Fragmentation strategies
Mario Gioia
Álibis, Desvios e Atos Falhos (Alibis, Detours and Freudian slips) sediments a path to which Guilherme Dable?s work was naturally oriented. This is attested specially by the tridimensional piece that the Rio Grande do Sul born artist installs in the largest exhibition room of Eduardo Fernandes Gallery. Dable?s first solo exhibition in São Paulo presents a fluid compound of works, in which painting, drawing, sculpture and installation are languages that blend and generate results of difficult determination, but endowed with mobile and restless senses and meanings.
The hybrid character of Álibis, Desvios e Atos Falhos acquires this synthesis in por favor dê-se ao trabalho de ir lá buscá-los, piece with something of sculpture, pictorial, expanded drawing. Atelier materials, residues of São Paulo?s urbanity collected in the proximity of the gallery and built elements shape a work that move between rigidity and fragility. Set in a precarious balance, it defies the gravitational force and asks the observer to go around it to take in the most of its integrity. Plans, sticks, clapboards and ribbons exemplify a varied integrity, going from the viscous and liquefied to the more solid.
The stained corten steel, the masks that geometrize color bands, the black velcros, the reflexive chromatic surface, the running petroleum jelly and tar, the scaffold veiny wood working as the piece?s ?skeleton?, are all elements that, reunited, end up forming a bric a brac that dialogues with the other works of the exhibition and with the white cube itself, without failing to boast a particularity.
Thus, it?s like the bi-dimensional color plans acquired corporeity, as if the lines and volumes of the drawing were made with real, worldly things, and as if a project-like collage had concreteness, with depth and perspective.
And it?s through a synesthetic effect that the compound of Álibis...is established.
Nothing forced, because Dable extracts from music important vectors of his visual production, like rhythm. It?s relevant to remember Tacet, project constituted of drawings and performance in which sound is central, exhibited in the program Rumos Artes Visuais. Shapes, color zones and trickles have links present in the entire space, in works whose titles come from poetry. And letters meet architecture through a transversal reading, in which projections, reverberations, light and sketches suggest what in architecture and urbanism theory is known as ?fragmentation strategies?
?The acceptance of a reality characterized by dispersion and difference, sum, by juxtaposing and by the shock between pieces and phenomena conducts to systems that are nothing less than a restoration of fragments. [...] Fragmentation is the most genuine form of the dispersible condition of the post-modern era, and when this hybrid condition becomes the starting point, when we resist the temptation of unity, identity and metaphysics, we resort to mechanisms that recompose a certain totality, multiple and fragmentary, like mosaic, collage, montage, assembly or the juxtaposition?1, writes the theorist Josep Maria Montaner.
Dable, therefore, creates a floating region by establishing fruitful dialogues between works such as a hora em que o vento sopra de estrelas extintas and então, gradualmente, você acorda novamente e prossegue and the landscapes of narrow horizons existent both in the surroundings of the gallery in São Paulo and the atelier where he produces daily, in Porto Alegre. If the artist spent his childhood in a house with modernist lines in Carlos Gomes Avenue, in Porto Alegre, the void and harmony that predominated in this city before seem to have merged, creating a new place, of dense capillarity and blind vanishing points. And it?s from this arid scenery that Guilherme Dable manifests, daily, his exercise of resistance, by refining a poetics of indubitable power, even if noisy, rough and permeated by accidents.