Texto, Capela do Morumbi
curated by Ana Paula Cohen
(29 July—1 October, 2023)
The São Paulo City Museum presents the exhibition Texto (Text), by the artist Thiago Honório (Carmo do Paranaíba, MG, 1979), especially devised for the Morumbi Chapel venue and architectural context. The exhibition is intended as act two of the processional-exhibition Oração (Prayer), held by Honório in May/June 2023 at Galeria Luisa Strina, in São Paulo. Both shows have been curated by Ana Paula Cohen. The construction of the Chapel is an integral part of the art: colonial-era ruins of a rammed earth building within the 19th century Indian-tea-growing Morumbi Farm, coupled with a 1950 chapel designed by the modernist architect Gregori Warchavchik (1896-1972). In previous exhibits, such as Solo (Soil/Solo, 2017) and roçabarroca (baroquefarm, 2020), Honório had already worked with earth-based architecture, with the vernacular, in those cases, the wattle and daub.
The notion of “text” contemplates the hypotheses and interpretations of the ruins that constitute the Morumbi Chapel, alternatingly approached as a chapel consecrated to Saint Sebastian of the Enslaved, as a chapel-grave for the Morumbi Farm owners, and as the ruins of a shed. Between living and dead nature, shed, chapel, and grave, Texto keeps the layers of history and memory in suspension, symbolically questioning the purposes and uses of this space.
Texto, the eponymous piece in the exhibit, is composed of a web of natural cotton stems running along the center of the Chapel, all the way down to the garden in the back of the lot, by the “altar” wall. Texto relates to the idea of web, fabric, and suspended narratives. It evokes the processional carpets made from dyed natural sawdust in Holy Week and Corpus Christi processions in Minas Gerais, like a cotton field set within and without the “raw wound-like” red earth walls.
The architectural plans for the Chapel and the specificities of its construction have been taken into consideration in devising the exhibit, lending additional meanings to the notion of plan*, as per the elements that constitute this work: the cotton stem, the plant cutting, the plantar part of the feet that traverse the earth-walled space.
Life and death, weight and levity, gravity and suspension are elements that make up the arrangement of this field-plantation-harvest-carpet. Additionally, Texto conjugates a conflation of distinct temporalities: stems of cotton (inanimate nature) inside the chapel, and still life – living nature, in the small patch of cotton field transplanted directly onto the earth – outside, in the garden.
The second piece in the exhibit, Aleijadinho, is on show at the Chapel baptistry, amid the 1951 frescoes by Lúcia Suanê (1922-2020). Aleijadinho discusses the notion of artwork by multiple authors and problematizes the notion of “morpho-psychological projection” – described by the art historian Germain Bazin (1901-1990) in the book O Aleijadinho e a escultura barroca no Brasil** (Aleijadinho and Baroque Sculpture in Brazil) – as it relates to the work of the Baroque sculptor Antônio Francisco Lisboa, aka Aleijadinho (1738-1814). Hands that sculpt, hands that work, hands that design, designed hands, deformed hands, chopped off hands, crippled hands, phantasmagoric hands, but also hands that carry experiences and knowledge sets, going across time, handled by different hands.
The hands on a sculpture by Aleijadinho, portraying the image of Saint John of the Cross (1542-1591), crafted between 1775 and 1790, and found on the altar at the crossing of the Church of Our Lady of Carmo in Sabará, Minas Gerais, were commissioned by Thiago Honório to be replicated, sculpted, and made incarnate in life-size by folk saint builders in Minas Gerais, and then inlaid in the same position as sacred images would be, on a crystal easel designed in 1957 by the architect Lina Bo Bardi (1914-1992) to hold artworks from the São Paulo Museum of Art – MASP collection.
This piece entails a discussion of the statute of the hand in different realms, as it was created by multiple hands: the hands of the sculptor Aleijadinho, the hands of Aleijadinho’s assistant sculptors, the hands of the sculpted image, the hands of the folk saint builders who built the replica, the hands of the architect Lina Bo Bardi upon designing the crystal easels, the hands of the technicians who built out the easel, the hands of the artist upon creating the designs, sketches, and studies as he developed the piece Aleijadinho, the hands of the assemblers who inlaid the sculpted hands onto the crystal surface.
The superimposition of distinct temporalities and the displacements proposed in Aleijadinho directly relate to the temporalities and displacements present in the body of the Chapel. Replicas of hands sculpted and made incarnate by the folk saint builders from Minas Gerais, set up on the crystal skin of the easel created by the modern Italian architect Lina Bo Bardi, as well as Warchavchik’s chapel design integrated into the rammed earth ruins.
Ana Paula Cohen and Thiago Honório, winter of 2023.
* Translator’s note: the Portuguese word planta can mean both floor plan and plant.
** BAZIN, Germain. O Aleijadinho e a escultura barroca no Brasil. Rio de Janeiro: Editora Record, 1971, p. 195.
works
Texto, 2020-2023
Aleijadinho, 2017-2023
textsExposição processional, segundo ato, Ana Paula Cohen