ERRÁTICO, ERRANTE | 2012

Galeria Inox, Rio de Janeiro, Brasil

Curator: Marcelo Campos

Description of works

1 –Play Again | 2011

As I set out on the paths of my childhood, I wiped away small cubes of snooker chalk with the aid of sandpapers, recreating a lost collection of marbles.

2 – Time is not a thing, it is an idea. It will die in the mind | 2009 (IN PROCESS) | 2009 (em processo)

Gripped by the menacing idea of death – whether natural or induced – I began this series of concentric circles, using the characteristic motion of an automat devoid of spontaneity or a wanderer with no destination

3 - Waiting for birds

While searching for accounts on the making of feather objects, I came across a scene described by anthropologist Darcy Ribeiro in his Diários índios: he is alone, in the middle of a village, while all the others have gone off into the forest in search of feathers and birds. Based on that image, I created visions of the forest that surrounded him. Diários índios: ele sozinho, no centro de uma aldeia, enquanto todos os demais haviam se embrenhado na floresta à cata de penas e de passarinhos. Criei, assim, com base nessa imagem, as visões da floresta que o cercava.

Photo: Claudia Tavares (detalhe) e Wilton Montenegro

4 - An infinite combination of spheres | 2012

Spheres have been a recurring geometric image in my work, appearing in notebooks and on fine papers as well as in three-dimensional configurations throughout it. I created this particular group of spheres by employing mechanisms of invisibility upon accumulated sheets of tracing paper.

    5 - The artificer's joy | 2012

    These embroideries bring together treasured possessions: the Irish linen I inherited from my father; the silk thread given to me by the proprietress of a haberdashery (given that she foretold artistic potential); and, finally, the French knot, a stitch I learned from the embroiderers of a carioca cooperative.

    6 - All happiness is an illusion | 2012

    In this work I gather samples of passementerie that have crossed the lives of women of four generations of the same family, exhibiting the ornaments and textures of rickbrack, lace and embroidery.

    7 – They were created by a will for which there is no name | 2012

    By accumulating colors and hues that were slowly absorbed by blotting paper I was able to create several forms and extensions that resemble ancient stones and wood.

    • blotting paper, red, blue and violet ink, gramophone needle 
    • 110 x 160 cm (paper cutouts measuring 10 to 50 mm)
    • access the work page here

    Photo: Wilton Montenegro

    8 - Bottom of the can | 2012

    While waiting to begin a work session, I amused myself by playing with the contents of a can used for storing pins and needles, among other sewing materials. The small, magnetized space made it possible for me to rearrange the scene, opening up new possibilities of order and sound.

    • 3’18” video loop, edition of 5 + 2 PA loop, edição de 5 + 2 PA
    • concept and camera: Renato Bezerra de Mello
    • editor: Daniel Bardusco
    • access the work page here

    Still

    TEXT

    ERRATIC, ERRANT.

    Marcelo Campos

    Abril, 2012

     

    Contemporary art disseminates legacies: materials, arrangements, an ability to deal with concepts, categories, and narratives. In Renato Bezerra de Mello’s recent new works on view at the Galeria Inox, this expansion of mediums and materials is quite apparent. The exhibition is titled “Erratic, errant” and deals with the invention of trades in its environment of drawings, embroideries, video and installations. Renato remains linked to the subterfuges of memory and erasure. For this project, however, the artist has preferred to focus on ways of making, on possibilities of play and, therefore, of inhabiting the fissures of time, of intervals, of moments in which we believe in nothing, in which we cannot be startled. In the exhibition, we see small colored spheres that resemble marbles. This geometric image is presented in three-dimensional configurations upon the gallery floor as well as in drawings in notebooks and upon fine paper. What leads the artist to assume such figuration is, simply, the possibility of repeating it, no longer as a pattern but, rather, as a de-structuring, erratic, automated event. So much so that he is most deeply attracted to the recognition and modeling of such images in order to eclipse them in the pregnancy of information, exercising mechanisms of invisibility.

    The ways in which Renato Bezerra de Mello deals with the images are errant, accepting of the nomadic quality of random positioning, stimulating opaqueness of vision in the juxtaposition of papers which barely change places. These characteristics permeate the artist’s activity in light of his materials and his staging of erratic utopias, pretending to repeat what is identical. On video, while one waits, the artist observes the bottom of a recipient for storing needles and pins, and toys with the magnetization of another material, reconfiguring the scene, offering up alternative arrangements and noises. In the meantime, the artist stimulates himself by revealing the texture of lace ribbons, the sparkles and scintillations of pins: fleeting beauties. And so links are established in lieu of fixed and inhabited worlds.

    Renato draws against drawing, just as Rousseau did with writing. And, for this reason, he simplifies his task by increasing the complexity of not finding primary or secondary pathways; in fact, all of the chosen paths are secondary. In privileged visions, one plunges into a “wandering passion”, a term used by Maurice Blanchot to discuss the writer’s strategies. With this, the philosopher reiterates that “after being the innocent wanderer of youth, he becomes the glorious itinerant who goes from castle to castle, without ever managing to fix upon success, which casts him out and pursues him”. Renato’s artistic itineraries cast him in the role of wanderer – one who gazes into drawers in order to behold time, sequestering the last samples of materials in order to treat obsolescence, elaborating modes for storing or safekeeping, even if the contradiction existed much earlier, inhabiting the very physicality of the materials that are subject to disappearance.

    The exhibition “erratic, errant” therefore reaffirms Renato Bezerra de Mello’s attitudes towards ways of drawing and embroidering and, above all, of dealing with time in art. The circular world is not infinite.