Interventions

"Interventions" is a series of art works presented in the main garden of the LASAR MUSEUM SEGALL | IBRAM MINC. These works aim to offer visitors a reflection on the relationships between architectural space, public art, and the visual arts. The interventions of Lygia Reinach, Regina Silveira, José Manuel Ballester, Mônica Nador, Edith Derdyk, Marilá Dardot, Marcelo Moscheta, Ana Maria Tavares, and Macaparana have been exhibited since 2011. Prior to the project, artist Hilal Sami Hilal inaugurated the space with his work "To Dream Continents," an original work for the Atlas exhibition, held at the Lasar Segall Museum in 2010. With these developments, the garden of the Museum, formerly just a circulation space, becomes an open air gallery. As a result, the space acquires new meaning and establishes, through the work on display, an active dialogue with visitors. At the same time, the Museum broadens the investigative possibilities, bringing new concepts, actions, and practices into contemporary artistic trends.

Regina Silveira describes her work as "an inventory on light, treated as concept, word-image, and phenomenon. The work was created in 2010 for the glazed, curved facade of the entrance hall of the Edmundo Vasconcelos Hospital in São Paulo, as a random junction with the word "LUZ" (light) written in differnet fonts, cut and cast in transparent colored material. The intention was to create a kind of "impermanent" stained glass, in terms of light-color, effects, and reflections. The meaning of "Glossário" is in the small open and mixed visual narrative that it proposes. Interpretation involves not only the "reading" of the discourse, linear, or cross-ways, but also the flow of interaction that the words maintain with the user in motion and with the physical and changing external or internal light on which the work depends to illuminate itself and function.

"Architecture and Simulacra" is the title of José Manuel Ballester's intervention in the exterior gardens of the Lasar Segall Museum. Using the "trompe-l'oeil" (optical illusion) technique, Ballester displaces the structure of the Atelier de Segall window, a space tucked away in the Museum, and rebuilds it in the Garden. It, therefore, breaks and juxtaposes new spaces through photography that, in "mise en abyme" perspective, begin to have a new vision and interlocution. There is a process of architectural simultaneity, which only deconstructed and reconstructed photography allows you to create.

"Cabeças de Negros," a work developed by the plastic artist Monica Nador, is inspired by the wood engraving Cabeça de Negro, by Lasar Segall. It is a juxtaposition of the two heads: the one made by Segall in 1929 and the other in 2004 by a local resident who is a member of the Jardim Miriam Art Club (JAMAC). A difference of 75 years separates these two representations. The first, made by a white European who arrives in Brazil in 1923 and, permeated by its culture and people, develops an extensive "iconography;" the second, a self-portrait, a current representation of a black man living in the outskirts of the city of São Paulo. Different historical times, but which in their dialogue, reveal the marks of differences, inequality, and beauty. For the elaboration of textures of the pictorial planes that make up the exhibited work, the images of Segall's famous venetian blinds created for the Mangue series (Rio de Janeiro) were also used in the artist's work.

Edith Derdyk describes her design as "doors that open and/or close, a breath suspended in the air in contact with secret and hidden places, within the earth and into the sky. That is how I understand the space of a museum—a place where art can breathe in the strong cross winds and exchange with all who pass through there. This garden is a space of passage, with entrances and exits horizontally, establishing a direct connection with the street and the outside environment. Because it was an intervention, it wanted a greater approximation with the physical configurations of the architectural space, symbolically opening other places to pause and secret passages, perhaps with the desire to generate new sources necessary for the survival of art and, as a consequence, of the places where it dwells—a house, a studio, a museum."

The artist Marilá Dardot presents/writes/inscribes the verse "To Learn from the Stone." It can be viewed on the ground of the garden with Portuguese stones similar to the stones around the space dedicated to the project.This verse is part of the poem "Education through the Stone" (1966), by João Cabral de Melo Neto. The letters built with the same type of stones and cement joins create a unique visual poem. Form and content, stone upon stone, word upon stone, and stone upon word constitute in the creation of Marilá Dardot's single piece. It is curious that the stone has gained rare prestige and tradition in modern Brazilian poetry, due to the famous poem by Carlos Drummond de Andrade, "In the middle of the road:" "[...] in the middle of the road there was a stone/there was a stone in the middle of the road [...]" first published in the Revista de Antropofagia in 1928, almost four decades before the Cabral poem. Commenting on her work, Marilá Dardot says: "The strategy of working with letters, which somehow merge with the ground, is not new to my work. I managed to give form to the phrase of the Chilean writer Roberto Bolaño: "Because words are everywhere" (2008), taken from the novel "2666"(2004)."

