BETWEEN SKY AND WATER

Paço Imperial do Rio de Janeiro, Brasil

Curator: Marcelo Campos

Description of works

1 - To read the ocean currents while the rain hammers at the windows of the house | 2014

“For some years–perhaps forever now–I have contemplated the beach and sea of Boa Viagem, where I was born, and where I recognize myself whenever I return there, some thirty years after I first left it. Perhaps this is why I am more interested in rainy days, when clouds cover nearly everything and the rain hammers incessantly at the windows of the house, transforming the landscape.”

  • three simultaneously projected 10’ video loops, edition of 5 + 2 AP loop, edição de 5 + 2 PA
  • concept and camera: Renato Bezerra de Mello
  • editor: Daniel Santos
  • access the work page here

 

2 - You must forget everything you have been taught | 2016

I embroidered a few samples of early maps of the South American continent––selected for their resemblance to the human heart and drawn to its scale––upon pieces of linen that belonged to my father.

3 - Between green and violet | 2014 – 16

This work relates to others similarly based on the movement of coloring, in infinite shades of blue, different types of paper, in an allusion to marine surfaces. Tracked down at stationers throughout the city of Oporto, the paper labels are the last to absorb the ink from hydrographic pens whose felt––once it has dried––becomes material for another work.

4 - Navel of the sea | 2016

This work came to me when I was reading about the misfortunes of ancient navigators; in particular, a description of violently agitated waters likened to the “navel of the sea”: immediately, I visualized this piece, made from the parings of tracing paper.

5 - Flat earth | 2016

The idea of a flat Earth persisted through the early days of the great navigations. In this work, it emerges little by little in small maps that resulted from disassembling and subsequently discharging leftover ink from used felt tip markers, parts of which I distributed at the bottoms of small paper boxes.

6 - Parings | 2014

Spirals emerge from cutout scraps of of paper stored on rolls: a whirlpool of water is formed in the sea,in the contrary crossing of its currents.

  • various weights and dimensions of tracing paper, Letraset pen ink 
  • 80 x 120 x 40 cm
  • EXPOSIÇÕES: ‘Carpe Diem Arte e Pesquisa’, Lisboa, Portugal
  • access the work page here

7 - Cut | 2016

These colored sheets of vegetable paper retain the memory of the making of different works. Initially used as underlay paper, little by little it became a work unto itself by virtue of the accumulated ink residues left upon its surface. In turn, the arrangement of the sheets makes me think of the ocean that outlines the South American and African continents in two territories.

8 - One/Two | Two/Two | 2016

These collections of reading notes contain drawings and texts based on a variety of co-related subjects: the 1755 Lisbon earthquake; the arrival of the Portuguese royal library in Rio de Janeiro during the early nineteenth century; the great Portuguese navigations centuries before that and, in the even more distant past, the fear and fantasy that have engendered the accounts of ocean voyagers ever since the times of Antiquity.

9 - Displacements | 2004-05

I used carbon paper to transfer and print onto thin sheets of crystal paper lines that make up an imaginary world map I traveled as I read my grandfather’s 1940s written correspondence with my father.

10 - The dream of reason produces monsters | 2016

The creation of sea monsters predates the period of great sailing: it goes back to the ancient world and perhaps still remains today in the imagination of seafarers. Initially described, they are drawn and copied, with minor changes, on maps from different periods, as well as on my embroidery.

11 - Naked | 2016

My encounter with this woman came about as I was looking at the sea. She strolled along the beach in the very early morning, occasionally stopping to bathe in the waters of Boa Viagem beach, in Recife. She is naked––an image from hundreds of years ago––one that we only know from the earliest accounts of European voyagers to Brazil.

    • enlargement on cotton paper, edition of 5 photographs + 2 AP
    • 85 x 110 cm (each) | 85 x 350 cm (set)
    • access the work page here

12 - We are not one, we are various | 2016

The over 1,100 names that appear in this work display the impact of what became known as the discovery of Brazil. The greatest part of these indigenous peoples is no longer among us. Ethnicities are arranged by territorial location, in accordance with the Museu do Índio’s 1998 listing.

