When proposing the displacement of a concrete mixer – weighing over a ton – to Pivô’s exhibition space, I am uncertain if Alexandre da Cunha took into account the fact that the Copan building is the largest reinforced concrete structure in Brazil, with approximately 400 kilos of concrete per cubic metre covering its 35 floors. This information, as well as the contextual references around the objects that the artist selects as the raw materials for his sculptures, is secondary. What matters most is the object’s materiality itself and the strangeness triggered by its displacement. Removed from its typical landscape, the presence of the mixer makes us aware not only of its massive proportions and weight but also of the epic effort involved in erecting a structure of Copan’s magnitude. 

When in São Paulo, Alexandre da Cunha lives in an apartment in the Copan building and, for around two months before the exhibition opening, he used the empty exhibition space at Pivô. This period of prolonged access to the site meant that, rather than an objective influence, the building was more of an interlocutor in the artistic process. None of the works exhibited was made as a direct response to something specific or as an immediately identifiable reference to the building’s modern architecture or even the city of São Paulo. However, a feeling of familiarity with the environment surprises the visitor. The exhibited pieces echo the aridity of common areas in a mixed-purpose modern building, where the private meets the public in a turbulent but nonetheless peaceful coexistence.

The concrete mixer, which was sectioned into four parts, and the elegant sculptures, made with pieces of precast urban furniture and marble sheets, bring urban textures inside the exhibition space. Simultaneously, the same Espírito Santo marble sheets (commonly used in residential kitchen sinks and bathrooms), the large brooms and the rearranged hotel towels – in Kentucky, Romana and Garden Court – transport us to Copan’s residential floors. The objects’ volume, associated with the fragmented architecture and the site’s exposed concrete, gives us an awareness of our body’s scale not only in the exhibition space but also in the urban space outside. 

Alexandre da Cunha is known for the formal precision of his assemblages and Apollonian exhibition arrangements. Everything in his work results from meticulously calculated decisions. The artist is constantly working with sophisticated linguistic operations, both in the forms and titles of his artworks. His titles often derive from the brand of the product chosen as matrix, or are sometimes a reference to History of Art or an anecdote. He continually performs a sort of conscious ‘dimerisation’ of the connotation of each created image.  

It is not by chance that this time the artist chose an onomatopoeic exhibition title: Boom. Similarly to most objects selected by Alexandre da Cunha, the onomatopoeia depends on local cultural factors in order to be fully assimilated, however, in general, they dispense with translation or context to be minimally understood. When thinking about the exhibition title, the comic-book image of ‘boom’ springs immediately to mind: a speech bubble with the letters B-O-O-M in a chunky font, graphically representing an explosion, which can be found in publications as diverse as the popular Brazilian children’s comic book Turma da Mônica, the Asterix series, Japanese Mangas or Roy Lichtenstein’s images. 

Brazilian linguist Luiz Carlos de Assis Rocha, in his book Estruturas Morfológicas do Português (Morphologic Structures of Portuguese) defines onomatopoeia as such: “Other processes of vernacular composition that are difficult or impossible to systemise: obscure analogies, poetic intuition, a humorous spirit and the vivacity of imagination give rise to new words that cannot be accommodated by classic processes or that, at least, cannot comply with habitual standards and norms”. This description could very well be applied to Alexandre da Cunha’s oeuvre as a whole. 

The exhibition title is more of a movement than an acoustic experience: the economic boom, the blast from an explosion, and the concrete churning inside the mixer in preparation to erect a monument or a residential development… Would this be the sound of progress? Perhaps this used to be the sound of progress in Brazil, the country of eternal unfulfilled promise. However, the sequence of un-contextualised images of explosions in the slideshow of Contratempo states the opposite. 

Curiously, the images that refer more directly to the onomatopoeia that names the exhibition are silent. Lined up in a slow, almost monotonous cadence, the hundreds of explosion pictures collected by the artist have a disturbing presence. Without reference to the actual events that originated them, the projected images lose their original character and simply become blurs and colour combinations. Perhaps, the most appropriate title for the sequence of images in Contratempo would have been ‘catastrophe’. However, by choosing a less emphatic – or lighter – word as a title, da Cunha allows us to relativise, for a moment, the terrible conditions that resulted in those images, daring to contemplate them from a purely aesthetic perspective. The artist plays with the dilemma of the incompatibility between formalism and engaged art, without clearly leaning to either side. 

Boom is an exhibition of nuances and slow bangs. It seems that each work has calmly and justly found its place in the space. Despite being an exhibition that is extremely heavy in physical terms and composed of works visually and technically very different from each other, none of them are imposed over the other, and there is no predominant colour or sound. The pieces collide in space and are mutually enriched. Their load is compounded and rather than creating a static meaning, they open up multiple possible readings from a strong visual experience. 

This is perhaps Alexandre da Cunha’s most austere and bleak exhibition. Looking at the large objects scattered around the space makes me think of Chico Buarque’s song Futuros Amantes (Future Lovers): Wise men in vain/will try to decipher/the echo of old words/fragments of letters, poems/lies, portraits/vestiges of a strange civilisation…

During the exhibition’s preparation, the artist worked with a scale model in which he incessantly spread the miniatures of the extremely heavy sculptures, knowing that he would not be able to reposition the real pieces with the same agility. On many occasions, I entered the room whilst he was throwing the concrete mixer parts around in the model. I was surprised to see that even when randomly scattered, they always landed upright.

Both in the formal association games between mundane objects and the intertwinement of visual references from England and Brazil, Alexandre da Cunha is constantly confronting us – in a fresh and precise manner – with the vestiges of our strange civilization.