There is a fierce stone
a young man,
there is the young man’s gaze locked onto the stone,
the young man’s gaze, my home,
the young man’s gaze sometimes is the stone.
Luís Miguel Nava
Thiago Honório: Opera
Early last month, Thiago Honório presented a new exhibition in Pueblo Garzón, Uruguay, at the invitation of the Piero Atchugarry Gallery. Titled Ópera (Opera), it did not begin nor end within the gallery premises. Composed of three acts – flower, flesh, and stone – the exhibit demanded a body in motion through space (traveling across the pueblo) and through time (traveling through myth). There was no starting point or endpoint; there was no clear itinerary. A sort of fable with no moral lesson, Ópera was at once the artwork and its vestige, past and future, memory and imagination. Over twenty years ago, Thiago Honório created a piece of work recognized for its polyphonic, unclassifiable character. In straddling the widest range of formats, no predefined methodology underpins his output other than a commitment to the challenges posed by language itself.
This time around, the exhibit centered around the age-old myth of Anahí. The sweet-voiced daughter of a Guarani tribal chief, she is said to have witnessed her father’s murder by the Spaniards, and she fought to protect and liberate her people. Ultimately captured by the colonists, she was burnt on a tree, and when dawn came, the tree’s top was covered with deep-red flowers shaped like the flames that killed her, their color referencing the blood she gave for the freedom of her people. And so it was that the ceibo flower, now considered a national icon in Argentina and Uruguay, was born.
Honório built 600 life-size ceibo flowers out of enamel-coated ceramic and spread them throughout the village of Garzón. The flowers were responsible for pulverizing the exhibition, blurring up its boundaries and outlines. Whereas the traditional exhibition space demands attention to be centered around the empire of vision, here, on the contrary, his Anahís diluted our gaze across the landscape, leading us through erratic paths and ultimately calling upon us to experience the pueblo itself as a fabular territory as we walked through it. These hermaphroditic flowers contain male and female organs within a single fleshy, club-like structure. They are not portrayed as tall branches, but rather as grass-level wildflowers, fresh and fragile amid rushing feet, implying eroticism.
What they want is to get the landscape burning hot, to turn up the heat on the heels of the unsuspecting passersby who chase them like Hansel and Gretel’s breadcrumbs; a lesson in re-enchantment. Outdoors, they have been gifted not only to the gallery audience, to curious tourists and the locals themselves, but also to the insects that touch them, the cows, the birds, the dogs, and other non-humans or extra-humans. Pliny the Elder used to tell of the birds that would try to peck at the fruits painted up by Zeuxis, such was their virtuosic seduction. Here, however, the artwork is not meant to falsify reality, but rather to produce a supra-reality: a space where the day-to-day and dreaming are reflexive conditions of mutual engenderment. If Garzón is, for its own identity, a place dedicated to suspending us in time and space – a kind of geography ever foreign to itself –, Honório’s work reinforces this dimension with an oeuvre that is a “living myth,” as Mircea Eliade would have it. Anahí lets us know that it is also possible to get delirious with animals and plants.
And some would finally arrive at the gallery’s premises to find the then-already-iconic series Pintura de Parede (Wall Painting), initiated in 2013, with multiple subsequent iterations. The deep-red flowers gave way to blood-red compositions made from worn out sandpaper of different grits, previously used by the artist in renovating his studio and his home. Its would-be orthogonal grid is challenged by the organic texture of pieces that are the result of acute friction between two bodies (sandpaper and wall) – an encounter one cannot come out unscathed or unmarked from. The red-and-white patterns reminiscent of fat-marbled meat render the architecture vulnerable, making its entrails visible or inflicting wounds and bruises upon it, in a gesture at once erotic and violent. Honório prompted the audience to picture the 1950s horse stable (which is now the gallery) entirely as a deep flesh wound, stripped of its own skin of history and cultural dimension to become pure body, a membrane that precariously negotiates in between the inside and the outside.
It would make no sense, however, to call this a body-home, since there is no suggestion here of a soft nest that is ready to harbor and welcome. We are closer to a frail, unprotected body, exposed to trauma, and carrying with it echoes or vestiges of those other sanded-down surfaces – the home and the studio transported in leftover dust. Ironically, his gesture makes this architecture a place that is rather “unsheltered” from itself, and what gives these pieces of sandpaper their flesh-like aspect is precisely their degradation: the wound produced upon the rough surface, yielding a built-up form through its subtraction. “The deepest thing is the skin," Paul Valéry would argue. Here, depth is built through dearth, an absent presence that leads us to finally notice the exhibition space itself as a device alien to any fantasy of neutrality: a subject unto itself; flesh. It should be noted that Pintura de Parede also harks back to the artifices of illusory visuality which comprise the Baroque lexicon, as it relies on metaphorical dramatization, duplication, and simulacre as rhetorical resources, all of which are central techniques to the artist’s work.
Lastly, also featured was a recreation of Luzia, whose eyes inlaid into stones watched the audience from afar. In his first trip to Garzón, to join the CAMPO AIR artist residency in 2019, the artist had built a solid shape out of irregular-shaped gray granite stones collected in the vicinities of the pueblo, with the aid of a local artisan. Eyes made from resin sculpted by a saint builder from Minas Gerais for processional and devotional images were inlaid onto the shape, in a direct allusion to the piece’s eponymous saint. Four years later, the artwork was recreated in the same pueblo, at the same location.
One had to walk up to it, that is, one had to want to see it. From afar, all that one makes out is a hardened totem, closed off unto itself as it demarcates the essentially flat landscape. As one approaches the mineral structure, little by little, a pair of eyes seems to humanize it, converting it into a hybrid that is difficult to categorize. At times it seems like there is a body hidden underneath the fort-like structure; at others, it looks like an actual living stone, fully imbued with subjectivity. Luzia is at once object and subject. As its eyes glare at us, making it into a character, we are objectified by its vision. Just like Medusa, who had the power of turning to stone those that looked straight at her, the sculpture needs to give us thing-like contours, temporarily inverting our roles. Who does the looking and who gets looked at? As Georges Didi-Huberman famously put it, here, “What we see is not worth — does not live — in our eyes but for what looks at us." In the absence of a shared language between stone and man, cattle and people (not at all gratuitous is the fact that Luzia is perhaps seen by cows more than it is by humans), eye contact remains a privileged (and mysterious) form of communication.
Ópera confronts us with a central aspect of Honório’s work: it is a type of artmaking that does not seek to respond to events in the heat of the moment (not at all interested in a presentism that is anchored on the “here and now,” on the machine of breaking news). On the contrary, he weaves together a different temporality, one more dedicated to dealing with the present as an extemporaneous condition. Echoes from the past and rumors from the future condensate in these three acts, in this body of work, or “body at work,” as the artist likes to say, and this is perhaps why they lead us in so many different directions and tributary streams. The meaning they construct is never univocal or crystal-clear, and this is why they find an ideal landscape in Garzón, a house which accommodates their noisy silence which perhaps, who knows, also causes the chant of Anahí to vibrate in the wind.
— Pollyana Quintella
Palavra Solta Magazine, May 2023.
Translated by Gabriel Blum