Tração Animal
Luiz Camillo Osorio
Animal Traction presents the collection of Raul Mourão's recent works. Sculpture has always been his craft, but the images and the street pushed the sculptural and the concern with volume and severity to the fluency of life. Scattering iron structures clandestinely and silently in the city, sheltering and involving the trunk of some trees, as well as hanging friend artists on the walls of Sergio Porto's gallery were the artist's initial movements answering to this call to contaminate circuits and invert expectations in relation to the spaces of creation and reception of art. From these initial movements passing later through the appropriation of signaling boards, symbols and references of the daily life, three elements articulate their poetic: geometry, eloquence and humor. Not necessarily all of them appear in each work, but always exploring at least two of these qualities.
Geometry implies in commitment to the structural simplicity. The eloquence points to an always very direct and immediate presence of the shape. Humor is the spice that lets a breath of intelligence go through, breaking the austerity of the geometry and blocking the communicative facilitation.
The modular structures used in scaffolds are rigid and useful in their daily function. In this Balanços by Mourão, however, they let themselves be conquered by movement, by the ludic articulation and by the grace of serving only to the unarmed glance. Putting them in movement depends on the visitor's gesture. When the impulse is given, they swing in various rhythms. Some more agitated and nervous, others more insinuating and sensual; some slower and others briefer. All of them, however, produce jointly choreography to be admired by the visitor that passes by them, sees the external landscape through their hollows, and perceives the movement of the trees or the cars crossing the movement of the pieces. It's not the case of stopping and seeing. I believe that these pieces invite the spectator to move. The sculptures and the spectator's body get into an interesting synergy. A body swings the other; a body depends on the other; like in football those who move come first.
The plastic and visual presence of the world gets into his work not as a theme, but as energy that infiltrates in the creative process, unfolding the curious eye in kinetic structures, in rhythmic plans, in dancing shadows. The movement of the swings dislocates to the vertical plans of the elevator and from this to mysterious design of light and shadow.
If in the shadow room, despite the physical presence of the small sculptures, there's a kind of magical enchantment that surprises the spectator and leads them to a half fantasy, half illusion plan, in the video, despite the virtual aspect of the means, what prevails is the materiality that insinuates between the plans of light, shadow and concrete. One takes us to the dream, the other to the city. This game between dream and city is something that has always crossed Raul's poetic and invites us to a deconditioning of perception. Things may be perceived without a functional determination, without the definite prescription by any kind of need.
This is the freedom of an aesthetic eye that lets itself be seduced by the mere appearance of the phenomena, by the simultaneity and the singularity of the sensitive data of the happening. The camera open and attentive to the slow movement of the elevator is available at random and to the simple fruition of what is presented in each passage of light.
It's an exhibition in looping, everything goes and comes back swinging: from physical to virtual, from body to light, from light to shadow. In this continuous movement, a kind of visual mantra, what is highlighted is the capacity for aesthetic enchantment of his work ? the strength to capture and activate our perception before the appearance of the things; the surprise in its entire unarmed contingency.