ROMMULO VIEIRA CONCEIÇÃO
ROMMULO VIEIRA CONCEIÇÃO
2025 - Mario Gooden
Milton Almeida dos Santos (1926–2001) was perhaps the most prominent and important Brazilian geographer of the 20th century. He specialized in urban studies and theorized the social and political conditions of Brazilian urbanization before postcolonial studies had gained an academic foundation. In his book The Nature of Space: Technique and Time. Reason and Emotion (1997), Santos stated that today’s modern city is “luminous” and that the “naturalness” of technology and information results in a routine and mechanical condition of everyday life. On the other hand, the spaces of the city occupied by the poor are “opaque” urban areas; however, they represent zones of proximity and creativity in opposition to the luminous zones and the “spaces of exactness.” These are inorganic spaces that open up, and by escaping hegemonic rationalities, marginalized and excluded populations become a source of creativity and future possibilities.
In his most recent work, Rommulo Vieira Conceição draws upon Santos’ spatial theories, as well as photographs of everyday spatial conditions, architectural elements, and details of marginalized opaque spaces in Brazilian cities, such as Favela Nova Jaguaré in São Paulo, Favela Santa Marta in Rio de Janeiro, and the Humaitá neighborhood in Porto Alegre. In these opaque spaces, which are at times under pressure from the military police, Conceição addresses the creative construction of localized experiences and their implicit critiques of the fusion between capitalism, colonialism, and power.
In his sculptural installation for the 35th São Paulo Biennial, the artist builds walls using construction materials and details commonly found in favelas and peripheral neighborhoods, such as six-hole clay bricks, ceramic roof tiles, and colonial balusters. These walls and Greco-Roman Doric columns support neoclassical pediments that express sociocultural and political values. They are juxtaposed with suspended shields from the military brigade featuring images of riot battalions, evoking windows or mirrors. Finally, a series of shopping carts are arranged and scattered throughout the work, a reference to capitalism and consumerism, but also to mobility — offering the possibility of encounters as well as the construction and reconfiguration of values.
Mario Gooden. Rommulo Vieira Conceição. 35th São Paulo Biennial, SP.
Source: https://35.bienal.org.br/participante/rommulo-vieira-conceicao/
THE PHYSICAL SPACE Can Be an Abstract, Complex, and In-Progress Place
2021 – Douglas Freitas
Rommulo Vieira Conceição. The Physical Space Can Be an Abstract, Complex, and Under-Construction Place, 2021
Rommulo Vieira Conceição’s production stems from the superimposition of elements found in both public and private spaces. In his works, objects and architectures are reorganized, merging environments in ways that generate symbolic and functional displacements. The work The Physical Space Can Be an Abstract, Complex, and Under-Construction Place was created from field research carried out by the artist in Brumadinho, Mário Campos, and other cities surrounding the Inhotim Institute, as well as Belo Horizonte and the Historic Towns of Minas Gerais. In it, we perceive the juxtaposition of arches, domes, walls, railings, scaffolding, water jars, and pediments. These architectural structures express values tied to the history of architecture and art—both influenced by diverse socio-cultural manifestations over the centuries.
In the installation, a kind of collection of architectural apparatuses—originating from the artist’s observation of spaces of sacredness—are disconnected from their original context and functionality in order to reconnect within what resembles an ecumenical square or monument. The arches, for instance, lose their architectural structural function and begin to sustain nothing—or perhaps cease to uphold the representation of the sky within sacred architectures in order to let the real sky be seen through them.
The work directs the gaze toward multiple viewpoints, heightening the disorientation of this space in a state of construction. These fragments of sacred architectures intermingle with a sectioned school architecture, and together they symbolically sustain the idea of faith in knowledge, and in a collective construction of humanity.
Text written for the work “The Physical Space Can Be an Abstract, Complex, and Under-Construction Place,” commissioned by Instituto Inhotim, 2021.
THE COEXISTENCE OF OBJECTS
2020 - Cíntia Guedes
Rommulo Vieira Conceição. When Position Defines Social Space, with the Object as Its Container. Installation. 500 x 100 x 200 cm. 2020
Never has there been, nor will there ever be, an observer capable of apprehending the world in transparent evidence. Yet, the promise of capturing and organizing all things that can be seen has never ceased to be made, sustaining the colonial/modern fabulation of autonomous subjectivity, and finding diverse expressions in the field of visual arts. Rommulo Vieira Conceição’s installation for the 2020 CCSP Exhibition Program, however, points to the fact that what we see is always far greater than any model of perspective that art images can offer.
In this work, the artist’s vision — he is also a geologist and converses with design in his photography, installations, videos, drawings, paintings, and photographs — is mediated by computation. Printing appears as vocabulary and as the condition of the images’ appearance. When we finally encounter the images arranged on the ten overlapping glass plates, they do not merely refer to “something” from the real world, but also to millions of bytes that refuse to serve exclusively the realist mimicry of hegemonic visual organization.
Placed one over the other, the plates project four shelves where objects coexist: milk jugs, Bavarian crystal goblets, vases such as the North African amphora, the quintessentially Brazilian copo americano, Coca-Cola bottles, among many others. All are printed glass upon glass, carrying connections to specific territories and contexts. Certainly, they can be read within a historicizing fabric and located within art history. Yet in the installation, they do not obey a predictable order nor conform to the linear time of History. (Jonathan Crary, Techniques of the Observer, 2012.)
As the artist himself stated in conversation for this publication, wooden mortars, aluminum frying pans, and the typical Northeastern clay water filter also appear projected on glass. By altering the “original” material, these objects acquire the aura of pieces stored in display cabinets. In this way, the artist signals his interest in exploring the im/possibilities of penetrating spaces — a concern already present in previous works, such as In Suspension (2019) and The Fragility of Human Affairs May Be an Unquestionable Spatial Limit (2015). Both works highlight Rommulo’s insistence on confronting the limits and failures of the ideological aspirations of democratic integration carried by modernism in the arts.
In this exhibition, particular emphasis is given to the investigation of optical relations: in the printing of black on transparent surfaces across overlapping plates, the limits of two-dimensionality are explored, fracturing the Cartesian basis of perspective through which we are taught to see. The invitation here is to inhabit, definitively, the fractures of a contemporary gaze that doubts and distrusts.
In this installation, depth is not the primary visual operator of perspective. Rather, the artist invests in relationships between objects, where it falls to the visitors to deal with the undefined portions within each image. Because of the disposition of the plates and the fragmented printing, no object can be located in a single fixed position.
This is the surveying of the gaze, a process Rommulo had already experimented with in earlier works. This time, however, we cannot determine what is near or distant; no image comes before or after. Whoever stands before the installation may feel compelled to activate their body, to move, adjust their height and angle, reposition their gaze.
We find, for example, in the photographic series Between the space I see and perceive, there is the plane (2015/16), a clear play with the dynamics of vision, then explored through lines of opacity and sharpness dividing a single photographic image.
The work was conceived to be displayed in two ways: one consisting of individual pieces, each made of a set of glass plates (as shown in the figure), and the other as a large installation in which multiple plates are overlapped to create a fragile environment. In this second configuration, a low light placed in front of the plates (still under testing) may enhance the three-dimensional effect of the drawings.
Rommulo turns the installation into an optical device through which each object, incapable of being captured in isolation, is entangled in multiple social, cultural, and political-economic positions. Bearing witness to the coexistence of objects, the viewer may abandon the illusion of their own transparency and perceive themselves as “seeing.”
By rigorously studying transparency and exploring relations of refraction and reflection, the artist also refuses the possibility of apprehending images as a continuous flow. In doing so, he fractures the geometric-spatial agreement through which our way of seeing sequentially organizes what is seen into a given space, confirming an intuition of time as linearity.
There are no possible intervals between the point of appearance of one image and another, which would otherwise arise before or after, on the same line or in parallel lines. Rommulo radically wagers on the co-existence of objects. In this sense, the mathematical and intellectual abstraction by which we understand temporal extension as the distance between the appearance of one object followed by another, in a continuous line of events, is imploded. The work thus opens itself to dialogues close to diasporic arts and their aspirations for the decolonization of vision and even of our intuition of time itself.
By refusing to sequentialize and spatialize the installation’s images as autonomous representational units, the work also resists subjecting them to exhaustive relations of similarity, as exclusive referents of that which in reality promises them absolute meaning. We may relate each printed image to particular contexts and territories, but once they touch and deform one another, they can no longer be reduced to autonomous positions, for they only exist as images insofar as they manifest within one another.
Here resides the announcement of an implicated mode of existence which, in the coexistence of objects in Rommulo Vieira Conceição’s work, responds to the constrained present we live in by means of powerful aesthetic unfoldings, aspiring to other ways of coexisting and calling forth an ethics of relations yet to come.
Text by Cíntia Guedes for the work When Position Defines Social Space, with the Object as Its Container.
CCSP Exhibition Program, 2020
Collapsing Structures
2019 – Agnaldo Farias
Man is a being who created himself by creating a language.
Octavio Paz
Language is a virus that came from outer space.
