* Email from the artist to the author. February 2010.
The quotes in this text are taken from this correspondence.
** The meaning of the verb mount here is threefold: the one that designates the layout of works in space, the one that corresponds to film editing, and the (Brazilian Portuguese) jargon that designates the transformation of a person through clothing, wigs, and makeup.
*** A procession statue is a type of sacred image carried in processions and clad in clothing made of fabric.
Awakened gaze
As per the division of labor in the art world, it is the curator’s job to formulate a line of thought and stir up meanings concerning the artwork in the presence of the actual object. Hence, the formulation is ever more evident that while not every critic is a curator, the opposite does not entirely hold true. The curator’s work requires critical thinking. This dichotomy could be further extended into the separation between curators that develop and care for collections, and those that make exhibitions (exhibition makers, as per the Anglo-Saxon jargon). In its active state, this practice transcends the exhibition checklist (conjugated in the past or future tense) and kindles the semantic-formal relationships that the body-work triggers within the space, in the company of others, in the continuum of architecture, in the steps of the gaze, ultimately, in the montage.
Thiago Honório is a partisan reinventor of this activity, artist-curator-mounter of his work. His artworks are ultimately montages. Which, in space, remount one another. This is why he chose to name his latest exhibit “Corte” (“Cut;” the quotation marks are part of the title proposed by the artist). The title alludes both to the corners of the sharp surfaces of his artwork-montages and to the smallest possible unit in the principle of montage, the cut, the space of suspension between two scenes which, in film, lends the narrative its pace – what Eisenstein calls collision, the invisible glue that gives shape and meaning to what we see.
The describing of this system prior to its completion is just another symptom which feeds into the initial reflection in this text. When we visited them, the artwork-montages were all, the words of the artist-physiologist, on the “dissection tables” in the studio*. Their parts were not mounted, so to speak**. Let us then examine, first, the studies that precede them. Those are drawings, notes taken in pencil and ink on paper that are at once technical and suggestive of the future, of what the works are to become, in that state in between being and nonbeing. Thiago’s cognitive sketch-diagram makes it clear that the superimposition of standalone objects is the principal operation that defines the principle of montage of each artwork in the exhibition. We are talking about layers of separate objects which directly superimpose, without the use of attachments or other structures, and which ultimately constitute the works. Here, two aspects should be noted. Firstly, how, in his conceptual framework, the artist values the distinction between his work and sculpture. It is not simply about the technicality of carving and modeling versus object (which has been altogether overcome since modern sculpture), but about active non-belonging to the lineage of sculpture.
Clearly, the perspective of sculptural values is not best suited to these artworks. On the other hand, and notwithstanding that, one of the most frequently recurring elements in this research, and one which abounds in this exhibit, is precisely the pedestal, taken as an inextricable part of the artworks, and not simply as a “neutral” object of display. We might think of a history of the pedestal which ran parallel to a history of sculpture, up until its abolition, on the one hand, or even its absorption into other artistic strategies, as is the case here.
Are we, then, faced with the representation of presentation strategies, with the agency of drawing (design and drawing), yet under a logic in which they actively provoke the spectator, and not only in terms? Let us look at the centerpiece of the exhibition, Imagem (Image, 2008-10). Here, we have a central element, the head of an 18th-century procession statue of a saint*** found by the artist in an antique shop. It sits, at the spectator’s eye height, atop a mirror-faced cube whose top is covered in animal hide. Finishing off the whole arrangement is an acrylic dome, which makes for a near-scientific and rather solemn look.
Thiago refers to the time spent looking for the image as part of the work done, but additionally, “the most important thing was that it had to be an image with a fixed, straight, attentive gaze,” not at all evanescent or penitent. Here, what is at stake is, first and foremost, the spectator’s encounter with this sharp gaze, which awaits him in the exhibition space and, in a way, ontologically precedes him and reminds him of his status as a voyeur in the room. The tension achieved between the figure of the sculpture and the body of the spectator is all the more evident because part of the artwork’s surface is covered in mirrors, an element that harks back to narcissism and transformism, as if it were encouraging an erotic fusion between the object and the subject, not least because the artwork finds itself alone in the first exhibition room. Another element to be looked into is the animal hide, which in this context is reminiscent of fetish and of a semianimate stage of matter.
Eroticism and the tension in the gaze, harking back to the notion of transformation and the metaphors of the body, are also present in the other artworks in the exhibit – organic materials, representation/presentation, and references to vision are articulated. All the artworks are constituted through precise superimposition and montage devices, in an agency of the thorough technical work (in acrylic, metals, and mirrors), whose result is placed in dialogue with raw, organic elements skins, horns, and tusks). The convergence of these two registers causes them to mutually transform in a game of attraction and repulsion. On the second floor of the gallery, the artworks share a room, as if they were watching each other, carrying out a reciprocal exchange of meanings. Their surfaces refer to one another: one of the objects, Viravolta (Turnabout, 2008-10), is covered in mirrors, and its top is also covered in hide. Another artwork, Vis-à-vis (2008-10), features a pair of magnifying glasses, and Paparazzi (2008-10) is a pair of mirrors – both these pieces directly reference the eyes, a surrealist trope which the artist consciously reclaims. In one of these works, Presa (Tusk, 2008-10), the interplay between signified and signifier becomes more evident, in the object as well as the title.
All artworks in this exhibition flow towards a deeply awake sense of oddness. Thiago speaks of an act which inquires: “Who does the looking and who gets looked at”? He speaks of Hitchcock and the anxiety, the suspense, triggered by the object’s awareness of the subject, like in the classic scene from Psycho (1960) where we watch as Lila approaches the house – which looks on sinisterly, in a virtuosic stroke of montage between subjective and objective cameras. That approach, combined with other perspectives on the film and the works of Thiago Honório, reminds us of how the act of exhibiting relates, first and foremost, to transformation.
— Rodrigo Moura
São Paulo: Galeria Virgilio, 2010.
Translated by Gabriel Blum