Migrações,2000/2005
graphite on paper
Within the countless forums of discussion that drawing gives rise to, the work is based on investigating visual systems and their capacity to generate images. It questions the traditional training methods for landscape drawing and the role of the artist as the generator.
It entrusts to a mechanical process, able to perpetuate itself almost preceding the handling by third parties, the production of a series of pencil drawings on paper, carried out inside boxes, shipped from the artist’s home to the exhibition venue. Landscape drawing is usually linked to a renaissance and retinal perspective. it is a static cut-out of nature and dependent on the hand of a contemplative artist and interpreter of reality in order to exist. It is not an autonomous process and cannot occur without his control. It perhaps grasps his view of the landscape, but hardly the physical experience of having been in it, of having traveled through it.
It is to record this aspect, from the start of the movement, which the work is seeking to suggest. The resulting drawings will be the graphic testimony of journeys that really occurred. They will be the “seismographic” compression on the same surface of drawings of observations of different landscapes, but which will highlight the procedural aspect of achieving them, and not the landscapes themselves. Means of conveyance, on foot or by plane, visit landscapes not only different but intimately liked to their potentialities. Consequently they generate particular graphic patterns, as they are not subject to the actions of the same natural agents on a certain route, and to confront them is the focus of interest of this presentation. The project migrations has already generated during its lifetime the clash between patterns produced in means of transport that range from trains to boats, taking in delivery tricycles and interstate buses on the way, in cities like Rio de Janeiro, Sao Paulo, Paris and London. The drawings obey arbitrary criteria from start to finish based on the considerable mileage covered on the way to the exhibition venue on the same support.
Four springs, approximately 12cm in length, connected vertically to a 33cm square metal plate, were fixed by the tops to a wooden base fixed horizontally to the floor of the trunk of a car. Over them, fixed to the trunk lid, hangs a device consisting of a small wooden base and a single spring, 23cm long, extended at one end with a hollow aluminum tube, which houses a soft lead pencil inside it this pencil touches the center of a sheet of paper resting on the first structure. They are responsible for graphically recording all the irregularities of the terrain that the vehicle is subject to during any journey.