William Burroughs
What is the interest of an artist’s biography in the analysis of their work? After all, as the great Russian poet Joseph Brodsky wrote, the true data of poets’ biographies, much like what happens with birds, “are in the peculiar sonority of their song. [The biography of poets] is in their vowels and sibilants, in their meter, in their rhymes and metaphors.”¹ An important perspective, without a doubt, but there are cases — and Rommulo Conceição is one of them — in which biography provides a key to understanding the work. The series From the space I see and perceive, there is the plane, which greets the visitor, serves simultaneously as both introduction and coda to the exhibition. In each piece that composes it, there is always a landscape — diurnal, nocturnal, vegetal, rocky, it does not matter — all rigorously divided by thin black lines, like an asymmetrical window frame, a stained-glass/puzzle whose units are quadrangular shapes, related to the rational grids, parametric, biomimetic, and associative modeling we overlay onto the world. The quadrilateral fields are divided between those that show the landscape with clarity and those that blur it, out of focus, with the apparent effect of humidity or the exchange of heat with the external environment. There is, therefore, a bifurcated logic: on the one hand, a representation that reveals the outside world as if there were no barrier or separation between inside and outside; on the other, a film that denounces its own presence, like an effect of language that, while showing the world, also shows itself as a factor of distancing from it. The question posed, and which Rommulo presents to us in an enchantingly simple way, is: does a world exist outside of language?
The artist’s curriculum does not omit his training in geology, nor his doctorate from the Federal University of Rio Grande do Sul (UFRGS), in association with the Australian National University in Canberra. It does, however, completely exclude his activity as a professor in the field of Geoscience at the same university. Read diagonally — as one tends to read that minor and monotonous genre of literature — Rommulo’s CV makes us believe his two faces do not communicate, as if they were parallel professional lives with no contact between them. Yet, as this exhibition shows, artist and researcher Rommulo Conceição do communicate, interpenetrate, and fertilize one another.
In this show, composed of photographs, drawings, and installations — some hybridized — the visitor perceives numerous disciplinary crossings, as well as the artist’s mastery of scientific systems of representation: digital technical drawings whose plasticity he tests and questions, pushing them to collapse.
As evidence of the multidisciplinary character of Rommulo’s poetics, one finds the play between design and art: on the one hand, trivial and everyday objects, fragmented or whole, designed and executed with the refinement typical of the furniture and objects that populate contemporary décor stores; and, on the other, the characteristic uselessness of artworks. (If there is a dissonance between design and art, it is precisely art’s insistence on remaining unsubordinated to the practical demands of life. Something akin to Millôr Fernandes’ classic definition of chess: “A Chinese game that increases your ability to play chess.”) Works such as Living room, bathroom, and service area or One table (how many tables does this table contain? Or would it be just one table undergoing rotations, like a Peter Eisenman house from his deconstructivist period?) do not arise from improvisation, but from the premeditated play of forms, the short-circuit of structures.
The idea that we are inside a laboratory dedicated to the manipulation and materialization of mathematical formulations — geometrically absurd or incongruent, complex like the drawings of the Dutch artist M. C. Escher — becomes evident even in the painted walls of the exhibition space: vivid, bright, artificial colors; aggressive shades of green, red, blue, and orange typical of plasticized environments and epoxy resin artifacts, with rounded edges and the promise of easy cleaning. These are also the colors of the drawings in the series All that is solid melts into air, which lends its title to this exhibition. Digital drawings of dismantled, exploded, diaphanous structures, precise like engineering projects yet fragmented; incomplete and enigmatic drawings akin to new cave paintings which, instead of being eternally fixed on stone walls, float over atmospheric images of our planet — partially obscure, chromatically manipulated — only to be covered or juxtaposed with pacifying fields of clouds, similar to the calming backgrounds we choose for our computer screens as compensation for the long hours we spend paralyzed in front of them.
The examination of Rommulo’s poetic research leads us to conclude its interdisciplinary nature, accompanied by notions such as overlapping, juxtaposition, folding, mirroring, layering — all that might suggest a complex coexistence of systems of different natures, functions, and meanings: art and science, installation and design, project and product, matter and image.
Within his intricate three-dimensional production, the artist offers us a vast repertoire of interpenetrated environments: kitchens, offices, bedrooms, amusement parks, banks, supermarkets — a whole repertoire of domestic spaces and public facilities, shuffled and transpassed, as if subjected to violent, sudden pressure.
As Jean Baudrillard revealed in The System of Objects, families of furniture and objects articulate in the constitution of environments that are nothing more than the social order of an era duly materialized. The syntax of a dining room, a playground, or a bedroom can extend into an infinity of components, devices, tools, and objects — born of continuous design processes, the rhythm of new discoveries, and the refinement of new programs of necessity, or simply stylistic changes dictated by fashion and the implacable logic of planned obsolescence. Table, chairs, stove, cupboards, plates, glasses, cutlery, wall, tiles, formica, bricks, vitrified flooring; fence, shelf, hangers, carpet, wood, metal, grass; bed, desk, wardrobe, bedside table, lamp, wallpaper, carpet. Objects, when arranged in a living room, bedroom, or kitchen, fit together, find their places, stack, link, and maintain distances so as to safeguard the steps, gestures, and positions of their users. They are, therefore, anthropomorphic — which is why Roland Barthes argued that objects are “man’s signature in the world.”
Instead of being destroyed by the collisions proposed by the artist — instead of leaving behind ruins and fragments — the environments traverse one another to reorganize into new configurations, both physical and symbolic. The result resembles the formidable collisions of tectonic plates, the shearing stresses taught to first-year geology students; the unheard-of forces that ripple the earth’s surface over centuries and later sleep beneath the ground and vegetation, making us forget — or not even imagine — the furious tensions embedded within.
Rommulo defunctionalizes, renders objects unviable, distancing them from design and directing them toward art — an approximation reinforced by the excess of aestheticization, expressed in those intense, exclusively primary and complementary colors, applied on lacquered, gleaming surfaces as unreal as digital architectural models. Models which he constructs as both step and product of a rigorously calculated process. The artist arrives at them as an unfolding of delicate digital drawings. And it is precisely in these projects that lies the seed of his singular projective reasoning: elaborated on layers of transparent sheets, they maintain the same rigorous finish as the objects themselves, and, inevitably, the same sorts of incongruences, inaccuracies, and subversions of geometric perspective — disturbances of the representational standards with which we intervene in the world.
From the space I see and perceive, there is the plane, which greets the visitor, serves simultaneously as introduction and coda to the exhibition. In each piece, there is always a landscape — diurnal, nocturnal, vegetal, rocky — all rigorously divided by thin black lines, like an asymmetrical window frame, a stained-glass/puzzle whose units are quadrangular shapes. These relate to the rational grids, parametric, biomimetic, and associative models we impose on the world. The quadrilateral fields alternate between those that show the landscape clearly and those that blur it, out of focus, as if through humidity or heat exchange with the outside environment. There is, therefore, a bifurcated logic: one of clarity and one of obstruction — a film that at once shows the world and reveals itself as a distancing effect. The question posed, which Rommulo presents enchantingly simply, is: does a world exist outside of language?
By working on the body of representations, materializing them, Rommulo Conceição, both scientist and artist, demonstrates the malleability and the imponderability of what common sense holds to be exact — the malleability and the imponderability of being.
Curatorial text for the exhibition “All That Is Solid Melts into Air,” TCU, Brasília, 2019.
Earth-to-Earth
2019 – Roberto Conduru
Rommulo Vieira Conceição. In Suspension, 2019. Installation, 400 x 120 x 230 cm.
In Suspension, 2019, is an example of how Rommulo Vieira Conceição deals in an engaged, skillful, and critical way with Brazilian artistic modernism. It is not difficult to glimpse in this work some high points of the constructive strand developed in the country since the late 1950s: Penetrables and Magic Squares by Hélio Oiticica, Active Objects and Pluriobjects by Willys de Castro, Emblematic Objects by Rubem Valentim, Lygia Pape’s Morar na Cor series, and even Bichos by Lygia Clark.
In 2013, In Suspension was presented with the lower-left plane in black. In the version shown in All That Is Solid Melts into Air, the solo exhibition held at the Cultural Center of the Federal Court of Accounts in Brasília in 2019, the artist replaced the black with orange on this plane and extended the same color onto the wall from which the work projected. Chromatically merging with the building designed by Oscar Niemeyer — and by extension, the city itself, the Brazilian capital conceived by Lúcio Costa in 1957 and inaugurated in 1960 — the work references both the apex and the turning point of Brazilian modernism.
Subtle, this chromatic continuity indicates how constructivism, more than a language appropriated by Vieira Conceição, is a problem for him. Or rather, it is part of a larger problem: modernity as a project that was doomed from the start. Engaging with the work of artists who lived through the crisis of modernist idealism and envisioned alternative utopias, the artist reactivates the constructive strand of Brazilian art, but does so to interrupt the inertia with which it might crystallize into sterile tradition and unquestionable authority. Eschewing direct citation, he confronts crucial references to that tradition in a manner that is both fluid and tense, animated equally by aesthetic pleasure and by critical urgency. In this work, by leaning volumes of color, glass planes, and metal rods against the wall or the floor, he makes clear that the “suspension” referred to in the title is not about the plastic elements themselves, but about their artistic, cultural, and socio-political references. Thus, he puts constructivism “in suspension” to confront the illusions of modernity.
In Suspension intensifies critique by unfolding and superimposing, without aiming for coherence or reconciliation, works that are already reflective in themselves. The planes, volumes, and spaces of Oiticica’s Penetrables and Magic Squares are compressed, restricting circulation and heightening bodily confrontation with color. While Active Objects reappear magnified, embodied, and piled into the vertical volumes at the left, Pluriobjects resurface condensed into metal hooks, sharpening the exercise of doubt proposed by Willys de Castro. These hooks also ossify Clark’s Bichos, or evoke them as though they were suspended there, alongside other bodies — ours among them.
