Gazing games
Parallel editing is a filmmaking technique, also known as dialectical montage or intellectual montage, which consists in the editing of footage to convey a message without the use of words. This game of associations to build new meanings is not a privilege of film alone. Freud, the founding father of psychoanalysis, as regards the language of dreams, would already tell us of the mental montage of images and oneiric experiences as messages from our unconscious reality. The montage of novel meanings and concepts through day-to-day images and objects also came about in the world of fine arts, in dadaist assemblages and in Marcel Duchamp’s readymades.
Thiago Honório’s “Corte” (Cut) exhibition draws from the same source, using object superimposition to inquire into the act of montage in the art world. In a metalinguistic exercise, the artist imposes two levels of questioning regarding art object exhibition structures, casting doubt on both the pedestal as a support and the very act of legitimization of the gaze within the exhibition space. To this end, he creates half-animal, half-object hybrids that tense up the meanings of creation and the creative act. One example is the piece “Vis-à-vis,” two magnifying glasses whose handles are a pair of bull’s horns. Laid out on a pedestal-mirror, the objects confront their conventional functions of reflecting and magnifying: the interplay between the mirror and the magnifying glass deforms the perception of the gaze. According to the exhibition essay from Rodrigo Moura, Thiago Honório’s works “hark back to the classic scene from ‘Psycho’ where we watch as Lila approaches the house – which also looks on –, in a virtuosic edit of subjective and objective cameras.” In a nutshell, not only do the works in the exhibition “Corte” question the act of montage as a creative construct, but also as a game between the act of looking and seeing.
— Nina Gazire
São Paulo: Istoé magazine, April 18, 2010.
Translated by Gabriel Blum