The steady and imprecise flux known by the ancient Greek as gonorrhoea has always characterised my production, not what is also known by medicine today as blennorrhoea. Within the scope of an ethic-moralistic view of the art milieu and of other fields of knowledge since Antiquity, I would be letting myself be used; wasting when using what is lying around and doesn’t belong – infidelity. A time where pleasure flows through things purposelessly. I feel satisfied with this manner, I don’t wish for the position of a ‘breeder’. Paternity does not pre-occupy me, although I acknowledge its existence. I’m not circumscribed by reason or information and I prefer the diffuse and the non-systematic. The work is essentially ‘orphan’ and ‘impotent’; I do not aspire to definitive coitus.

Ivens Machado’s (Florianopolis, 1942 – Rio de Janeiro, 2015) solo exhibition at Pivô brings together a group of sculptures, videos and drawings produced during different periods of a career spanning almost five decades. Best known for his sculptures using basic building materials, Machado started his career in 1970s’ Rio de Janeiro in dialogue with names such as Anna Bella Geiger, Fernando Cocchiarale and Paulo Herkenhoff. As part of a generation that immediately succeeded the groups linked to Concretism and Neo-Concretism, Machado chose to forge his own aesthetic path, having encountered a certain resistance from the art market both for not formally conforming to established artistic genealogies and for his controversial approach to themes such as sexuality and violence. Nonetheless, art critics now see him as one of the most significant Brazilian artists of the latter half of the 20th century and his work’s relevance and influence, particularly amongst the younger generations, is revealed – intentionally or unintentionally – in the work of artists such as Marcelo Cidade (concrete and shards of glass) and Adriana Varejão (meat and tiles), to name but a few.    

In his account of Machado’s installation at the 16th São Paulo Biennial (1981) – a large reinforced concrete oval structure dotted with shards of glass and suspended by steel cables – critic Paulo Sergio Duarte says: “if we were to reduce it to the opposition raw/cooked, we would be in the realm of raw forms, but of a perverse inverted rawness as it is anti-natural, calculated, chosen in detail, in order to be inscribed, as negation, in the inherited territory of Construtivism’s precise form. To make matters more complicated, strangeness and familiarity ate on the same plate”. This rawness so typical of Machado’s work is explicitly manifested in the way he manipulates rough materials, such as shards of glass, concrete and steel reinforcing bars that are recurrent in his sculptures. However, beyond their physical appearance, their primitive and heavy forms reiterate how the artist insists on deconstructing the normalisation of behaviour instilled by the institutions that regulate the ‘good’ functioning of society (school, family, etc.), as well as his refusal to conform to established aesthetic standards. From his first visual interventions on ruled paper (1974-5), in which he interrupts or diverts the normal course of the lines, to subverting social conduct rules in the installation Obstáculos/Medidas (Obstacles/ Measures, MAM-RJ, 1975) and his sculptural production – ‘architectures without a project’, according to Milton Machado -, Ivens Machado’s work is in live contact with the existence of things in their raw, pre-normative or rationalised, state; hence the exhibition’s title.

To put together a solo exhibition by an artist whose work encompasses half a century is a huge challenge, compounded by the impossibility of dialoguing directly with him. Even though there are some valuable records of his production, notably the comprehensive monograph O engenheiro de fábulas (The Engineer of Fables) organised by Ligia Canongia for the retrospective exhibition of the same name held in Curitiba, Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo (2001-02), we were lucky enough to rely on the invaluable support of Monica Grandchamp, Machado’s close friend and collaborator, who is currently managing his estate. Grandchamp was able to clarify many of the doubts that emerged during the research process, and she generously provided some of the artworks and documents displayed in this exhibition. Having worked as Machado’s assistant for many years, she was directly involved in the making of his pieces, and for The Raw of the World she reconstructed a reinforced concrete sculpture with shards of glass originally made in 1982 and later destroyed.  

Faced with the responsibility of representing Machado’s lengthy career trajectory and under the limitations of working in a non-museological exhibition space, I have opted for a selection of works that represent some key moments in his artistic development, many of which have had little prior institutional visibility. Machado’s last major solo exhibition in São Paulo took place at Pinacoteca do Estado in 2002, over a decade ago. This means that the public, particularly the younger generation, has had very little contact with most of his work that is not held in public collections or that hasn’t been exhibited in recent solo shows at commercial galleries.   

The Raw of the World opens a few months after Machado’s solo exhibition at MAM-RJ, curated by Fernando Cocchiarale, which presented some of his most iconic works, including Cerimônia em três tempos (Ceremony in Three Acts, 1973) – a large installation with ‘tables’ of tiles and a piece of fake meat that secured him the first prize at MAM-RJ 5th Summer Salon – and his famous reinforced concrete sculptures covered in shards of class, such as the terrifying and gigantic Consolador (Dildo, 1979) and Mapa Mudo (Mute Map, 1979), a piece that reveals so much about our society using such simple means. In turn, Pivô’s exhibition includes a great number of lesser seen works that belong to private collections and to Machado’s estate and, in this sense, the proximity in time between the two exhibitions means an important opportunity to expand the repertoire currently available to the public.  

Even though this exhibition does not intend to cover the artist’s full trajectory, it showcases his series of works on paper that began in the 1970s, two of his first videos shot in 1974, a significant set of concrete sculptures produced in the 1980s and 90s and his most recent works in which he used wood, rubble, cardboard and porcelain. Instead of a chronological approach, the exhibition seeks to potentiate the relationship between his work and Pivô’s singular architecture, intensifying the experience of the encounter between visitor and work in space and avoiding instrumentalisation. Additionally, given that Machado is a historical artist, we have sought to make available to the public a variety of previously unavailable reference materials, including video interviews and important texts which are currently out of print, allowing for a contextualisation of his work and offering in-depth readings of specific works and series.  

Artists who are able to forge their own language are rare; and even rarer are those whose works remain current throughout the years. Ivens Machado once stated that he had no interest in relating to the history of art; in fact, he refused to take the simpler route of alluding to or referencing established aesthetic standards. This was perhaps both his curse and his blessing: the lack of deserved recognition in life as a result of the bewilderment provoked by presenting something to the world for the first time and the uniqueness of the forms that remain alive and pulsating in their topicality and relevance – always evading the ‘definitive coitus’.