Pointed, polished, and gleaming like the glass panes, the hooks are indexes of violence that heighten the tension produced by the not-quite-harmonic conjunction of perspectival and planar spatialities, as well as by the exalted chromatic games that neither seek balance nor reconcile contradictions. The work expands and contracts, opens and closes. Ambiguously, the glass planes form a niche that attracts, suggesting shelter, protection, refuge, but also the threat of confinement. The invitation to enjoy forms, colors, materials, and textures is simultaneously a call for viewers to abandon passivity, cease to be mere spectators, and engage with the work, with themselves, and with the world. Seduction here is revealed as demand, as summons.
Vieira Conceição knows that it is not only impossible but also meaningless to persist in manipulating planes, volumes, colors, and materials to configure new objects and spaces, functional or otherwise, as if to outline futures as unprecedented as they are unattainable. The artist does not share constructivist idealism, nor does he believe in subjective or cultural revisions of that utopia. For him, the challenge — starting from engagement with some of the great achievements of Brazilian constructivism — is to reactivate its critical dimension in order to question the false promises of modernity.
In this process, Vieira Conceição also dialogues with Cildo Meireles’s Virtual Spaces: Corners (1967–1968), which ironically critiques everyday architecture, Euclidean perspective, and the emancipatory projections of constructivism and modernism. Both Virtual Spaces: Corners and In Suspension generate a problematic interactivity, where viewers are frustrated as their expectations are denied, tricked into exercising doubt — of their own senses, of conventions, of the world. Attempting to perceive In Suspension, we inevitably see our own reflections in the glass planes. These reflections render the surfaces less transparent, somewhat translucent, pulling us into the work. Understanding reflection as essential for survival in an alienating sociocultural context, Vieira Conceição deploys art as a reflective artifice in opposition to the status quo.
Seemingly innocuous, the exposed bricks in In Suspension also participate in the critique of modernism, particularly in the self-critical processes of modernist architecture. Bricks were used to expose the “truth of construction” against the idealism of smooth, monochrome walls that defined rationalist abstraction. In Vieira Conceição’s work, however, arranged in bands, the bricks intensify the critique, referencing not only rustic construction but also the human labor without which nothing is built. Moreover, their association with the horizontal volume and the hooks recalls barbecue counters around swimming pools in Brazilian suburban houses across different social classes. This alludes to the capture of a critical language by architectural style — so-called brutalism — while also showing that the artist’s references extend beyond elite or erudite culture.
Yet he does not idealize popular or mass culture. In her series Morar na Cor, Pape found “an existential freedom” in the everyday use of color in Rio’s poor peripheral homes. In Suspension, however, does not embrace chromatic experience as existential adventure, nor does it posit freedom in Brazilian urban margins. By extending the orange of the work onto the wall, Vieira Conceição seems to pair with Pape’s praise of corporeal-tectonic use of color in order to attack Niemeyer’s whiteness — “incendiando,” as Pape put it. Vieira Conceição’s chromatic gesture becomes a critique of modernist purism.
Through color, In Suspension also engages Rubem Valentim’s work, which fused constructivism with other references — erudite and non-erudite, particularly Afro-Brazilian religious material culture — to construct a virtually universal plastic language. But unlike Valentim, Vieira Conceição does not seek synthesis or harmony. Restricting himself to so-called primary and secondary colors, he sharpens chromatic clashes to expose sociocultural disharmonies. And though his references are anchored in constructivist symbolism, his critique reaches a global scale, since its object is modernism itself, propagated worldwide.
Certainly, In Suspension is entangled in art’s self-reflexive chain, addressing art, constructivism, and their Brazilian inflections — partly to critique them. But also because art, as a system that reflects upon itself, inevitably speaks of the world, of life. Vieira Conceição thus raises his work into the symbolic, somewhat “suspended” domain of art in order precisely to speak of the real, grounding reflection in what is basic, common, down-to-earth. Avoiding icons or figurative references, he nonetheless speaks of the world. The artist plays with colors, materials, planes, and volumes as concrete elements and as symbols of art and culture. Paradoxically, the work employs the self-reflexive language of constructivism to break aesthetic suspension, to call people to confront the brutal inequality of Brazilian society — one of the most segregated and violent in the world. From that singular event in Brasília, the work projects a broader reflection on exclusion as a structural condition of global modernity.
Text written for the work In Suspension, 2019
Roberto Conduru – Endowed Distinguished Professor of Art History, Southern Methodist University
¹ Atlas of Brutalist Architecture. London: Phaidon Press, 2020.
² Lygia Pape. “Morar na Cor.” Arquitetura Revista, Vol. 8 (1988): 29–32.
³ Rubem Valentim. “Manifesto ainda que tardio” (1976). In A Mão Afro-Brasileira: Significado da Contribuição Artística e Histórica, edited by Emanoel Araújo, 294–295. São Paulo: Tenenge, 1988.
Dismantling
2017 – Bruna Fetter
Rommulo Vieira Conceição. Series All That Is Solid Melts into Air, no.1.
Drawing and photograph on stainless steel. 130 x 95 cm. 2017
We entered 2017 with an acute sense of hopelessness. Not only in Brazil, but in different parts of the world, echoes of instability and frustration resound loudly. Economic, democratic, social, and humanitarian tensions bring us back to pasts we wished we had already overcome. In our country, after the collapse of the euphoria generated by a brief economic surge followed by a political crisis, we witness the gradual dismantling of rights and achievements that we once believed had been guaranteed for decades.
Faced with the fragmentation of institutions and beliefs, the artist moves. And it is this movement that Rommulo Vieira Conceição presents in the exhibition All That Is Solid Melts into Air.
The fragility referenced in the title also names the series of 17 previously unseen photographs of skies, taken by the artist during his travels. These photographs, printed on stainless steel plates, are not the only visual elements of the works. Superimposed on them are drawings of various projects previously created by the artist, now fragmented. Doors, sinks, walls, chairs, pipes, railings, windows, and even a seesaw — all deconstructed — drift freely in a gravity-free environment. While the sense of collapse is evident, the violence of these images is softened by the clouds in the background.
The question of the virtualization of the image is crucial for Rommulo, who has long employed technology and architectural design language in his drawings. His projects are so identical to the executed works that one hesitates to distinguish which is the “real” artwork. A virtual trompe l’oeil, born of the conviction that the contemporary observer is visually prepared to decode this projective, architectural visual code. That is, to read a 3D drawing and perceive, even mentally, its materialization. Now, however, what is at stake is dematerialization. By scattering solid structures across different sky images, the artist intensifies the fragmentation of space and questions the validity of perspective — recurring concerns in his work — exposing the fragility of structures that supposedly sustained our beliefs about the world around us. Reflecting on a universe in which information is stored in something as ethereal as clouds, the artist rubs against current certainties, revisiting the questions of modernity and its failures.
In the work Space Becomes Place as I Familiarize Myself with It (2017), the first video produced by the artist, repeated across different gallery spaces, Rommulo again starts from aerial views of skies and clouds, but this time to characterize his own displacements. Using Google Earth Pro, an everyday, accessible application, the artist again relies on the public’s recognition of such a code to articulate landscape, movement, map, body, and sound. In each location, the artist positions himself at the center of the frame and, like a compass, rotates to the four cardinal points. Mapping the place with his own body, in each new sequence he stands 12 steps further from the observer, until he disappears into the immensity of each landscape-void. The body vanishes, consumed by the landscapes, dissolves, while the aerial map in the bottom right corner of the screen traces the action. In the lower left, the profile of the landscape becomes the basis for original musical compositions that form the video’s soundtrack.
This work, like most of Rommulo’s practice, speaks of space. Not a private space superimposed on another, but a landscape situated and localizable by anyone willing to follow the geographical coordinates provided. The work proposes participation, but does not impose it. The visitor may or may not engage, may or may not scan the QR Code and be projected into clouds of information, may or may not claim those landscapes for themselves. This play of approach/distance negotiates the familiarization of the body and of our gaze with each landscape in the video — which, moreover, is an open-ended process and will continue to grow with the addition of new locations as long as the artist remains interested in the proposition. The uncertainty about the work’s conclusion resonates with the photographic series: in suspension, on the verge of collapse.
Drawing from Karl Marx’s famous phrase in The Communist Manifesto (1848): “All that is solid melts into air, all that is sacred is profaned, and man is at last compelled to face with sober senses his real conditions of life, and his relations with his kind” — this exhibition presents ruins of contemporaneity to question historical cycles. The paradox Rommulo presents here generates a discomfort that grows gradually as we move through the body of work. The constant self-citation of existing works creates a sensation of déjà vu, while their dissolution simultaneously revokes a promise of the future. What remains are traces of a becoming that still waits to be possible.
Text by Bruna Fetter for the exhibition All That Is Solid Melts into Air, Gestual Gallery, Porto Alegre, 2017
Anywhere
2013 – Bruna Fetter
Two seesaws separated by a wall. On one side, bricks; on the other, tiles. Glass panes play at being mirrors, multiplying those same seesaws that perhaps, in reflection, meet for a fraction of a second only to drift apart again immediately after. An endless up-and-down, always repeating itself, multiplying and returning to the same point. At the same time, the open grid finally allows one to see beyond. A table, shelves, a park bench. An entanglement of inside and outside emerges. After all, on which side am I?
This kind of apparent contradiction is a constant in the work of Rommulo Vieira Conceição, in which each element contributes to constructing a scene while simultaneously deconstructing the reference that might contextualize it. It is as if devices of micro-localization offered partial clues as to where we are. Yet with each clue, element, or added layer of information, our chances of situating ourselves are reduced. Non-location points to a non-place.
For French anthropologist Marc Augé, a place would be a space of identity, of building relationships, including historical ones. In opposition, non-places would be spaces where the possibilities of identity manifestation and the establishment of personal relationships do not occur. Standardized spaces of passage, such as elevators, shopping malls, and airports. Spaces of redundant circulation, like Rommulo’s seesaws.
