Daniel Acosta and the Panic realism
Tadeu Chiarelli
The questioning in the Brazilian art three-dimensional field has become a privileged territory for the emergence of new and good artists in the past few years. Not only in the São Paulo–Rio–Belo Horizonte axis, but also in several other centers these artists lie scattered around Brazil and have been resizing canonic notions of sculpture, object, installation, broadening the limits between these categories and also the borders between them and painting, design, printmaking and drawing.
Under this expanded situation of current Brazilian art emerges Daniel Albernaz Acosta’s work. Any reflection upon this new situation of Brazilian art which operates inside – and on the limit of – tridimensionality goes through his trajectory and be- comes wider by it.
To think about Acosta in relation to other artist’s production all around Brazilian territory is to reflect upon the influence of environment’s natural and cultural circumstances upon their productions. Although completely connected to the contemporary art debate, these artists did not eradicate from their work the formal solutions stemming from their places of origin.
Quite on the contrary: in many cases, the work actually relies on the attempt of cleansing the visual stimuli from a native ambience, through procedures and/or adherences captured in the sphere of contemporary art... Daniel Acosta’s first phase works would certainly be different if he wasn’t impregnated by the architectural/ urban aspects of Pelotas, interior of the Rio Grande do Sul state.
Born in Rio Grande (RS), Acosta emerged from Pelotas in 1989, the city where he started to work as an artist and university professor. In a state with no sculptural heritage worth of his interest, his production stemmed from the surroundings of Pelotas, with plenty of architectural references built between the late past century and the be- ginning of this one. What captivated him was not properly the eclectic buildings and/ or art deco that withstand the criminal dismantling of real estate speculation, but the ornamental elements that adorn these constructions, and the plywood that protects the passerby from the sight of the destruction of such icons from a wealthy past.
Acosta’s works until 1992, 1993 – made preferably of purple plywood sheets – were the poetic intersection between the plywood sidings and the architectural ornament, between the visible and the hidden. They filled up the pain of the emptiness left by the continuous destruction.
Entrenched in his original background, embodied in the reality of Pelotas that sheltered them, these pieces seem to discipline the ornamental excesses of the city’s buildings, whilst transforming the matter and color of its concealing plywood into precious things.
However, these piece’s meanings were never restrained to the fact that they originated from the remake of the architectural/urban elements of Pelotas. What’s interesting here is the way Acosta managed to widen the very definition of sculpture, through this, so to speak, affective basis, by connecting his work to one of the sever- al strains of recent Brazilian art, precisely the one that is made between the borders of painting, relief, sculpture and design.
His production from this period travels side by side – although without ever be- coming undistinguishable from one another –, and in the same track of the works by artists that have been long known in the Brazilian circuit. Similar to the production of Amilcar de Castro and Carmela Gross, those pieces stood between the borders of painting and sculpture, projecting towards the tridimensional while preserving, literally or metaphorically, the wall’s plane.
In São Paulo from 1994 on, Acosta’s work goes through a substantial transformation. The chaotic metropolis impact on the artist’s poetics has helped to deepen and mature it.
From its several transformations, the change in materials draws our attention right away: if Acosta used to work preferably with purple plywood sheets, in his new works the plaster and Formica prevail. From the warm nature of purple wood, the artist now faces Formica’s impersonality (maybe it is a metaphor for his feelings to- wards an attempt to encompass a new urban space?).
Another visible transformation: if the design universe already manifested itself in his previous production, this feature expanded after he moved to São Paulo. His current works no longer inspire subtle associations with industrialized objects from the 30s and 40s.
Nowadays his most explicit references are safety scaffolds for pedestrians, flooring, bathrooms, urinals... “indifferent objects” of public and/or private use, reorganized by a an outsider’s sensibility to a new environment, because surely Narcissus considers everything ugly except for his mirror.
In a city that replaces its identification indexes every day, and whose best synthesis is an avenue – nothing here reflects us, except for the buildings and cars glasses, and the electronic safety devices.
Since nothing here represents us, and everything tends to present itself as a simulacrum, the human body – previously the main territory of sculptural representation – appears on Acosta’s works as an absence (at the “urinal”, at the “bathtub”, at the “tiles”). Or it appears as pure immanence, on the television screen. If the body is, in Rodin, matter, texture, volume and mass, in Acosta the body is its absence or mere surface without thickness (the television, the skin made of Formica).
Attached to this total strangeness, the will to build a panic realism towards the non-reality of São Paulo, Daniel Acosta now includes in his production, previously fully attuned to the vernacular, undeniably erudite references: “Marat” refers to David; “Observatório” to Duchamp; “Escultura Básica” to Carl Andre...
It’s as if, in face of São Paulo’s rarefied reality – where everything is a façade or access path – the artist felt the need to anchor his sensibility in some identifiable port. The history of modern-contemporary art, in this case, is the only place where Acosta and other artists seem to recognize themselves nowadays.
Now that we’ve distinguished the changes, let’s draw our attention to what’s remained unchanged in the artist’s work.
His current pieces, such as the previous ones, still navigate between the conventional definitions of painting and sculpture, having its intersection point on the relief. Acosta, despite of the gelid nature of plaster and the complete impersonality of Formica, keeps simultaneously discussing issues close to the painting and sculpture traditions, by keeping his production on the fertile non-place of the relief – a prolific space in Brazilian art for the past thirty years.
His move to São Paulo, the contact with a metropolis whose identity isn’t in the old buildings, nor in nature, not even in the local color but precisely in the negation of any possibility of identity, didn’t make Acosta’s works to alter this basic feature: they are still dependent on the plane, still discussing painting and sculpture issues. He does it, at the same time, with a consistency that only makes it more rewarding.
To think about an artist’s production by taking its relations to his working environment into account, only seems possible at end of this century, after the collapse of the European and North American avant- garde’s values, which became international. In the specific case of current Brazilian art, more and more young artists leave the excessive formal rigors of such tendencies to the side, while channeling their artistic interests in the search of a deep synthesis between art and life, in its broader sense.
Daniel Acosta’s case seems exemplary for that matter. The recent works he now presents in São Paulo manage to prove how rewarding the artist’s exercise of giving in to his environment’s stimuli can be, however hostile they are. His works perspire the environment they were built and executed in. If today his work’s panic realism overflow with a similar frequency to Ana Maria Tavares’s and Iran do Espírito Santo’s (the current most thought-provoking São Paulo’s translators) works it’s because they are, without a doubt, the synthesis of a sensibility built someplace else, undeterred by the constant massacre in a city such as this megalopolis... and reacts.