Daniel Acosta – Inventor of architectures and landscapes
Agnaldo Farias
Let us start with the photographs through which Daniel Acosta has been exploring some themes that may seem trivial, cows in the grass, a landscape with a fallen tree, a mushroom (or is it a golf ball?). By observing them we may soon notice that what interests the artist is not so much about the images and what they depict; it is less about the cows, the tree, the mushroom (but is it really a mushroom?), and more about those images in regard to a possibility of escaping the things we are used to and that obliterate our comprehension; they prove that, in spite of the trust we place in it, our vision is an endless source of misunderstanding. For images, as those photographs remind us, are almost as abstract as words, such whimsical constructions that the slightest shift in point of view is capable of altering its syntax, if one of its constituting parts is substituted or erased it may acquire a whole different and unpredicted meaning or at least become impregnated by strangeness. If each sign carries a form, a body, in this exhibition, all the way from the most abstract to the most concrete, from landscapes to architectures, Daniel Acosta’s proposal is to tear them apart in order to rearticulate them next, being careful to always leave its connections naked, as a compound fracture.
As a result there is no way of staying immune to these syntactic games’ effects: before a picture of a fallen tree on a field, which the artist makes vertical by rotating the camera body, making the horizon into a steep diagonal, the spectator twists his or her body in the vain attempt to reacquire the easy domesticity of the skyline.
The nodal point in Daniel Acosta’s poetics resides in discussing the lenient way we relate to representation, which makes each of his works – photography, drawing, sculpture, installation
– a critique of these representation’s memory which pervades our muscles and minds, guides our gestures, limits our perception’s spectrum, prevent us from realizing that things don’t unravel themselves from their appearance, are not confined in what is immediately seen, are not merely a skin-?deep phenomenon.
In Acosta the critique of perception or, in other words, the recognition of the five senses as a simultaneous result of culture and nature, happens by means of the systematic demonstration that, contrary to the current notion that settles them as relentless things, these two poles are gradually more and more distinct. Indeed if everything there is comes from nature, is modified nature, what about the things that, being artificial, try hard to look natural? The artist is fascinated by plastic plants – fake plants? no! real plastic – formic plates emulating wood
grain, as much as he is fascinated by a world so full of encryptions, objects so coded that it only takes a small shift of place for them to show their insubordinate side, as in the case of the litter, such a mundane object but that, mounted on one of the museum’s walls, submerges as an unclassifiable thing.
And what can we say about the proto-?architectural buildings – kiosks, cabins, portable bathrooms, ATMs, etc –, the formidable array of indecisive objects standing between sculpture
and architecture and which intrude landscapes, cities and even buildings? They are at the root of the manufactured hybrids the artist installs inside buildings, museum and gallery interiors, in an occupation process equivalent to the contemporary urban life dynamics, based on the high density of people and constructions, in the coexistence of opposite terms – architecture and landscape – or even similar terms – architecture inside the architecture.
The city is the fertile soil from where forms proliferate and flow through the fields. Under its logic, the natural matter metamorphoses itself into artificial matter which, by its turn, mirrors itself on the natural, while the thing metamorphoses into sign and the sign into thing. With its ostensible artificial materiality, the plastic base, formic, industrial lights and colors, with its pots overflowing with iridescent green foliage, with its small lake/pool of sinuous edges made of blue formic similar in every way to architectural ground plans, Daniel Acosta manufactures his “portable landscapes”. The irony that here emerges from the title arises from the ascertainment that although the constructions parodied by the artist are manufactured by such sophisticated technologies, it still seems strange that, instead of affirming its artificiality, they end up simulating nature -? their starting point, as for everything there is -?, the way the formic leaf simulates wood veins in invariable drawings.
Originally published in 2004 on the occasion of the solo exhibition at the Contemporary Art Museum of Goiás.