
from 1 pm to 7 pm
*Opening 30 March from 4 pm to 7 pm
Pivô is pleased to present Volta Grande, Portuguese artist Alexandre Estrela’s first solo show in Brazil, curated by Luiza Teixeira de Freitas. The exhibition shows of 7 works from which 6 are entirely new. Drawing its title from the name of a small town in the Brazilian interior state of Minas Gerais, Volta Grande’s history is that of being the birth and death place of Humberto Mauro (1897-1983), deemed by some to be the “father” of Brazilian cinema.
According to the curator, “Volta Grande” gathers in the curved base of the Copan building a body of work that is the result of dead hours and concentric walks that Estrela made around a house. Matter and memory are the guiding threads of this exhibition that intertwines time and body, video and sculpture. There is something in these works that resonates to infinity, as the image exists beyond the image in the dialog that it establishes with the surfaces of projection.”
Estrela, who works mainly with video and photography, inspects the relationship between matter, images, and perception. His works present landscapes and images of nature through different technologies, discussing the canons of modern art history as well as studies about behaviorism, physics, and acoustics amongst other sciences. Time and perception; factual and fictional history; memory and materiality are central subjects of the show.
The work Águas de Março (2019) shows a soaked piece of tropical cedar filmed drying in the sun on one of the hottest days ever recorded in Minas Gerais. The camera could not withstand the torrid heat and stopped filming within seconds of the wood finally drying. The image of the wood is projected onto a woodchip board, to which it bonds like a skin, alternately drying and growing moist in an eternal cycle. Another piece, entitled Cupim (2019) shows the image of a tropical wood devoured by termites projected onto a wooden screen. The holes made by the insects coinciding with the holes made in the wood. The back of the screen, painted blue reveals a constellation. Volta Grande (2019) is a photograph of a trunk of a pau mulato tree projected onto a cylinder placed in front of a vertical plane. The tube incorporates the image of the tree and the smooth bark becomes one with its surface. An imperceptible rotation of the tube reveals a horizontal line that draws its outline.
The work, A Cadeira de H.M. (2019) is a piece in which Estrela refers directly to Humberto Mauro. It shows an image of a deformed seat of a chair caned by Mauro, animated with the sound of his voice. Appealing to future generations of Brazilian cinema: “I have great esteem for the youth of Brazil and have great belief in their abilities. My hope is for young filmmakers to produce truly great works of cinema so that Brazil has an ever better tomorrow.” At the end of his life, Mauro, for some the father of Brazilian cinema dedicated himself to the practice of Brazilian straw craft and the study of Amerindian language, Tupi. Mauro believed that cinema, just like Tupi, was a language that needed a structure in order to avoid extinction.
Within the aftermath of memory
The way we experience time is personal and unique, impossible to share in its fullness. So too is the way we construct memory – past, present and future.
In January of 2019, Alexandre Estrela accepted an invitation to spend a month in Volta Grande, a small town lost in the Zona da Mata in the state of Minas Gerais; the hometown of Humberto Mauro and of his silent film; of his brother José Mauro, a pioneer in radio music in Brazil; and of the cachaça ‘podemos’.
During his time there – in the place which formed the backdrop of my childhood – he lived amid the modern utopia of an immense garden, an over-sized swimming pool, the humid heat, the discovery of a new insect every day and the birdcall of the ‘bem-te-vi’. If the works and images he produced there will in the future bring him memories, for me, they are anchored in a past that remains a perpetual part of my present.
In the curved base of the Copan building, the exhibition Volta Grande gathers a body of work that is the result of the dead hours and concentric walks that Estrela traced around the house during this period, with matter and memory as the guiding threads that intertwine time and body, video and sculpture. There is something in these works that resonates with infinity, with the image persisting beyond itself in the dialog established with the projection surfaces. It might make sense to think about these works in terms of what Yves-Alain Bois said about a painting by Poussin, ‘that they incorporate the duration of perception into their aesthetic structure’.
1.
Águas de Março
On one of the hottest days ever recorded in Minas Gerais, a soaked piece of tropical cedar was filmed drying in the sun. The camera could not withstand the torrid heat and stopped filming within seconds of the wood finally drying. The video records the temperature like a thermometer. The image of the wood is projected onto a woodchip board, to which it bonds like a skin, alternately drying and growing moist in an eternal cycle.
i.
Sitting on the curb of the street, just outside the gate. The day barely dawned, with everything still half wet and cool from the morning dew. A child learning to walk, stumbling across the sidewalk, right there, in Volta Grande. The aligned cobble stones of the street that were once a dirt road. The child advances a few yards, looks back mischievously, and continues on its way. Learning to walk at the pace of Volta Grande, the unhurried cycle on the way to work, to the supermarket, during daily errands or when doing nothing at all. Whatever breeze was there is gone, the inclement sun has risen and one can feel its heat on the skin. The swimming pool steps are made of black bronze, which mercilessly burns the great-grandson’s feet today as it did the great-grandfather’s back in 1961. A thermal memory, shared between generations.
Bem-te-vi.
A sweat-drenched body at 40 degrees.
The anthills in the football field.
2.
Wood Cuts / Wood Rings
A wooden screen is intersected by another that is similar, cutting it in half. A video where one can see a tree log surrounded by grass is projected onto the cut surface. The image slides towards the orthogonal plane, sharply cutting it in two to the sound of an electric saw.
ii.
The house is already stuffy at dawn and the morning air coming in through the glass doors is a relief. The garden green enters and settles. Each of the trees that survived the last storm have a story, a memory – the dead fern, resurrected, lives again, providing a certain shade in the landscape. The pleasant sound of the water from the hose watering the hundreds of plants in the garden. It runs with the patience of a place where time is not an issue, where nothing is in a hurry. In the same way, the net cleans the lifeless insects floating in the infinite cubic meters of the swimming pool.
