Fortes D’Aloia & Gabriel presents a selection of works by Nuno Ramos – painting, drawings, and videos – in dialogue with two iconic pieces by Iran do Espírito Santo. Through a sheer accumulation of matter, Ramos defies materials and manifests lessons in the history of painting, literature, poetry and current affairs. In an analogous and yet opposed procedure, Espírito Santo musters the accumulation of content through synthetic and minimal forms. Through a lyrical, formal approach, the works on view also address darkness and violence in the world today.
Nuno Ramos (São Paulo, 1960)
Nuno Ramos is a multi-faceted artist. He dwells in painting, sculpture, installation, drawing, performance and video, and is also a poet and writer. Throughout his endeavors we witness a struggle to transform inert materials into living things, which is why for him the work is never finished. Risk of failure, risk of materials, aesthetic risk, but ultimately the very concept of being at risk informs his practice.
In his large-scale paintings, in particular, his infatuation for unlikely combinations of materials – metal, wood, clay, glass, wax, resin, cloth, lanolin, salt, sand, water, oil, vaseline, paper and paint – comes to fore. However, for Ramos excess is merely the initial motivation to then push materials to their extreme. His rich compositions resist classification, stable centers of gravity and clear focal points to exist at the edge of pictorial meaning. The artist’s drawing series are based on motifs derived from select texts. He uses words to generate a visual vocabulary that is at once able to illustrate its source and expand its meaning beyond the page. The video Luz Negra is entitled after the homonymous song by famous Brazilian samba singer and composer, Nelson Cavaquinho. It documents a ceremony in which huge speakers are lowered and buried deep into the ground. Meanwhile, another famous song by Cavaquinho, "Juízo Final” (The Final Judgment), is playing from the speakers. His is a metamorphic vision that understands the ever-changing nature of matter and still attempts to battle with it. For instance, in Cujo, a book he published in 1993, he writes: "Today I saw a lizard. Not a lizard, a leaf resembling a lizard. Not a leaf, a stone resembling a leaf.”
Iran do Espírito Santo (Mococa, 1963)
At first glance, due to his chosen imagery, Iran do Espirito Santo’s work seems quite simple. The objects he represents in drawings, sculptures and installations come from the day-to-day, and its colors – gray, black and white – and materials – glass, stainless steel, crystal, granite, to name a few – refer to industrial design and mass reproduction. But soon enough our senses are dully undermined by the artist’s precision and technical virtuosity.
A Noite/2018 (1998-2018) is an official size Brazilian flag striped from its colors. One stands in front of a rectangular piece of fine black silk with minimal silkscreen reproductions of the original white stellar constellations seen from Rio de Janeiro on November 15th 1889 – the day Brazil became a Republic. The quasi-monochromatic black is a nod to abstraction and yet it is grounded in reality, more specifically in the plight of representing a young and troubled nation-state. As with much of Espirito Santo’s work there is a schism between signifier and signified, which is where new and diverse meanings come into being. The black flag may be a metaphor for the night and mourning, but it may also allude to new beginnings. Ultimately, A Noite/2018 succeeds in paying homage to the history of art, while at the same time making a declaration about the country’s state of affairs as it did in 1998 when it was originally conceived as a painting and a print.
In Ato Único (2001) an accident seems to have broken a piece of glass. As a matter of fact what we see is a slab of granite that was carefully sculpted, suggesting an accident that never really occurred. Furthermore, the highly reflective granite surface brings viewers into the work to become a living part of the artist’s controlled experience in chaos. Granite, a fairly resistant type of marble finish, is proved to be fragile, or perhaps its latent fragility was simply brought to light through a “single act”. Time and time again Espirito Santo’s work is able to defy expectations and reassign meaning to mundane objects and images.
