Quase no platô
Mário Gioia
For the new solo show at Marp (Ribeirão Preto Museum of Art), David Magila anchors his work in two leading poetical vectors: on one hand, prevails the melancholy that results from the construction of precarious architectures, of weak solidity and that travel to the impossibility; in another sense, the drawing line migrates to other languages, such as the pictorial and the tridimensional, but, in the end, never ceases to be fundamentally drawing.
The São Paulo-born artist that lived some part of his life on the state’s coast embodies such displacement in his creative process and creates links with more lateral paths of the Brazilian Art History, in which the silence and the lower tone are more evident – and that maybe because of this have been recognized later.
Architecture is the key for this feature in Magila’s production. Because if the national architectonic modernity created moments of glory specially in the first half of the 20th century, allowing the emergence of masterpieces by Niemeyer, Reidy, Lucio Costa and Lina Bo Bardi, for example, the frailty of urban planning, the failure of inclusive policies in a variety of scopes and the population growth, among other factors, ended up forging a clash with the space, something subterraneous and simple in Brazilian cities.
Such examples, abundant in the surroundings of big cities, have less to do with the auto-construction of communities, for example, where there are good cases of this “popular living” (even with the State’s omission), and are more related to a certain middle class of questionable taste. Take this and add a little creative public authority that pays the smaller price and is faulty in many occasions, and we have an ordinary city, punctuated by shiny porcelain tiles, roof tiles made of toxic asbestos, landscaping that resembles empty lots etc.
Thus, hexagons of gray floor always escape from pavements and roads, in which cleaning machines, correction and order are left to their own demise. Tires escape from discharge and become decorations of buildings that rapidly rise, even when their foundations are not reliable. TV satellite dishes ornate facades in non-harmonic colors that go together with anachronic roofs of ceramic modules, supposedly to attribute a more domestic face to the construction. To this dismaying landscape, we may add the most damaging real state speculation, marking, in all continents, the sameness of large scale buildings, without communication with the surroundings and the place’s memory, whose slabs often don’t shelter anything productive. “The constructed product (…) of modernization is not the modern architecture, but the junkspace. The junkspace is what is left after modernization follows its course, or more accurately what coagulates while modernization is in, its residue”¹, writes Rem Koolhaas.
From this scenery of an almost urban apocalypse, Magila, as a good contemporary artist, doesn’t escape. He works daily, with his tools to extract uneasiness from this panorama. In formal terms, he doesn’t forget the drawings and its graphic possibilities that resist, don’t fade. And through an interesting procedure: sketches via tracing paper are the base of his large scale paintings. Emphasizing the procedural quality, the action of the pencil is manifested, even if only seen closely. The mixture of materials, such as acrylic, charcoal and graffiti, generates an unsteady result, which transits between media, leaving certain incompleteness as a condition (photography as founding image changes, then, into only evidence).
And an interesting change in the way of dealing with objects and installations, now, is a more stressed concreteness. If in former specific sites, such as “Isso lá é verdade” (2013), a tridimensional desire was revealed (and the configuration of a large vessel enclosed on the wall of a white cube had an interesting surreal side), today the pieces like the series Iscas (2015-16) sit on a relevant dialogue between creating and undoing, solidity and ruin, the project and the actual. Hence this melancholic tone, so important in the evolutionary line of the Brazilian Art (remember Goeldi, the immigrants of the Santa Helena, Ivan Serpo, Evandro Carlos Jardim and, today, Daniel Caballero), which David Magila skillfully deals with in a constant and daily movement of reinvention.