Thiago Honório: an unfinished reading
It appears to me that, when seen together, Thiago Honório’s latest projects incite the observer to put himself in the specific situation of the spectator. There is nothing new about the fact that art has long since become spectacle, an event emptied of any religious or utopian meaning. In fact, this indictment has already become old and tiresome. It is the within and beyond of the structure of spectacularization and market – which has become strongly consolidated even in a country that invests as little in culture as Brazil does – that constitutes the risk which Thiago and other artists are claiming for themselves.
This is not a matter of celebrating a certain “aesthetics of precariousness” which has been gaining currency among us and which, all due exceptions aside, is nothing more than “creative” mimicry of the highly uninspiring situation of generalized poverty that surrounds us. On the contrary, there is nothing precarious about these projects of Thiago’s. Overall, they aren’t carried out by the artist and recourse to engineers and specialized labor is required that they may make it off the drawing board. And this, to my way of seeing, is one of the new directions his work has taken over the last two years. But it must be said that singling out the specialization to which the artist has resorted in his latest works has no meaning in and of itself (just as an insistence on manual crafting is equally unable to represent anything to a reading of the work). It is truly a prosaic observation. And this, too, as we know, is a part of art history.
Even if works like Getting Out (2003), Information Counter (2004) and the artist’s most recent project, to be presented at Parque Lage in Rio de Janeiro in 2005, may be understood as bodies outlining space – including the repertory of his own works – they are not limited to this. For they surpass the suggestion of a three-dimensional line that struggles to demarcate a place in the world – they stage an event. Such an act, to which we are witnesses, presents itself as an ephemeral gap in real space, which could be a gallery, a private cultural institute or the landscape of the city of Rio de Janeiro. Or, in the case of Health Plan and Own Home (2003), a billboard set up backwards and placed on the façade of the Rosa Barbosa gallery (São Paulo) in a joint exhibition with Thiago Bortolozzo. Beyond the feeling of strangeness that the appropriation produces, like an empty billboard (albeit one that announces, by means of a mirror game, the distorted image of the gallery and the exhibition inside) it simultaneously alludes to the works’ trade value and to their artistic value.
The process exhibited in Health Plan and Own Home helps us to understand the relationship which the abovementioned works maintain with the real spaces in which they unfold. Like most artists of his generation, Thiago Honório experiences, in the genesis of the work itself, communication with his environment. But not in the guise of a wearisome topography (so common in contemporary art) in which ceilings, walls, doors, windows, are duplicated by some architectural or visual artifice (painting, photography, video, etc.) intent on demonstrating that a door is…. Its representation. Similarly, we are far from the spatial interventions which purport (through the use of certain devices) to disturb or change the way people circulate, and which sometimes result in exercises of pure formal mastery.
As in a theater, what we have in Honório’s case are minute performances, condensed images which, in spite of the fact that they were suggested by the places they occupy, become autonomous from them even as they support another duration, another (latent) history. The nature of the intervention and the materials used allude to something potentially present which the work would appear to be staging. Architecture and the street appear as indexes in Getting Out, as do the sheets of sulfite paper in Information Counter and the steel planes in Olé (an unrealized project for the façade of the Centro Universitário Maria Antônia – São Paulo). Such indicial presences are re-articulated to bring life to images that are not beyond but which spring slowly from trivial places.
I do not believe it would be unreasonable to point out the artist’s kinship (of sorts) to surrealism and to its procedures of displacing and juxtaposing meanings (not by chance do their titles have considerable importance to an experience of his works) as well as his taste for the unusual and the fleeting. As Aragon sang in Paris Peasant of his own wanderings in that city, “Metaphysics of places, it is you who rock children to sleep, it is you who populate their dreams”.
— Taisa Palhares
Text for the Canal Contemporâneo website, December 2005.
Translated by Stephen Berg