For the artist, these non-places are formed from fragments of the common, the routine. The banal displaced and coated with glossy automotive paint, two sinks in an abstract game atop a granite countertop. They are planes upon planes, of different shapes and textures. Masses of color in a brilliant pictorial construction that shapes space. Art and life blend together in a formal play. Concrete.
The vibrant colors that grow outward from the flat surfaces of the monochromatic drawings occupy space with solidity, becoming the very objects themselves. The decomposition of the house present in these drawings moves toward an even greater degree of abstraction. From industrial finish we move to the artisanal. From technical drawing to the hand-made. Lines that demarcate spaces put basic notions of perspective into question. Glazes once again confuse the observer. A red chair, a hallway, tiles, so many elements. An empty space filled with objects that release information about who we are and how we interact. A social field presents itself and shows us that the layers of everyday life are more complex than they first appear.
And so Rommulo Vieira Conceição leads us through these overlapping spaces. It is not a plaza, a playground, a backyard, or a house. It is all these possibilities left open that bring us closer to and push us away from his work. His world of balanced disorder confronts us with our being, inhabiting, and sharing, while simultaneously seducing us with the absolute beauty of the banal.
Bruna Fetter. Anywhere. In: Exhibition Folder ANYWHERE, Galeria Casa Triângulo, São Paulo, SP. 2013.
THE ARCHITECT OF THE OBVIOUS AND THE AMBIGUOUS
2013 – Osvaldo Carvalho
Closing the year of 2013, within the Vitrine Efêmera Project, is the artist Rommulo Vieira Conceição. Having followed his installations since 2007, I could perceive how dear and meticulous to him are the investigations of the spatial organization designed for interiors. The work he presents to us, In the Absence of the First, Fill with the Second, for this closing, is intrinsically linked to his already established process, and yet it still surprises us with the inexhaustible, pungent force with which it reveals itself to our eyes.
The vitrine is filled with two chairs, one blue and one orange, a pane of glass, two partitions of white tiles, and walls painted green and red. The obviousness is transparent, just as the glass is: complementary colors that create a short dialogue between form and content. Yet the suggested ambiguity shatters our comfort when we are compelled to reflect upon what stands before us. The installation becomes a vast chromatic plane with secondary and tertiary reflections produced by the large sheet of glass interposed along the bisector between the chairs, through which new arrangements emerge as we shift our position in relation to the vitrine. The artist expands the referential potentialities that the work holds, transforming its axis into a successive multiple. Rommulo has the skill to render the ordinary complex, and the obvious, ambiguous. Like a great architect, he dissects what Merleau-Ponty developed in his reflections on phenomenology—that is, the human cognitive capacity in the face of form, how it is brought into our field of consciousness and converted into phenomenon. Thus, the artist gestures toward the possibility of a meaning of things that turns the Cartesian method inside out, and goes beyond the organization of their sensible aspects. What we encounter in his work surpasses the reality of the thing in itself: it is art.
The chair, the glass, the tiles, the colors—everything there is more than its parts; it is In the Absence of the First, Fill with the Second, the materialization of an entity proposed by the artist, whose personification and personality, once established, are subject solely to external scrutiny and no longer depend on his action. What surfaces in his investigative journey is what I call the transperceptive, that which cannot be named through experimental data, subdivided, or classified. Rommulo’s installations hold the core that demands from us more than a mere glance, a core that requires immersion. And let no one be misled: it is not simple physical immersion, for his works do not fully accommodate such desire, but rather the expansion of what we understand as “seeing.”
The contrast between reality and appearance leaves us staggering and challenges our certainties about the unequivocal understanding that objective reality might have through our reason. Our only comfort lies in knowing that the author as spectator is very different from the author as creator: he stands far below (not necessarily understanding what he created) yet far beyond the spectator (because he creates).
Osvaldo Carvalho. The Architect of the Obvious and the Ambiguous. In: Exhibition folder In the Absence of the First, Fill with the Second, Estúdio Dezenove, Rio de Janeiro, RJ, 2013; and In: Arte & Ensaios journal, EBA-UFRJ, 2013.
Cartography of the Temporary
2012 – Angélica de Moraes
At times, there are capillarities between facts and people that lead us to know something or someone as the result of a guiding thread of previous inquiries. Or there is chance, the unexpected of the moment, demanding the deciphering of coexistence, of a closer look. This two-faced logic of encounter applies both to art and to life. It belongs to the sphere of fascination, a trigger that sparks both the curiosity of the instant and the research of a project. It is certainly in the nebulous region where these reasons and emotions intermingle that we allow ourselves to be captured by the work of Rommulo Vieira Conceição — paradoxically so rich in clear surfaces and sharply defined edges.
At first contact, we can observe subtle unfoldings (or deconstructions) of the neoconcrete tradition. Here, the break from the geometric radicality of concretism is no longer achieved through the direct introduction of questions of the body but rather through its intentional omission. The body, explicitly absent, appears in a ghostly, oblique manner, enhancing the indelible memory it imprints on everyday household objects — understood as a code for deciphering the existences that inhabit or once inhabited them.
This is Rommulo’s first solo exhibition in São Paulo. Carefully Through is the result of the 2012 Funarte Contemporary Art Prize and was curated around a series of eight photographs that lend their name to the show. Complementing the ensemble are the installations Entre (2011) and Dissipative Structures/ Swing, the latter created especially for the exhibition.
All the works in the show reveal the spatial reasoning employed by the artist to semantize the inner architecture of emotions. The central piece — both due to its dimensions and its protagonism — Dissipative Structures/ Swing exposes even more effectively the absence observed in the photographic images of its surroundings. In it, a transparent pane of glass and incident lighting on a fragment of the ensemble (a chair) create an optical illusion that, on its own, elucidates the artist’s entire poetics. Illuminated by a spotlight (or by the attention of the viewer?), the chair, in an intense shade of orange, transposes the glass and materializes — immaterial yet entirely visible — on the other side. Like the reflection of a dialogue that has found its place in the other.
Still within the same piece, we see a swing conjuring childhood memories (stored in the lilac drawers beside it?). The pendular ascent of the child’s toy transforms into the vertical ascent of adulthood through the steps on the adjacent wall. Dreamlike architecture leading from dream to project? The ensemble is anchored around a table — the mythical space of shared nourishment and the exchange of experiences.
The table anchors both the external brick wall and the internal tiled wall. It is the breathing membrane between them. The window, lit in red, clarifies that we are, all along, speaking of surfaces of observation, of the crossing of gazes.
The echo of these space-cognitive issues appears in the piece Through. Here too we find the use of polished, reflective surfaces (ambiguous adjectives, incidentally, referring either to physical characteristics of materials or to types of human behavior). The use of intense, complementary colors persists. The glass panes, tripled and framed for the act of opening to the other, remake the symbolism of access to a meeting space (entre), marked in bright red. If we wish, it also evokes the gaze constructed through several overlapping lenses — a characteristic of photography.
With his photographic series, Rommulo investigates the panoptic vision, that totalizing gaze capable of encompassing, from a single point of view, the entire scene in front of it. The images of interior spaces captured by Rommulo in the sober Finnish studios and in the atmosphere laden with memories of a hotel in Argentina provoke us to gather and interpret clues. Like those left by the two towels hanging on hooks in the sauna. Or the meticulous arrangement of tools.
Rommulo inscribes himself, with freshness and clear authorship, in the issues of the unmonumental (1), for which the German artist Manfred Pernice is one of the exponents. That is, in sculpture and object-making positioned against the criteria of monumentality and the affirmation of stone-like certainties. Rommulo reflects the fragmentation of the 21st-century understanding of the world. As I have previously written (2): “our notion of the world is no longer established through narrative or the logical analysis of cause and effect, inherited from Greek philosophy. It is forged in the here and now, in the juxtaposition and the possible articulation, in a given moment, of fragmentary notions of an ever-expanding and mutable universe of information. In cartographies of the temporary.”
Angélica de Moraes.
Cartography of the Temporary. In: Catalogue Carefully Through. Rommulo Vieira Conceição. São Paulo: Ed Ideário / Funarte, 2012.
(1) Reference to Unmonumental: The Object in the 21st Century, exhibition curated by Laura Hoptman, Massimiliano Gioni, and Richard Flood, New Museum, New York, 2007–2008.
(2) Moraes, Angélica de. Cartographies of the Temporary. 2010.
¹ Unmonumental: The Object in the 21st Century. Exhibition catalogue, New Museum, New York, 2007. Phaidon Press.
² Agora/Ágora: Creation and Transgression in Network. Exhibition catalogue, Santander Cultural, Porto Alegre, RS, 2011, p. 86.
Carefully Through
2012 – Angélica de Moraes and Bruna Fetter
Rommulo Vieira Conceição investigates the phenomena of perception and codification of space across various media: installation, photography, object, sculpture, and drawing. His production spans 14 years of continuous deepening of results obtained from experiences in Brazil and abroad (Argentina, Australia, Japan, and Finland). For this first solo exhibition in São Paulo, the result of the 2012 Funarte Contemporary Art Prize, we selected a photographic series, an object, and a sculpture/installation that represent some central characteristics of the artist’s contribution.
Born in Salvador (Bahia, 1968) and currently living in Porto Alegre (RS), Rommulo brings together in his work the two strands of his education: a PhD in Geosciences and a Master’s in Visual Poetics (Institute of Arts), both from the Federal University of Rio Grande do Sul. Thus, the space of the house is excavated with scientific rigor. It descends into details capable of illuminating fragments of the whole (our being in the world) through the poetic articulation of its parts.
