Exhibition
Notwithstanding the sumptuous appearance of his objects – in which a good dose of eloquence and rhetorical effects intervene – it is not their unique individual appeal that Exhibition immediately evinces. On the contrary, the number of literary associations and the allegorical mask which these objects loudly proclaim and which they so prominently impose upon vision are, in fact, what denounces in them a clamorous mark of absence, transporting them perennially elsewhere. When that absence is fully realized, without leaving a trace – nothing to be deciphered, no interiority to be surmised – what remains is the literal gravity and physical pressure of the things that ultimately constitute them.
Thus considered, Thiago Honório’s exhibition is a sharp-lined geometric solid in permanent conflict with the gallery’s cubic space, its multiple edges nodes of tension, points of destination and development for lines which place all that is there in mutual dependency; despite the narratives they flaunt (and their obvious references to sexuality), none of the objects could unmoor themselves from that solid to claim a forum of their own or the exceptionality of an ego with no loss to the calculated, compositional austerity of the whole. The power of the work lies in the fact that it allows for a tone very close to kitsch in its prodigal and solemn use of literary references, as well as in the capricious meanderings of the psychological critique that it insinuates, only to reveal its exteriority more frankly and coarsely, or the coincidence between interior and exterior of which it is made. For this reason, too, it is absence: because it fulfills space with possibilities, without concessions to abstract generalizations of type or to exercises of formal variation.
In order to say the same thing, yet now describing the situation through its negative – in other words, through the unavoidable presence that the work proclaims (which will, in fact, always afford us a truer understanding of things): thus considered, the exhibition, far from being about the depths of an unconscious, strives for a tabula rasa; it is an inventory of physical events produced by a complexity of drives that have not been fully sublimated and, for this reason, remain less than a step between splendor and the painful corruption of its vitality.
Many of the works presented are designated by proper names. It is certainly not a matter of paying tribute to famous artists, poets and writers, much less to use them as metaphors. To call these objects Bataille, Leiris or Buñuel makes them more thing-like, underscores their opaque quality as things whose existence can only be realized in other things. Nonetheless, the names are not indifferent. The artist probably chose them because they belonged to authors who confronted the appalling physical dimension that objects may have when they are resistant to a predication or when they are divested of the idea of finality; authors who venture outside the world of concepts and generalizations, in search of material thought that has strayed, so to speak. Thus, in being reduced to names (such is the case with the exhibition itself), the objects express some part of the adventure impressed by the feeling of impossibility present in the work of the two writers and the film maker; in submitting entirely to the name of someone else, the objects gain in concreteness, allowing themselves to adhere to this like mirrors that gather everything from an environment without exchanging anything with it. As might be expected, vision may be counted among the things that are central to the “exhibition”.
If – not only in the history of art but also in the history of culture – vision has achieved the near-status of a concept, and a concept that is central to Western thought (tradition speaks of a “mind’s eye” and of representation as an appropriation equivalent to the world – which is naturally a feat of vision), the figure of the liberating trance of a profane revelation often appeared to those authors at the cost of the ineffable violence which they unleashed upon vision, when not directly to the eye. In this manner, what surfaces before the objects in Exhibition is the confused residue of them that we retain. It is as if the artist had wanted to create a specific sensation that would correspond to the energetic activity of our eye – an eye that the works do not miss the chance to tease – more this than allowing us to be entirely fulfilled by vision, that already deciphered field whose “cause” we have grown used to situating in a universality of the spirit; removed, in case, from the vicissitudes of the organic eye. Under the guise in which it appears in Thiago Honório’s work, the eye is thus the vertex of the physical and mental experience which does not always allow itself to be translated upon the flat terrain of representation; vision, in turn, naturalized by use, would have to retire to the flesh of the eye, to re-conquer its curvature in order to capture the simultaneous and seductive dimension of those physical events.
So it is that Exhibition sets before us a world of reflexes without origin, a warm sultriness that illuminates the objects harshly without managing to separate them from one another. Those objects are worth what they are not, through the intensity of negation of which they are capable, and it is for this reason that there is a mortifying incongruence between the power of its allegories – allegories which are, it might be said, physical presences in the work, wherein content is also form – and the meticulously neutral treatment given to the space in which they were confined. Initially, as a matter of fact, one is not quite sure whether the work is what is inside or whether it is what is outside.
The installation of the works alludes vaguely to a museum-like décor, for the windows and wood supports in which the objects are presented look like display cases or the type of furniture destined, in art or historical-scientific museums, to exhibiting objects of value. A game of reciprocal reverberations between what is living and what is dead is created, between what happens on one side or the other of the surfaces in this continuous propagation of images that Exhibition produces; finally, one wonders who is looking and who is being looked at.
However, the display cases and supports are, so to speak, so many other compositional elements in the exhibition’s calculation. Bound by them, the objects live their own incommunicable life; they are the spectacle of its vital nerve, initially declared only to them. If the furniture that contains them initially suggests mediation, it is the objects themselves which support this mediation; they actively incorporate it to its most internal logic. Thus, one can only have access to the objects through the sinister framing of those display cases and the ritualized supports in wood with gold plates which paradoxically confer formidable materiality and might to that which, in ceremonial affectation, they ought to catalogue and separate from reality, as usual. Regarding this furniture, it should be remembered that it appeared historically as a resource of comfort and well-being for vision, a resource by means of which culture could elide the present, quickly reducing it to an abstract order of vision. But here those objects return, imperturbable and disturbing; deformed by them, the furniture can no longer alienate them from the present that they denounce and withholding from them the possibility of a lasting death.
That arrangement appears to have arisen from the feeling that an exhibition is ultimately a death and, as such, something before which one must attempt remembrance and understanding; a remembrance and understanding which emerge as something original, something that is always happening for the first time. They imply a silent, murderous struggle with materials corrupted by the domestication of the senses and by a pacifying of vision, by all the explanations and justifications that vision interweaves on its path, and which for this reason can only evoke life from this other place. Hence the grave character that the term Exhibition acquires in this case – it refers directly to a demonstrative procedure that is central to the work. That is, Exhibition does no more than describe the act of “exhibiting” which is practiced there as if pornographically and which may not signify the generosity with which one hails vision, a safe passport to the reality of the senses, but, instead, the administering of a placebo for the cure of an illness that does not exist.
— Sônia Salzstein,
São Paulo: Galeria Virgilio, novembro de 2007.
Translated by Stephen Berg