Saltando de banda (Getting out) / Thiago Honório
With an exhibition schedule both proposed and made possible by the very artists who present their work in it, the 10,20 X 3,60 Gallery is a rectangle outlined flush against the sidewalk, from which it is separated only by a glass door that opens onto a busily eclectic urban environment, far from the areas that concentrate the majority of São Paulo’s galleries and cultural equipment. It thus suggests both the fragile, picturesque appearance of the art space within an urban situation which tends to dissolve it into its own dynamics, made out of the small retail businesses, services and the transportation grid that is vitally connected to the city’s economic life, as well as the inverse possibility of a greater permeability of the works in this rich external environment, disencumbered of additional institutional mediation and (in fact) more directly exposed to what is happening in the street.
It is the ambiguous insertion of this space in the Santa Cecília region – oscillating between a familiar scale which tends to assimilate it into the neighborhood’s everyday life (as yet another singularity of its local color) and its frank and natural extension into the street, onto the city’s perspective – that vitally stimulates Thiago Honório’s work. Not that the 10,20 X 3,60’s project is a problem for the artist. By interrogating the public scale of a space that proposes to welcome artistic production more informally and directly, against the grain of the prestige circuit, the work faces a broader cultural situation which addresses the feebleness of the idea of a city within the artwork’s sphere of interests and the disappearance, on the horizon of contemporary art, of works being perceived in terms of scale in relation to the city.
The tremendous mechanical effort that goes into supporting two heavy reinforced concrete columns within an enclosed, precariously structured space of exiguous dimensions (evincing as incongruent a relationship between two such disparate elements as that which takes place in “Saltando de banda” – “Getting out”) is an eloquent index of this situation. At the opposite pole, it certainly (and somewhat paradoxically) corresponds to the permissive and unresisting absorption of art’s manifestations in the contemporary city, and the universalizing of a way of occupying space that dwarfs the scale of the works, uprooting them and leading them to approach the city as a constellation of small, private, non-communicating niches. At a deeper level, the work encounters the contemporary de-materialization of the notion of space itself. Not by chance, weight and gravity are its central values.
Thiago Honório’s decision to occupy the 10,20 X 3,60 gallery space not with the many drawings to which he has dedicated himself over the last years, but with engineering which, in a play of strength and resistance, centrally involves the stability of the 10,20 X 3,60’s building, already constitutes, therefore, a stand. The action, monumental in nature, extraordinary in light of the relatively modest dimensions of the place, immediately situates the work on a scale that goes beyond the gallery’s rectangle with a strong gesture of extroversion. For the artist, it is a matter of guaranteeing the work’s presence outside that door, of making it communicate with the flow of material life going on in the street, which means not that it will intervene in the urban environment, but that it is committed to drastically modifying the habitual patterns of scale. This is what led him to compress the gallery’s interior so that the extraordinary reserve of energy accumulated in that situation necessarily pushes the work’s focus outside to the relationship systems which the action mobilizes.
The two reinforced concrete poles installed inside the gallery weigh 500 kilos apiece, are four meters high (as opposed to a room height of approximately 4,30 meters) and 28 centimeters in diameter, supported without being fixed to the floor by beams fastened to a concrete pilaster atop the only wall that is actually part of the building’s structure – the other two being plywood panels, and with the rectangle completing the 10,20 X 3,60’s pane glassed access. The poles, hanging out of the vertical position, hoisting themselves from an uncertain point of support on the floor, their weight supported by the construction’s only “solid” component, vehemently play leading roles in the uncomfortable, disproportionate relationship between the work and the gallery as well as in the exasperated dialogue that the former maintains with the city.
Considering the performance of strength and resistance to gravity which the work concentrates in such a tiny area of the city, there would appear to be a lack of material consistency and enervation with regard to that which reveals itself beyond it as a public space. Instead of welcoming the small Santa Cecília neighborhood gallery’s tacit assumption of uniqueness and exceptionality, and the intimate scale that it seems to signify, instead, after all, of perceiving it from an internal point of view, the work states its own exteriority; it expresses itself practically without formal mediations as an technical fact of impact, far beyond its physical limitations – crude, impersonal language – the only one able to touch upon the interests that mobilize the city’s infrastructure.
This does not mean that the work is depleted in the literalness of its process, in its distressing physical presence. To the observer, the challenge lies precisely in being able to detect an ethereal, lonely, nonsensical narrative in “Saltando de banda” – “Getting out”, as if the work were an impossible metaphysical ballet in which the floor were suddenly pulled out from underneath pale, stout columns, leaving them motionless in a lunar void, contained only by air. It should be observed that the two poles, divested of their structural function of supporting, ignore the premise of the walls’ verticality of space and static function; stretching the gallery’s possibility of containment to the limit, they force the observer to cincture it in sinuous, seductive movements, refusing him the possibility of distance or any perspective view. The tacit understanding of walls as supports, or as passive places for an assumed “exhibitionality” of the works is thus broken. The work vindicates a corporeal relationship with space.
— Sônia Salzstein,
São Paulo: 10,20 X 3,60, fevereiro de 2003.
Translated by Stephen Berg