The photographic series Carefully Through refers to intimate spaces only reached after passing through many doors or situations, which have locks but also keys that open them. The photographs investigate the panoptic gaze, that is, the totalizing vision that encompasses the entire scene from a single point of view. There are traces and reverberations of the personalities and histories of the inhabitants (never represented) adhered to the surfaces and objects of these places.
The object Between and the sculpture/installation Dissipative Structures/ Swing bring the panoptic questions into three-dimensionality, generating impossible architectures. Here, there is an influence of the unmonumental, that is, of contemporary sculpture that positions itself in opposition to sculptural tradition. There is no monumentality, no affirmation of stone-like certainties. Rommulo’s works reflect the perplexity of the fragmentation of the understanding of the world in this 21st century.
Angélica de Moraes and Bruna Fetter. CAREFULLY THROUGH. Text for the exhibition “Carefully Through,” Mario Schenberg Gallery, FUNARTE – São Paulo. December 6, 2012.
In Space, the Void
2012 – Bruna Fetter
In this series of photographs and an object, Rommulo Vieira Conceição articulates scenes absolutely indifferent to human presence, but which, paradoxically, denote moments full of intimacy. It is the accumulation of seemingly banal situations that builds the singular poetics of these images.
Without the use of digital montage, it is the precise choice of a single vantage point in space that allows us to understand the relevance of each connection. It is not by chance that the series receives the title Carefully, through (Cuidadosamente, através), in which the various doors—open or half-open—integrate the sequence of environments, imprinting a spatial cadence that ultimately verticalizes horizontal images. Or in the object titled Between (Entre), which also replicates the door element, inviting those who approach it to penetrate possible realities and experience the voids within each of these possibilities.
The set of works presented here shows a relevant moment in the artist’s production and reflection, with overlaps of spaces and moments coming together to emphasize what the gaze barely registers: the voids, so common in a daily life of accumulations.
Bruna Fetter. IN SPACE, THE VOID. Text for the exhibition In Space, the Void, Gestual Gallery, Porto Alegre. August 18, 2012.
Between the Inside and the Outside
2011 – Cauê Alves
A showcase is a communication device between spaces in which the differences between what is inside and outside are clear. Usually, what is inside is almost inaccessible and can only be obtained through payment. But while in commercial spaces the products are arranged with the intention of provoking the desire for consumption, the showcase project carried out by Rommulo Conceição for Casa M is based on another principle.
First, because Casa M is an open space with free activities for those who pass by. A place of encounter, study, experimentation — in short, a house that counts on the participation of the neighborhood and has helped to activate the cultural scene of the city. And indirectly, the characteristics of this space are incorporated into the artist’s project.
Furthermore, Rommulo Conceição’s work provokes a reversibility between inside and outside. It is as if he brings the whole street and its passersby into Casa M, reinforcing the very meaning of this space. This happens insofar as the artist establishes a dynamic between the three doors aligned in the showcase. For those looking from the street, one door opens inward — as if the house were outside and the passerby inside. Then, another half-open door reinforces the idea that we are inside something. The third door, however, opens in the opposite direction.
For those who see it from the inside, there is also the sensation of being within the house. There is a mirroring between spaces that makes one reflect the other.
The gaze of the pedestrian walking down the sidewalk simultaneously contemplates the three glass doors framed by shiny green and red jambs, and traverses the panes. There is something painterly in this in-between place. Each layer of glass is like a transparent veil that both conceals and reveals what happens in the street and in the house itself. Doors are by definition places of passage, but those designed by Rommulo Conceição, even though they are half-open, are non-transitable. Only lights and gazes pass through them. Yet his showcase, instead of dividing spaces, blurs the boundaries between inside and outside.
Cauê Alves. BETWEEN THE INSIDE AND THE OUTSIDE. In: Exhibition folder, 8th Bienal do Mercosul – Casa M Showcase, Porto Alegre, September 2011.
SHOWCASE – ROMMULO CONCEIÇÃO
2011 – Fernanda Albuquerque
Since his earliest experiences, Rommulo has been working with the ways in which architecture configures spaces. At first, he intervened in specific sites, such as the façade of a house about to be demolished and the tower of an old mansion. More recently, he has turned to more generic spaces: living rooms, kitchens, bathrooms, corridors, supermarkets — environments that carry with them a kind of identity. A set of characteristics that distinguishes them from other spaces and allows them to serve certain functions. After all, can one imagine a bedroom without a bed? At first glance unquestionable, our ideas and perceptions about everyday spaces are challenged by the artist’s creations, whether photographs, drawings, objects, or installations.
By bringing together realities as distinct as a kitchen and a bathroom, or a movie theater and a supermarket, Rommulo scrambles seemingly fixed identity constructions. He creates distorted environments, disconcerting places — though impeccably finished and often still functional. The ambiguity that defines his work, at times subtle, at times more aggressive, also seems to account for the strong attraction they exert on our gaze.
For Casa M’s showcase, the artist created a piece — part object, part place — that condenses fragments of domestic architecture.
Fernanda Albuquerque. SHOWCASE – ROMMULO CONCEIÇÃO. In: 8th Mercosul Biennial – Geopoetic Essays, Catalog, Porto Alegre, September 2011.
PARALLEL 30: FIELDS OF ENERGY
2010 – Angélica de Moraes
This exhibition brings together three artists who live within the geography located at 30 degrees south of the Earth’s equatorial plane. Parallel 30 is synonymous with Porto Alegre. They are three Brazilians coming from different regions of the country. There is an impregnation of time and place in events. Knowing when and where things happen helps us to understand the very core of the action. Other factors involved in shaping what happens are the personality and life experiences of its protagonists. These indelible filters permeate all artistic creation and our very being in the world. Yet it is not arbitrary to say that there is indeed a kind of cartography imprinted in the making. Globalization has broken down geographical borders to the same extent that it has highlighted the characteristics of each individual or culture.
This imaginary line invented by cartographers crosses through places as diverse as the red and desert-like interior of Australia, the green pampas of Argentina, and the gray mountains of the Andes. Along the way, it passes through the capital of Rio Grande do Sul and the studios of Gisela Waetge, Rommulo Vieira Conceição, and Túlio Pinto. Their gathering in this exhibition is a construct, a convention set for this moment and place. It is a cut-out of something infinitely larger, both in the production of each of these artists and in the contemporary visual output of Brazil’s southern region. It is a punctual mapping, a cartography that allows us to evaluate the poetic density that permeates these three ways of making art. They are eloquent testimony to the quality of visual arts produced in Rio Grande do Sul.
Two generations of artists are represented. Gisela Waetge, born in São Paulo and based in Porto Alegre since the 1980s, has the most visible and extensive trajectory. In 1991, she participated in the 21st São Paulo Biennial with large-scale works on paper, establishing a delicate and effective hybrid between drawing and sculpture. In this exhibition, although in a more intimate register, she continues to test limits. She creates what she calls “fields of energy.” She challenges the boundaries between drawing and painting. With extreme economy of elements, she uses the line as color. The rare broader areas of color, such as the citrus green of her larger canvases, exist not to create a pictorial event but to define the edges of a graphic action. They do not seek meaning within themselves, but at their borders.
The pictorial composition of Gisela’s works is built through rhythmic, almost melodic, occupation of rigid millimetric grids. Graphite is more present than paint. Brushstrokes, stripped of gesture, become points or drips. The highly liquid paint follows the movements of the support, obeying gravity’s pull, creating the path of color. It expands through the artist’s bodily movement, not just the hand’s gesture. In smaller works, she appropriates printed structures (musical staves, for example) to construct a rigorous and obsessive labor of erasing the limits between borrowed line and mimicked line.
Rommulo Vieira Conceição, originally from Bahia and living in Porto Alegre since 2000, focuses his work on the perception of space and the hybridization of media and codes of representation. His sculptures/environments create a blend of design, assemblage of domestic spaces, and objects of surreal ancestry. The surrealist non sense runs through his tables and chairs, which seem to unfold into space in exercises of descriptive geometry, in absurd projections. And yet, they retain an unsettling similarity to the functionality of the furniture they ghost.
The ambiguity deepens in Rommulo’s drawings, which seem to float in 3D, elusive, scrambling visual perception and canceling the Renaissance perspective – the universal code of representation on the plane. His monochromatic works, rendered in intense, overtly artificial industrial colors, recall the cosmopolitan visuality of neon lights, emblems of the urban. At times, the colors nearly obliterate the drawings inscribed within them, again demanding sharpened perception from the viewer.
Túlio Pinto, born in Brasília and based in Porto Alegre for a decade, works with the transformation of things through the action of time. The poetics of his practice are closely tied to the physical properties of the materials he uses. Weight, rigidity, fragility, and elasticity are focal points of his visual discourse. Metaphorical potency paradoxically emerges from the precariousness and impermanence he sets into motion.
Túlio is interested in exploring metaphors embedded in the laws of physics. His delicate colored latex balloons, pressed by heavy slabs of concrete, embody this dynamic. The tension between such opposing yet strangely complementary materials creates a charged site of energy. Something seems to breathe, to slowly expire like a sigh. An agonizing respiration that must be observed carefully, repeatedly, over time. Almost like auscultating, with compassionate attention, our own condition as urban beings surrounded by the heavy structures of contemporary life.
Angélica de Moraes. PARALLEL 30: FIELDS OF ENERGY. In: Exhibition folder, TRIPÉ | PARALLEL 30, SESC Pompéia, São Paulo, 2010.
