En Passant

Since the late 1980s, Iran do Espírito Santo has been creating a series of paintings directly on the walls of the galleries where he shows his work. Quite often these works depict architectural elements such as bricks, glasses, fences and wood, thereby evoking a direct relationship with the architecture into which they are introduced. He created the painting En passant 3 as a site-specific work for the semi-open hall of Galeria Praça at Inhotim. This painting is the third version of a more recent development of the artist’s wall paintings that deal with an element shared by all architectural spaces: lighting. Based on a rigorously detailed scale of 53 hues of gray, with black content ranging between 0.1 percent and 95 percent, this work can be read in its articulation of the space as an interpretation of lighting. At its Inhotim location, which is sensitive to different sources of natural and artificial lighting, En passant 3 boasts a different dynamic than it does inside the white cube, and it seems to come forth as the manifestation of the shade —that is the negative of sunlight. The work’s French title is an expression frequently used in Portuguese conversation. It means “in passing” and alludes to the invariably fleeting passage of the audience through the exhibition space.