning shape, and conceptual albeit figure themes such as flames, columns of smoke, mountains, waterfalls which violently flow in all directions defying gravity, as well as curtains behind curtains on a stage within the picture of the empty half-open scene, an absent space of representation. During this period the repetition of forms can also be observed as the theme in certain works, just as in others the virtual space of the painting is continued in real space, the wall, over which the graphic gesture of the artist begins to complement the pictorial image.
Perhaps this is the beginning of the presence of a great energy, a movement translated into a painting calculated but with fluidity in its execution, with transparencies and styles of drawing to refer us to the poetical image of the platonic cave, were brightness and glimpses of the exterior seem to be projected (International Biennial of São Paulo, 1989). Paintings in acrylic on canvas and wood were to follow, in a smaller form, assembled as a gigantic mural. This production (1988, São Paulo Gallery) seemed to us to be a reference, strange like the atmosphere of Angelo Venosa works, as if we were standing before a free systematic ordering of elements and instruments from the Neolithic era by archeologist researching and extinct culture.
We had a similar impression of her works in the beautiful exposition of the São Paulo Gallery two years later (1990), both in Paisagem (Landscape) and in Trem (Train). These works were in cast aluminum, once again an experiment with new materials that is unquestionably a characteristic of the artist. Carmela Gross’ poetic density reaches a hi point with “Praia” (Beach). Her four plates of cast aluminum are juxtaposed with rare beauty of conception and result. In front of this piece it is impossible not to recall the work of Ulrich Rückriem (exhibited in the XXth International Biennial of São Paulo edition, 1989), of vigorous hieratic, in an expanded geometrical shape in stone, also composed of the juxtaposition of elements.
Her monochromatic works as of this exposition (in aluminum or wood) seem to bring out, voluntarily or not, the virtual form of the shadow, a subtle constitutive element of each work, while relief, the escape from the canvas, is confirmed. On the other hand, from here on the artist seems to search for organic forms or ordered forms of nature, almost amorphous, as members of the kingdom of aqueous thing; with in this primitivism already mentioned her pieces show relieves insinuating a circular spiral movement, always monochromatic relieves, stiff “tumors” on the verge of exploding, of emerging from the wall, mysterious in their enclosed forms or suggesting and attempt at a central perforation. The movement with had emerged in her works in 1984 reappears with a new form in her more recent work as blades, or mills (or propellers): pieces of rustic wood, always painted monochromatically, which can be moved by the hand of the observer, starting slowly. In these works occupying a larger space on the wall, again in the hand of the artist, the designer/inventor of these functionless machines, is almost totally absent. They are shapes taken from nature, without angles or straight lines, with little interference on the part of the artist. The liquidness already mentioned above also invades her drawings of the same period, in the inexistence of a rational composition, now on crafted paper with organic forms as if moving in a uterine or oceanic cosmos, an ocean of elements like jellyfish with viscous transparencies, hindered, suspended in their interrupted gestation.
Carmela Gross’ work belongs to the contemporaneity of art. It is part of our time, identifiable with the conceptual currents and with the experimental concerns of the last two decades. It is certain that there exists a great similarity among studies of artists of developed urban environments, and the work of this artist in this sense in no exception. It would be difficult to find in her the characteristics that for the international environment would fulfill expectations for Brazilian, South American Art. She knows this very well and has been confronted when exposing in Latin American: perhaps her art says little, is reticent, compared to the turbulent Brazilian social and physical environment. But this fact, as we have seen with other artist, might be a consequence of our own economic instability and social injustice. The artist therefore shuts herself in her work proposal, attempting to listen to herself and plan the echoes of these circumstances or the denial of them, in her artistic work. That is to say, in Brazil those who express a bit of the social reality are fill and far between; others deny, with eloquent rejection, confrontation with this same reality in a country in which it is difficult to inform people at all levels.
In the case of Carmela Gross, on the other hand we do not see in her trajectory the concern with establishing her personal presence in place of her work, a peculiar situation in contemporary art were what is important is a shout, the spectacular, an instant of planning, not the work which remains. Behind the experimentations of this work there is sequential work, which can be appreciate though the years. She does not contribute any ostensive realization like the hi-technologic execution of the works of Jenny Holzer, nor is the international distribution of Cindy Sherman’s art. One can be contemporary without resorting the marketing of Jeff Koons or Christo. Paul Valéry wrote that “pleasure is disappearing. Fruition is a lost art. Now it is intensity, enormity, speed, direct action on nervous centers, in the shortest way possible”. It is above all in the most talked-about international events that this possibility for fruition of work disappears most significantly, by the fact that only clamor draws attention due to the disappearance of interest in the work, which does not matter much save for the impact that it may have on the visitor who strolls though biennials or exhibition space, superficially regarding the works to know effect given the lack of time. There is surely a price, that of recognition, for the artist who chooses to appear though a work overtime and not pass though the arenas of the jet set of the arts, specially when one leaves in a culturally destitute country like Brazil today. But what is fundamental, in our point of view, is to belong to a place at a certain time (hic at nunc). It is rather the depressing for artists to live in a country oblivious to culture and its manifestations, like Brazil in the last few decades. Giulio Carlo Argan wrote that in western Christian civilization “art certainly had a historic development corresponding to the historicist structure of this civilization, art was created with the intention and awareness of creating art and with the certainty of thus contributing to the making of civilization or history. Intentionality and the awareness of the historic role of art are clearly the main factors of the relation established among the artistic facts of one period, among the successive periods, among artistic activity in general and the other activities of the same cultural system” (G. C. Argan – History of Art as History of the City, Martins Fontes, São Paulo, 1992, p.19). This natural insertion of art in the history of societies is ignored in Brazil, were aghast, we watch a swift process of de-culturing, the intellectual and artistic environment unable to obtain the assistance of the State. And under the circumstance we all feel isolated, struggling for a meaningless area, when there should be an aggressive movement for the appreciation of artistic creation in order to confer dignity to the degraded Brazilian bean. The relationship of art and society is not even present in the stage in which we live, for there does not seem to be any concern with the art of the past which is fundamental to establish create and disclosed our memory; there is even less concern with the present. Perhaps the absence of spiritual and artistic values in Brazil is of such significance that means of mass communication are imposed as the only valid ones, even at the political level above governmental teams subservience to the powerful television mass. We feel these considerations are a necessary reflection upon examining the course of the coherent art of Carmela Gross. But in better days she will certainly have her work established in the panorama of Brazilian art of the second half of this century.
Aracy Amaral.