LINES OF PERIPHERAL BORDER CONTOURS
2009 – Vânia Sommermeyer
The ESPM presents the works of three artists, researchers, and friends who, in recent years, shared conversations and the same workspace, the Atelier Floresta. Rommulo Vieira Conceição, Vânia Sommermeyer, and Tiago Giora, united by the relationships of transit between space and two-dimensionality, bring the exhibition Lines of Peripheral Border Contours. In the succession of spoken words, a mental drawing is produced, and this can suggest infinite possibilities. We understand drawing as project, contour, periphery, mark, border, and surface, in a succession of operational unfoldings. It is in the redundancy and obviousness of the title that it becomes drawing itself, connection and repetition through difference, a factor that unites all of our works.
Rommulo uses drawing to present projects and to work with the representation of space and perspective through layers and superpositions of lines. In the use of multiple processes and systems and in the employment of complementary colors, the artist uses the simplicity of everyday furniture to create possible proximities and distances with them, where the superimposed objects reveal an impossible use, in addition to determining the boundaries of an absent body or one in constant motion.
Vânia works with collages of leftover tailoring fabrics, playing with symmetries and forms that pulse between the utilitarian world and the autonomy of lines and stains. The artist understands fabric as a membrane that covers, separates, and connects voids and solids. It is in the cutting of the pieces that Vânia sees the edges of the gesture traced by the tailor, which is nothing more than the peripheral zone of a body fragment, one that does not reveal itself in the clothes, nor in their drawings.
Tiago works directly with the gallery-space, either emphasizing or erasing parts of it through the plaster coating of portions of its floor, provoking a continuity of the white walls. By covering part of the floor, the regular arrangement of forms is altered, as well as the initial perception of the grid. By uniting line and surface, wall and floor in the same mass, the artist creates a new space, another contour, and another path.
Vânia Sommermeyer. LINES OF PERIPHERAL BORDER CONTOURS. In: Exhibition folder, ESPM Gallery, July 2009.
BY THE EDGES
2009 – Eduardo Veras
The ESPM Cultural Space in Porto Alegre opens today the exhibition Linhas das Bordas Periféricas de Contorno. The title – imposing and baroque, somewhat redundant – underlines and, at the same time, contradicts what is offered to the visitor’s gaze.
The hallmark of the exhibition is rather refinement, subtlety, what is suggested rather than imposed. It brings together works by three contemporary artists, born or based in Rio Grande do Sul, whose careers, if not extensive, are at least the result of intense, serious, continuous research. Vânia Sommermeyer, Rommulo Vieira Conceição, and Tiago Giora all passed at some point through Torreão as students of Jailton Moreira, later exhibiting there. The three also completed their Master’s in Visual Poetics at UFRGS and maintained for three years a shared space, Atelier Floresta, in Porto Alegre. Linhas das Bordas Periféricas de Contorno reflects their questions about what drawing is or where it can be found.
Vânia turns to a neighbor’s tailor workshop, collecting leftovers from trousers and suits. In these scraps of cloth, some still marked with chalk and all with frayed edges, she perceives forms that look like drawings, sometimes like paintings. Some, for example, suggest the façades of houses. All preserve a certain symmetry, one side mirroring the other. They evoke something that is no longer there: the body – with two arms, two legs – that once served as the model for the pattern. In her collages on white paper, folding and unfolding these fabric remnants, Vânia follows only one rule:
— I never use scissors.
No retouching is done on the tailor’s scraps, she emphasizes.
Rommulo – a professor of Geosciences at UFRGS, with a Master’s and PhD in Geology, and three postdoctoral studies, one of them in Paris researching the Earth’s lithospheric mantle – superimposes sheets of glass and tracing paper on which he draws furniture: chairs, stools, beds, nightstands. His drawing follows a deliberately technical, cold approach, combined with complementary colors. For example, in a chair: the backrest might be red, the seat green, the legs red. One part on one sheet, another on another, overlapping. As Rommulo explains:
— I try to deconstruct perspective. You identify the object, it is a chair, but you don’t know what is behind and what is in front. The composition is more mental than real. The vanishing point vanishes.
Among the three, Tiago responds most directly to the exhibition space itself, a white gallery with very high ceilings. Visiting the place, considering what to do, he could not help but notice the ceramic floor: all stained, resembling sand, contrasting with the imposing walls, and displaying a strange geometry – Cartesian (from the alignment of tiles), yet irregular (from the room’s contours). What he did was cover some tiles with a layer of white plaster, as if the walls had spilled over onto the floor.
— I felt like calling the floor, he says. I erased the floor to bring it back.
Eduardo Veras. BY THE EDGES. Article on the exhibition “Linhas das bordas periféricas de contorno”. In: Jornal Zero Hora, Porto Alegre, August 29, 2009.
DO YOU UNDERSTAND THE IMAGE?
2009 – Åsa Lönnqvist
Where are you now?
Seated, or walking?
Our conception of space — is it culturally rooted, unifying, or something individual, particular to each of us? This is one of the central questions of the project Carefully Through, as Rommulo explained upon his arrival.
Like most visiting artists, Rommulo took his camera and set out to explore the city — in the morning, at noon, and at night. He sought out details in space. He searched for perspectives. He investigated dimensions — both within the image and in existence itself.
Depending on our mood and the focus of the moment, we notice more or less, distinct details — whether in the room we pass through or the street we cross. At times, there may be another space within the space — but will we have time to perceive it? Will we allow ourselves to feel wonder at the details, or will they seem irrelevant?
In the photographic series Rommulo created, he managed to capture vast totalities in a single image, without any manipulation. At the same time, he worked at the opposite extreme: rigorously pared-down drawings of richly ornamented façades.
Åsa Lönnqvist. DO YOU UNDERSTAND THE IMAGE? In: Exhibition folder Carefully Through, Pro Artibus / Artist in Residence-project, Ekenäs, Finland, March 2009.
PERSONAL: DRAWINGS ROMANCES
2009 – Gerardo Pulido
This exhibition proposes different approaches around drawing, through the works of Melina Berkenwald, Rommulo Vieira Conceição, Gerardo Pulido, and Tomás Rivas.
The show aims to rethink the relationships that drawing establishes with each individual proposal. At the same time, and as can be inferred from the very title, it seeks to work on the invisible ties that connect the participating artists.
“Personal,” in Portuguese, designates the intimate, the private, and the particular. At the same time, it also refers to a group of people: the staff of a company, for example, but also a group of friends, as one informally says in Brazil. In fact, it was the word used at the head of the emails exchanged by the exhibitors (replacing “friends”), which helped to think and organize this exhibition almost a year ago. Its title, therefore, denotes both the similarity and the difference among the works and their authors.
The “drawings” in the exhibition stem from the same root, while still being diverse expressions. Hence the subtitle: “drawing romances.” With it, a linguistic link is evoked (the Romance languages), which although characterizing the European and African continents, also decisively defines America. If the nationalities of the exhibitors embody points in space, they can come together above all by sharing a common territory.
At first, drawing was thought of as a project. A “project from” the very place of work and a “collective project.” Each individual proposal, from something as elusive or incomplete as the concept of drawing, defined distinct materials and techniques for the occasion: incisions on glass and wall (Berkenwald), infographics on paper, furniture, and domestic architecture (Vieira Conceição), painting on wall and paper (Pulido), volumes and carved walls (Rivas).
In any case, the exhibited works are considered drawings because, irrenounceably, a drawing involves a mark made on a surface or in space. The future itinerancy of the exhibition does not escape this idea. The show will be a drawing of itself, as happens with a body in motion.
Personal: Drawing Romances, ultimately, seeks to question the limit, the timeliness, the usefulness, and the risk of drawing, as well as the possibility of occupying it subjectively and, therefore, of finding coincidences within a general yet shared history.
Gerardo Pulido. PERSONAL: DRAWING ROMANCES. In: Exhibition folder, Zavaleta Lab Arte Contemporáneo, Buenos Aires, Argentina, May 7 – June 13, 2009.
CONCEPTUAL LOOKS OR HOW I MISTOOK A CARL ANDRE FOR A PILE OF BRICKS
2008 – Kiki Mazzucchelli
"We don’t see graphic design as art, but we see art as a form of design. Although it is difficult to define art, it is not difficult to define its context: there is a clear infrastructure of exhibition spaces, galleries, museums, art magazines, art book publishers, art history, theory, etc. Art can be seen as the production of objects, concepts, and activities that operate within this specific infrastructure. For us, this production can certainly be seen as a specific form of design."
(*Interview reproduced in the book Design and Art, ed. Alex Coles – London, Whitechapel Ventures Limited: 2007)
The incestuous relationship between art and design is not only a vast subject, but something that has been discussed since at least the beginning of modernism: from the texts of British artist and designer William Morris, to the various avant-garde movements of the 20th century, such as Soviet Constructivism, Dutch De Stijl, and the Bauhaus in Germany. Design as an independent discipline is the result of the process of industrialization and is associated, at its origin, with ideas of mass production in service of democratization, conferring aesthetic value to the unskilled labor of workers and transforming the everyday object into a work of art. Traditionally, it carries an extremely utopian character, suggesting that by bringing art into life it would be possible to subvert or modify rigid social structures, providing greater equality.
Initially, this exhibition intended to investigate how some contemporary artists appropriate the strategies and production modes of design to realize projects that use its transformative potential, concretely interfering in public life. However, what emerges from the works of the artists in this research is a series of questions that much more precisely reflects the complexity of the relationship between art and design today. For example, one can observe a great interest in the role of design in private life—perhaps symptomatic of the growing privatization of the public sphere—or in the non-functional, which in a way signals a disbelief in the utopian ideals of modern rationalism. This is, therefore, an exhibition that rethinks its original hypothesis through the works themselves, identifying in the production some thematic axes that highlight different approaches and intersections between art and design.
