Exposição, Galeria Virgilio
(December 6, 2007—February 15, 2008)
In his second solo show, Thiago Honório looks to problematize the idea of exhibition. The works featured in the show, whose title Exposição (Exhibition) literally enunciates the problem the artist is presently grappling with, were loosely inspired by the novel Story of the Eye, by Georges Bataille, and the essay Mirror of Tauromachy, by Michel Leiris, both of whom were dissident authors from the French surrealist group led by André Breton. The reference to that movement is simply intended to suggest a poetic piece of data in connection with the rich sensorial universe and the free association of ideas of Surrealism, and it does not imply that the exhibit depends on the latter nor on those literary works.
In setting up Exposição, Thiago Honório sought to concatenate and build a relationship between the artworks, emphasizing the intervals between them, imparting an active statute to the spaces left vacant; thus, even as he observes the autonomy of each piece, he submerges them into a bundle of reciprocal relationships, a situation in which the spectator should find themselves permanently called upon to redefine the set.
As Thiago himself tells us, “this exhibition and the works featured in it (which are, so to speak, one and the same as well as two different things), come as a reflection on the nature of the creative process, on this uncertain boundary that can make something a 'work of art.' It is something which inquires whether the status of an ‘exhibition’ might be the very constitutive moment of the artwork and reveal its subtlest formative mechanisms, rather than being the presentation of a set that can only emerge a posteriori. The artworks have a shared desire to question the extent to which art still brings about the experience of a creational communication between an intimate and a public sphere, and the desire to address a certain frailty of the human condition, ever at the mercy of being sucked in by the exacerbation of a private world or, conversely, of becoming submerged in a whirlpool of determinations which are foreign to it, and whose comprehension eludes it. They are, as Leiris puts it, the reflection regarding the nodes or critical points, regarding ‘the places where man touches the world and himself.’”
On a generous wall in the ground floor room sits the lone, grandiose horn of a wild animal; on the adjoining wall, a plasma display shows the video Exposição I (Exhibition I), and at the center of the same room, where the visitor comes upon two columns, there are two artworks, titled Xeque-mate (Checkmate) and Olho (Eye). More than the idea of boundary which ties together all the previously unseen works on show, the set reveals a rawness, the intent to have an exhibit whose elements are self-evident, and it arises out of an act which paradoxically wishes to presentiate itself through absence, i.e., through the very energy that should radiate from the artworks.
The title / “name” Bataille (which also means battle) engraved onto a gold plaque affixed to a jacaranda plinth from which the horns emerge, the exposed bricks, the concrete pile, the tray that holds the hides, the lead, the makeup mirror, the egg – all these elements are what they are: exposed in raw fashion, and devoid of narrative concerns.
The notions of boundary and contrast, as well as a relationship with the surroundings that actively involves the spectator, are questions which Thiago Honório holds dear, and he has been addressing them in his works ever since Saltando de banda (Getting out), an exhibition held in 2003, an engineering performance of sorts, featuring hefty reinforced concrete piles and steel cables.
Exposição is accompanied by a brand-new essay from Sônia Salzstein.
works
Leiris, 2007
Bataille, 2007
Xeque-mate, 2007
Olho, 2007
Buñuel, 2007
Falo, 2007
Superfície, 2004-2007
Exposição I, 1999-2007
textsExhibition, Sônia Salzstein