13 - I don’t know how to say what i feel | 2016

This work is made from the felt in marker pens that I use for coloring paper in infinite shades of blue. Even when it is empty of ink, felt continues to retain a tiny amount of the color it absorbs, thus presenting itself as a formal material; its appearance is almost vaporous, particularly when undone into threads.

14 - Running on blue in search of beauty | 2014

In an allusion to the inifinite colors and incessant motion of seas and oceans, this accumulation of paper rolls covered in different shades of blue emerged from observation of the sea and from a dream of the lost libraries of antiquity.

TEXT

Between sky and water

Marcelo Campos

Setembro, 2016

 

One must forget everything that was taught on such thorough maps, and begin to erase from that letter in the head the form, the general surface, even the presence of the American continent. The one who can bring to his soul the obscurity and uncertainties from that distant century will be able to relive the surprise, the enthusiasm of a whole generation when, in that which was then the infinite, the first outlines of an unsuspecting land, little by little was sketched.

(Stefan Zweig. Amerigo)

 

Life and narration configure an inseparable existence. Narrated and lived facts get mixed in the emission of the voice, creating conjectures that offer meanings for the exchange of confidences, for the organization of the chaos of existence, the drama of everyday feelings. In another way the drawings of writing weave signs for private audiences (in journals, in letters), or public ones (in court orders, laws, books). Writing and drawing merge, for instance, in the colonial attempt to create limits on lands, isles, continents in cartographical practices.

The exhibition “Between sky and water,” by Renato Bezerra de Mello originates from the impact of such intersubjective exchange between the account, empiricism and imagination, recurrent practices in that artist’s work. As he grounds himself on the forms of extending time on praxis, the artist searches for direct actions, as drawing, sewing, and writing, and based on that he fights the waste, taking profit of the remains, of the paper leftovers, of the pen cartridges, of the back sides, of the casings.

Here the artist is interested in the naming of America, a fact that grants to Amerigo Vespucci not only a tribute, as it was common in the times of Columbus, but that places him as a narrator who does not attribute the finding of the land to chance, or to a detour in order to arrive at India, as in the history about Cabral. Renato did research maps from different eras and have put them on embroidered linen, showing us morphological modifications of the imaginary from diverse eras, changing them considerably with the inclusion of the two coasts, Atlantic and Pacific.

On the embroidery one sees, at the same time, the sea monsters of the first nautical charts. Such accounts impact us both by the imaginary making of these impossible beings, and after docking, by the difficult acceptance of those which were already on land. In one of the works, the natives are referenced by means of a map of Brazil made by over a thousand Amerindian ethnicities. 

In the exhibition Renato Bezerra de Mello was also interested in the possibility of acting on the small, on the manufactured gestures, stimulated by another grand history, that of a library belonging to the Portuguese Royal Family that crossed the Atlantic when Prince Regent John and a part of the Portuguese court crossed the Atlantic to Brazil, in 1807. With the mishaps of the hurried boarding, due to the imminent invasion of Portugal by the French troops, as explained by Lilia Moritz Schwarcz, the library was left on the docks of Lisbon. However, the prince regent demanded the bringing of the Royal Library three years later. 

From such an impactful image, Renato Bezerra de Mello selects an account: the letter written by the librarian Luiz Joaquim dos Santos Marrocos, one of those on board during the crossing, to his father, narrating the distresses, the horror and the discomfort of the journey.

Thus, one sees sky and water metamorphosing in punctual works and installations in which diverse coesightings create the peculiar imaginary of the expectation for what is to come on maps, sea colors, monsters, words, which mix the voices of the invader and those of the natives. Thus, the narrative is skewed and externalized by means of blue pen cartridges, tags, yellowed papers, and texts. Such externalities are shared with the spectator as letters, presented or forgotten, made evident in individuality or superposed in opacities.

The exhibition “Between sky and water” is above all about the possibility of the account to attribute meaning to the time gaps when, apparently, one does not perceive what is going on.