Permeated by the idea of commodity fetish, the works of Marcelo Cidade, Superflex, and Los Super Elegantes explore, in different ways, how value is attributed to products. In Transeconomia Real, rings constructed from banknotes, Cidade condenses product and value into a single object, much like rappers flaunting gold jewelry. Superflex, in turn, addresses the issue of piracy in Supercopy/Logo, printing the title of the work on counterfeit Lacoste shirts. The piece by Los Super Elegantes is a narrative about an interior decorator that reveals how absurd value-attribution criteria can be. Yet, once these works enter the art circuit—where value is assigned according to the criteria of this specific market—the idea of fetish becomes even more complex.
Both the collaborative video by Carla Zaccagnini and Nicolás Robbio and the works of Marcius Galan and Rodrigo Matheus call into question the notion of design as a product of pure rationality. The choreographed movements of Zaccagnini and Robbio, who draw in synchrony, suggest an idea of standardization with near-mechanical precision, only to be undone by the final result, where difference produced by subjectivity becomes evident. Design is a human product and, in this sense, could be said to be the opposite of nature. In Mata and Banco de Jardim, Galan complicates this assertion by manipulating furniture pieces, stripping them of their original function and bringing them closer to nature. In his works, Matheus often appropriates corporate aesthetics. Here, he presents Ultra Lamps, a set of fluorescent lamps that, besides serving no purpose, suggest an outright waste of energy.
It is interesting to note that the function of design is preserved in only two works in the exhibition. In Fogo Amigo (Portable Version), Cidade creates backpacks specially designed to accommodate cell phone jammers, allowing the user to discreetly blend into any public space, interrupting communication flows. The Seats developed by Carla Zaccagnini in collaboration with architect Keila Costa are functional objects created especially for institutions that host temporary exhibitions, suggesting an alternative reading of such spaces.
In a way, the fictional domestic environments of João Loureiro and Rommulo Conceição touch on similar issues. Loureiro’s Sala, with its fixed and interconnected furniture, makes us think about how social relations can be determined by interior design—that is, by the arrangement of elements in a space designed for a particular purpose. In Sala-Banheiro-Serviço, Conceição creates an installation that superimposes domestic elements associated with specific areas of the house according to their functions into a single piece. The accumulation of these indexes of specific areas of the home generates a surreal environment where the behavioral rules defined by spatial use no longer apply. (*This association was made by José Augusto Ribeiro in the article “Artifícios da domesticidade”, in which he writes about João Loureiro’s Projeto para ocupação de uma casa (2005), where the work Sala was first shown. The article was published in Revista Número Seis.)
The question of representation appears in the works of Detanico + Lain, Maurício Ianês, and Nicolás Robbio. Detanico + Lain provide the necessary tools to decipher their writing systems, while simultaneously making us more aware that language is an arbitrary representation. Representation is, in a sense, a way of simplifying the original object. In his work, Ianês often questions the very capacity of representation. His dark sequin flags do not represent any specific nation but point to the idea of wealth conquered through histories of exploitation, war, and suffering. Robbio produces drawings that are almost illustrations from instruction manuals, reducing line information to the minimum necessary for universal decoding, while simultaneously introducing elements that disrupt and complicate what would otherwise be a logical, easily readable sequence.
Language also appears in the works of Stefan Brüggemann and Edilaine Cunha. With a practice that explores the legacy of conceptual art—particularly from the 1960s in the United States—Brüggemann uses tautological language in his adhesive vinyl texts that function as independent works within the exhibition space. In Número Um, Cunha appropriates the language of advertising campaigns, using it against images of a successful lifestyle typical of publicity.
Finally, addressing new forms of design that have emerged in recent decades with the popularization of new technologies, the duos Goldin + Senneby and Leandro Lima & Gisela Motta give physical form to objects that exist digitally. In Objects of Virtual Desire, Goldin + Senneby reproduce objects created on the social platform Second Life, which circulates an average of 400,000 dollars per day, and conduct interviews with the avatars who created or own these objects. This points to a new economy not only of money but also of desires and experiences. Lima & Motta, meanwhile, extracted digital files from some of the most popular combat video games in global lan houses to construct real-size prototypes of firearms. In doing so, they return weight and reality to these objects, creating an inventory of weapons associated with specific conflicts and nations.
Kiki Mazzucchelli. LOOKS CONCEPTUAL OR HOW I MISTOOK A CARL ANDRE FOR A PILE OF BRICKS. In: Exhibition folder, Galeria Vermelho, São Paulo, 2008. (curated by Kiki Mazzucchelli)
Interview with Lucienne Roberts of the Dutch design studio Experimental Jetset, 2005
From the plane to space… but what space?
2007 – Carla Zaccagnini
The first short story in Final del Juego (1956), by Julio Cortázar, is titled Continuity of Parks. That a book called End of the Game should begin with a continuity is already noteworthy, but the story itself is a circular narrative that ends where it begins, transforming, with a masterstroke, the reader’s point of view. We start off reclining in a comfortable green velvet armchair, reading the final chapters of a novel, and end up facing the same armchair, heart racing, dagger in hand.
The story is short—it could fit entirely on this page—and would make an excellent companion to the works of Rommulo Vieira Conceição, which always seem to propose a spatial disfiguration that alters the flow of time. The artist thus reveals how these two human methods of organizing the world and its transformations are tied to our perception and understanding of them. There is a game of disrupted expectations that strains our relationship with the real and places us in the middle of a narrative we do not fully understand.
In the work House-number-2 (2001), for instance, the flowerbed in front of the house occupied by a group of eight artists was replicated in the last room, on a wall parallel to the façade, as if the ending were once again the beginning. A similar strategy was used in Tower-number-5 (2003), in which the access stairs to the tower and the wooden balcony were repeated upon reaching the top of the climb, as though the ascent left us once again at the very point of departure.
Now, at the Centro Cultural São Paulo, Rommulo presents three sets of photographs from his series Chronotope (begun in 2004), where he uses the instantaneous record and our conventional reading of the photograph to destabilize the expected relationship between space and time. The photographs portray sequences of actions frozen step by step in strongly demarcated environments. But it is as if time moved at different speeds for the various characters who happen to occupy the same space for a brief moment.
One Table and Four Chairs (2006–07) is presented as a place where such misalignments are possible. A square on the floor is delimited by black-and-white Paviflex tiling upon which a marquetry design intersects with another flooring pattern, displaced at an angle of 14 degrees. The same misalignment is repeated in each of the elements composing the work: the tabletop and its eight legs, the seats and backs of the chairs likewise supported by double the necessary structure.
It is as if two nearly identical environments were cohabiting, overlapped upon the same territory. This makes us imagine different actions that could also overlap: four friends finishing off the last beer in the early hours while a mother and daughter have breakfast; two twin sisters recounting their literature class to their parents at lunchtime while two couples play cards after dinner.
Carla Zaccagnini. FROM THE PLANE TO SPACE… BUT WHAT SPACE? In: Exhibition Folder, Centro Cultural de São Paulo, São Paulo, 2007.
ROMMULO VIEIRA CONCEIÇÃO
2006 – Camila Gonzatto
In August of this year, the results of the Iberê Camargo Grant were announced. Wagner Malta Tavares – Wago was the artist chosen for the residency at the Art Institute of Chicago, Iara Freiberg for a two-month stay at the space El Basilisco in Argentina, and Laura Huzak Andreato to participate in the Guest Artist project at the Iberê Camargo Studio. Ten other artists were also selected to be featured on the Fundação Iberê Camargo website. The series begins this week with the work of Rommulo Conceição, who presented the project Superposto.
Born in Salvador, Bahia, Rommulo is 38 years old and has lived in Porto Alegre since 2000. His undergraduate, master’s, and doctoral degrees are in Geology, but he is also pursuing a master’s degree in Visual Poetics at the Instituto de Artes / UFRGS. Furthermore, even before entering Geology, between 1983 and 1987, Rommulo attended an art course with Célia Prata. “Célia Prata was the one who introduced me to some drawing, painting, and sculpture techniques. I enjoyed working with drawing and sculpture, especially modeling,” he says. It was at that time that Rommulo participated in his first group shows.
In the 1990s, Rommulo began working with handmade paper, first as a support for his drawing practice and later as a material that simultaneously functioned as both support and drawing/painting itself. After moving to Porto Alegre, Rommulo started attending Torreão. “The conversations with Jailton (Moreira) and his guidance opened up a diversity of possibilities for me. I got to know the work of various artists, and the space no longer had limits—colors could occupy any place, lines could be broken, art could have different definitions... in short, I was free to use whatever I wished,” he recalls. It was in a room at Torreão that Rommulo began experimenting with installations. “From the time I met Jailton, I created the works I most identify with, such as The Materialization of Impossibility, The Camping Tent…, Torreão, Number 5, and the ones that followed,” he says.
From 1998 onward, Rommulo began presenting solo exhibitions. In 2000, at the Casa de Cultura Mario Quintana in Porto Alegre, he presented The Materialization of Impossibility, an intervention in the institution’s elevator across eight cycles. In one cycle, he installed natural grass on the elevator floor, adding the sound of rain and thunder. In another, he placed the phrase “maximum capacity 6 people or 420kg,” alongside six iron spheres, each with “70kg” engraved on their surfaces.
Working with notions of spatial displacement, in 2001 Rommulo presented A Camping Tent… at the Goethe Institute in Porto Alegre, bringing camping elements such as a tent, portable table and chairs, and a plastic pool to coexist with objects already present in the gallery, such as a fire extinguisher, straw dispenser, and staircase. That same year, he participated in the group show House, in which he reproduced the façade of a house occupied by eight artists inside one of the rooms.