The smell of rain falling torrentially.
The pattern of the white meringue on the banana pie.
The moss-green ‘washing feet area’ surrounding the pool.
3.
Cupim
The image of the tropical wood devoured by the termite is projected onto a wooden screen, the holes made by the insect coinciding with the holes made in the wood. The back of the screen, painted blue, reveals a constellation.
iii.
The shadows at the tops of the trees are reflected in the large blue swimming pool. Within them so many memories. The corridor leading from the living room to the bedrooms is long, with a wooden railing running through it, separating the mezzanine from the main room. It seems to have been made yesterday, its wood glistens. We know by heart the number of steps it takes to cross the house to the end of the hall with the mirror. And in tune with Pirandello, every time we see our reflection in the mirror we are a new person, different to who we were the last time we passed by.
The reddish earth.
The back-pedal brake bicycle with its half-broken chain.
The jabuticabas.
Ecos da Figura Interna
A geometric composition is cut into a tropical wood screen that sustains and balances it. One side of the screen is painted in blue enamel and the light projected on it changes the tone of its color. Color itself is variable, its uniformity psychological. Colors are the echoes of the internal figure – a title borrowed from Clarice Lispector’s Alegria de Ser (Joy of Being).
iv.
The doors are a beautiful, vivid blue. They date from the house’s modern period, from the times of the Cobogó, when the roof was in wavy asbestos-cement. I know from stories told that the porch was a furnace and can see this in the movie A Noiva da Cidade by Alex Vianny and Humberto Mauro, in those scenes that were shot there. The doors are in the film and so their blue is too, the type of blue that only exists here and which I like to call Azul Volta Grande.
The ‘Mauros’ that exist in memory, Humberto and Zé.
The smell of coffee, the cake made of cake.
The kitchen, large, white and blue.
5.
Volta Grande
A photograph of a trunk of a pau mulato tree is projected onto a cylinder placed in front of a vertical plane. The tube incorporates the image of the tree and the smooth bark becomes one with its surface. An imperceptible rotation of the tube reveals a horizontal line that draws its outline.
v.
Clothes here matter so little. They cover the naked torso at meal times, by habit or good-manners. They protect us from the attacking mosquitoes at nightfall. But in our daily living with each other’s bodies, clothing ceases to exist and peels off like the skin of a pau mulato. Increasingly naked, we are reminded the body itself produces heat!
The vinyl playing on the record player.
An abandoned tennis court.
The termite eating the wood.
Pau Brasa
The interlinking of four photographs of Brazilian wood creates a spontaneous movement with similar resonances to those of fire. The sense of self-combustion in the video-projected images is magnified by the continuous crackling of burning coal.
vi.
The dry dark wood sauna and the stone, which give off a smell of eucalyptus when heated. A delicate alpine atmosphere in the tropical furnace. As fire consumes the oxygen everything seeks breath. In the midst of the flames, the old maracatiara floor also burns, consumed by the termite, ambassador of time, a plague that renews life. Nature always claims back what it has given. The floor of the house is now new, flame colored, still with no memory but ready to receive the footprints of future generations.
Romeu e Julieta
Tutu of beans
Stingless bees
A Cadeira de H.M
At the end of his life, Humberto Mauro, for some the father of Brazilian cinema, dedicated himself to chair caning and studying the Amerindian language, Tupi. Mauro believed that cinema, just like Tupi, was a language that needed a structure in order to avoid extinction. In A Cadeira de H.M., an image of the deformed seat of a chair caned by Mauro is animated with the sound of his voice. Appealing to future generations of Brazilian cinema:
“I have great esteem for the youth of Brazil and have great belief in their abilities. My hope is for young filmmakers to produce truly great works of cinema so that Brazil has an ever better tomorrow.”
vii.
What deep down is in itself a profound account of the passage of time, of memory between generations, of what stays the same, of what remains. The chair in which I sit for days on end on the porch of my house, the straw on its seat that holds my weight and my sorrows.
The coconut water, the mango juice, the bread from the Padaria.
Bare feet.
The stones along the road.
Recent solo exhibitions include Lua Cão (with João Maria Gusmão + Pedro Paiva), a project initiated in 2017 by Galeria Zé Dos Bois in Lisbon, that traveled to the Kunstverein München, and conclude at La Casa Encendida in Madrid in 2018; Knife in the Water, 2018, at Travesía Cuatro, Madrid; Ouro Mouro, 2018, at the Quetzal Art Centre, Vidigueira, Portugal; Baklite, 2017, at CAV Centro de Artes Visuais, Coimbra, Portugal; Cápsulas de silencio, 2016, within the Fisuras Program, at the Reina Sofia Museum, Madrid; Roda Lume, 2016, at the Museum of Contemporary Art of Antwerp, M HKA, Belgium; Meio Concreto, 2013, at Museu Serralves in Porto, Portugal; Um homem entre quatro paredes, 2013, at the Pinacoteca do Estado de São Paulo, Brazil; The Sunspot Circle, 2013, at The Flat Time House, London, UK, among others.
The artist has also participated in numerous group shows in institutions and biennales such as: Anozero – Bienal de Arte Contemporânea de Coimbra, 2017, curated by Luíza Teixeira da Freitas; L’exposition d’un Rêve, 2017, at Gulbenkian Foundation Paris, ACMI Melbourne and TATE Modern, a project by Mathieu Copeland; Hallucinations, Documenta 14, 2017, Athens, a festival curated by Ben Russel, among others.