Fragmented Strategies

Mario Gioia

 

Alibis, Detours and Freudian Slips paves a direction, which Guilherme Dable’s work was already taking. This can be attested by the tridimensional piece that the artist installs in the largest exhibition room at Eduardo Fernandes Art Gallery. Dable’s first individual exhibition in São Paulo presents a fluid set of pieces, in which paintings, drawings, sculptures and installations are mixed, generating results that are difficult to determine, but that are full of mobile and restless meaning.

 The hybrid character of Alibis… receives this synthesis in Now Would You Please Take the Trouble and Get Them, a piece somewhat sculptural, somewhat pictorial, something of an expanded drawing. Art studio supplies, residues of the urbanity of São Paulo gathered near the gallery, and constructed elements configure a piece that travels between rigidity and frailty. Settled on a precarious balance, it challenges gravity and asks the observer to circle it to perceive its integrity at the most. Planes, sticks, slats and tapes exemplify the various materials he uses, from the viscous and liquified to the solid.

The stained corten steel, the masks geometrizing color stripes, the black Velcro, the reflexive chromatic surface, the Vaseline and the running asphalt, the venous scaffold wood serving as the “skeleton” of the piece, are all the elements, which form a bric-a-brac that dialogues with the other pieces in the exhibition and with the white cube, but without displaying its specificity. In this sense, it is as if the bidimensional color planes gained a body, as if the lines and volumes were drawn with real things, from the world, and as if a project collage were concrete, with depth and perspective.

It is through a synesthetic effect that the set in Alibis... is based. It is not forced, since Dable is able to extract from music important vectors for his production, such as rhythm. In this sense, it is important to think of Tacet, a project with drawings and performances, in which sound is a paramount element, exhibited within the program Rumos Artes Visuais. Shapes, running colors and zones are linked throughout the space, in pieces, whose titles are taken from poems. And the letters find the architecture, by means of a transversal reading, in which projections, reverberations, light and sketches suggest what is known in the theory of Architecture and Urbanism as ‘fragmented strategies’.

“The acceptance of a reality that is characterized by dispersion and difference, by the sum, the overlapping and by the shock between pieces and phenomena leads to systems that are a reconstitution of fragments. […] Fragmentation is the most genuine form of the disperse condition of post-modernity and, when the starting point is this hybrid condition, when you resist the temptation of unity, identity and metaphysics, you turn to mechanisms that reconstitute a certain totality, multiple and fragmentary, like the mosaic, the collage, the assembling, the junction or the overlapping”, writes the theoretician Josep Maria Montaner.

Dable thus creates a floating region when he establishes fruitful dialogues between pieces such as The Moment the Wind Blows from Extinct Stars, and then, gradually, you wake up again and proceed, and the landscapes of dense and narrow horizons exist both in the surroundings of the art gallery in São Paulo and in the studio where he produces art every day in Porto Alegre. If the artist spent his childhood at a home of modernist lines at Avenida Carlos Gomes, in the Capital of the state, the emptiness and the harmony that prevailed in this city from days past might have seemed to split, thus creating a new locus, of dense capillarity and blind vanish points. And it is from this dry setting that Guilherme Dable daily manifests his resistance exercise, engraving poetics of undoubtful power, even if noisy, wrinkly and pervaded by accidents.

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