In 2003, Rommulo was invited to make an intervention at Torreão, the year in which the space celebrated its tenth anniversary. His work consisted of reproducing the exhibition space inside itself. “I try to detach the relationship that space has with time. At the same time, a space could be conceived with completely different definitions. Space loses its single function. I want you, before you even enter, to already be inside (as in House and Torreão), and I want that when you think you’re in one place, defined by conventions or specific functions, you have the sensation of being in another (as in Camping) at the same time. Something that connects us to many other things, other aspects of subjectivity. Perhaps we’re not even here, but rather in the stomach of an ostrich!” explains the artist.
The reflection on time is also present in Rommulo’s works. In the series Chronotope, for example, the artist proposes the overlapping of narrative in order to subject the viewer to the perception of time itself and the veracity of facts. “Space without time does not exist. So, what if we extend time, or slow it down, and see what happens with space? In the photographs of the Chronotope series, that is exactly what occurs. All sequences are narratives told in direct or inverse order. However, the time of their characters is different. I hope this scrambling of narrative, which is a function of time, also scrambles the perceived space,” he comments.
Among Rommulo’s recent exhibitions are his participation in Paradoxos Brasil, part of Rumos Itaú Cultural in 2006, and in the Salão de Artes de Goiás. Currently, Rommulo continues to research the same issues that drive him, but with an interest in expanding media. He has begun experimenting with 3D. “I don’t know if they are installations, large sculptures, or objects... I haven’t figured it out yet! They are deeply grounded in people’s everyday spaces, like bedrooms, bathrooms, and living rooms. The work shown at Rumos is one of them. It’s not a reinvention of architecture, like Matta-Clark proposed. All the works I create using these spaces are not appropriations of existing ones. They were conceived as hybrids from the very beginning. They are virgin and begin to be used the moment I propose them. I like that kind of memory cleanse. I want to explore this further in other two-dimensional media. At the same time, by moving toward flatter, textureless, more planar works, I would like to draw relationships within this two-dimensional universe and with the time that could be associated with it...” he concludes.
Camila Gonzatto. ROMMULO VIEIRA CONCEIÇÃO. Online magazine of the Fundação Iberê Camargo, Porto Alegre, November 17, 2006.
Cities: Construction and Precariousness
2005 – Aracy Amaral
The experience and, at the same time, the seduction of the big city is dominant as a theme for this section of Rumos. Thus, the focus on design, the peculiar approach to the problems of urbanism, seems to drive some visual artists — with or without training in architecture — in an apparent attraction to “design” as project, in order to organize their domestic or urban surroundings, as well as to propose creative or corrective interventions. This aspect may also point, with some frequency, to the denunciation of the deterioration of major urban centers and the abandonment of the past through unpreserved architecture, the presence of advertising, real estate speculation, and transportation. On the other hand, the omnipresence of the computer, cinema, video, and video games as forms of communication/entertainment appears, not always devoid of irony, in the works of the selected artists.
In contrast, the neglected and precarious character of the surrounding periphery, which pressures us, forms a parallel that reflects the dominant universe of our time. What is the real dimension of poetics in the incorporation of constitutive elements of this latter reality? In fact, construction without architects, ecological concerns, the periphery seen through the appropriation of discarded material linked to improvisation born of precariousness, lead us to exclusion, waste and its assembly or reordering, violence, rap, ingenuity replacing the possibility of consumption. And whether in a playful or aggressive way, it is nonetheless a record of a discourse synchronized with the magic of survival in a world of vanishing moral principles and a culturally frayed reality such as that of Brazil, marked by lack of education as the emblem of a decultured people.
Artists included in this curatorial selection: André Komatsu, Ateliê Aberto, Bruno Monteiro, Chico Fernandes, Cine Falcatrua, Eduardo Srur, Evandro Prado, Fabrício Carvalho, Gaio, Giulianno Montijo, João Angelini, Lourival Batista, Maíra das Neves, Marcone Moreira, Matheus Rocha Pitta, Nicolas Robbio, Paulo Nazareth, Pedro Motta, Rodrigo Matheus, Rogério Canela, Rommulo, Sebastião Marcos, Sergio Bonilha, Susana Pabst, Tatiana Blass, Vera Uberti, Vinicius Campion, and Yuri Firmeza.
Aracy Amaral. CITIES: CONSTRUCTION AND PRECARIOUSNESS. In: Rumos Itaú Cultural Catalogue, 2005/2006.
DOOR TO THE SOUL OF TURRET
2003 – Roger Lerina
The Turret is not an exhibition space. That is to say, artists have indeed been showing, for the past 10 years, their visual – and olfactory, tactile, sonic – propositions at the top of Porto Alegre’s most post-classical neoclassical mansion. But the Turret does not simply wait to receive – the place demands. Only entry is free: whoever visits the bastion defended for a decade by artists and professors Jailton Moreira and Elida Tessler must pay admission with intellectual curiosity and attentive sensitivity, the currency of that house. No less is required from the nearly 60 artists who have passed through there. Jailton, Elida, and the Turret – this trio of inciters – do not accept ready-made works: illuminated by three windows on each side, one must create in function of the space, because of it, and for it. The Bahian artist Rommulo Conceição, tasked with the first intervention of the Turret’s tenth year, did not shy away from the challenge. And he devised perhaps the most provocative and joyful rereading of the contemporary art living room in the capital of Rio Grande do Sul.
I did not see all of the Turret’s interventions – Rommulo was the 56th “proponent.” However, from the handful of works I have witnessed in exhibitions – or rather, provocations – his, by this artist and geologist in one, seemed to me the one that best submitted the sphinx. What did this figure, who mixes in his work certain aesthetic notions with shifting geological conceptions of time and space, actually do? Instead of deciphering it, Rommulo devoured it. The Turret swallowed the Turret – and this self-cannibalism did not result in annulment. On the contrary: never had the Turret been so vast and multiple as in this centripetal act. High up in the tower, aided by a carpenter, Rommulo reproduced the narrow staircase that leads to the site, the entrance door, the banister – all in the exact dimensions of the original space. Confronted with this peculiar architecture, the visitor first loses the north – and all other cardinal points. And “where am I?” is just the first question we ask ourselves before the Turret and its double.
Rommulo’s Escherian architecture works essentially with paradoxes. At first, the viewer is struck by an anguished perplexity at the sight of that steep staircase and mezzanine that prevents an adult from standing upright without hitting their head on the ceiling. Yet, as one climbs the steps of the Turret within the belly of the Turret, the visitor is surprised by an unsuspected sensation of well-being inside the leviathan. Upon reaching the top of the stairs and entering the gap between the suspended floor and the house’s original ceiling, the explorer immediately undoes the unease of wandering through what might seem the claustrophobic interior of a work by the Dutch master of trompe l’oeil, M.C. Escher. Seated on the balcony floor, legs comfortably crossed, those who arrived earlier in the entrails of the white whale help ease any lingering fears. It is simply a matter of finding oneself and settling into that giant model (or is it a miniature construction?), letting oneself be surrounded by the whiteness of the painted walls and wood, and observing the faces of companions around. An unusual warmth emanates, recalling perhaps the cozy tepidity of the maternal womb. But it may also be related to the strange feeling of being close to the “heavens” of the Turret, of having scaled an artistic Everest and finally resting at the summit, savoring the euphoria of the rarefied air above – and here we are, atop fifty-six geological layers of contemporary art, deposited in that space over ten years.
In the bizarre film Being John Malkovich, the characters entered the actor’s head and took over his mind through a door on the building’s 7 ½ floor – an entire story with ceilings as low as Rommulo’s installation. If God, identified in the Bible with the number 7, feels, experiences, and expresses Himself through man, but never fully controls him, it was necessary to climb just a bit higher to effectively manipulate John Malkovich – hence the “7 ½” of the feature film. Perhaps Rommulo Conceição has created a doorway into the soul of the Turret?
Roger Lerina. DOOR TO THE SOUL OF THE TURRET. In: Folder of the exhibition Turret Number 5, Porto Alegre, 2003.
A CAMPING TENT…
2001 – Jailton Moreira
I met Rommulo Conceição when he first arrived in Porto Alegre. Leaving, arriving, changing places has been a constant in his life. Born in Bahia and holding a PhD in Geology, he came from an experience in Australia with a suitcase full of restlessness, projects, and artistic proposals. He had a confident drawing practice and a series of large and beautiful handmade papers that he produced with rare care. That was when we began a conversation that has yet to end.
Rommulo combines a broad, cosmological vision of things with his experiences of displacement and a strict precision in the execution of his ideas. He demonstrates a pleasure in being in a place that is not his own, taking possession of it in an affective way without losing the critical and ironic point of view of a persistent foreigner. Earlier this year, he presented a series of seven successive interventions in the elevators of Casa de Cultura Mário Quintana. They were mutant estrangements in a public space. His interventions are destabilizing triggers of daily repetitions, therefore a provocation, and at the same time, something to be shared.
The installation Rommulo presents at the Goethe Institut gallery is a kind of suburban kit or a small vision of paradise/hell. He organizes an apparent campsite and, at the same time, the terrain where it is set. This unexpected island is offered as a space for landing and rest. Coincidentally, the gallery is located between the bar and the library of the Institute: two places that also function as spaces of pause. In the proposed environment, the paradox provokes sensations that range from the pathetic to the tragicomic. Although there is a narrative articulation, each element relativizes the concepts of real, natural, artificial, and virtual.
Rommulo unsettles the repetitions of our daily paths.
Jailton Moreira. A CAMPING TENT… In: Exhibition folder, Goethe Institut, Porto Alegre, September 2001.
ROMMULO VIEIRA CONCEIÇÃO
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