Marcelo Moscheta presents the work "Winter," specially designed and produced for the Lasar Segall Museum, where he explores the memory of space. The artist's concept when presenting the project was to work with organic elements of the garden itself. Moscheta considered and chose the leaves that fall from the trees and are raked up and discarded every day. The artist explores the full potential of this ephemerality, transforming the collected objects into a work of art. The process involves collecting the raw material and replicating a single leaf, numerous times, which will be pressed into a mass of white paper clay and fired in an oven. Thus, the artist creates serial production, replicating a single element of the garden, preserving its textures and characteristics. The material used for the molds, a mixture of paper and clay, presents the possibility of working with various forms and at the same time preserving the apparent fragility of the leaves. The large installation, is like something already of the past; the cycles of life, of the false idea of permanence that we have of life itself and of clay, as a formal instrument, carrying within itself all this burden of perenniality, of the record of past civilizations, the marks of time and the struggle against it.Thus, as the artist himself says, "Winter" "would be the attempt to prolong the fragile existence of life in the garden, no longer inhabited by its original owner, but revived by the public that passes through and gives life to the museum every day. The word winter carries the idea of the season, the conservation of things, hibernation, shelter, protection."

The "Rotatórias (Tête-à-tête)" intervention by Ana Maria Tavares is made of polished stainless steel and placed in order to create an organic arrangement in the middle of the garden of the Museum. The artist describes her work as: "Endowed with an almost art-nouveau character, the sculptures burst out vertically as a linear form, bending suddenly and sensually back to the ground from where they appeared. They supposedly appear as an artificial and gigantic garden, as the tubular mirrored metal of its forms are like stems of curving plants, mimicking the surrounding vegetation. However, there is a perverse and intriguing attraction in the work that captures the passer-by, just as a carnivorous plant holds the intruder in its supposedly docile environment. The body seeks support and so the curious visitor is summoned to enter the internal space of the pieces lulled by the familiar characteristics of the work—the material used, for example, is recognizable. In much the same way as in public spaces, stainless steel is used as a handrail and support for the body. The proportions of the pieces soon welcome the visitor, allowing him to rest his body, which immediately adapts to the given form. In the six parts that constitute the whole intervention, each person can settle in and see the other five: The work paves the way for an unexpected interaction. Tête-à-tête is a composition for accomplices, an environment of open encounter: it is form and function; a play between the visual delight of form in its pure and isolated condition and its use as repose for the body. In this context, the sculptures become furniture and transform the current path that connects the entrance door to the exhibition hall or the cafe into a small square, where time is extended for simple enjoyment. Instead of just crossing the space, the intervention presupposes the possibility of meeting with another person."

For "Interventions IX," we invited José de Souza Oliveira Filho, who was born in 1952 in Macaparana, a town in Pernambuco State. A visual artist based in São Paulo, he holds his first solo show in Recife, in 1970. Known as Maca to his friends, he moves between painting, drawing, and objects. His initial production is strongly marked by the north-eastern culture, which he explores in its formal aspects starting from figurative work and arriving at total abstraction. In the 1980s, the encounter with the neoconcrete artist Willys de Castro radically transformed his trajectory, during which he introduced elements of concrete/geometric art into his works, using industrial materials such as steel, acrylic, and polystyrene. Researching and exploring the relations between color and space, the artist initiates an intense dialogue with neoconcretism in which the straight lines and elementary forms such as the triangle, the rectangle, and the square predominate. The work of Macaparana, a diptych made of stainless steel, is an unfolding of the "Sara" series, which was carried out on paper in honor of a great friend. The rods and spheres that are part of this work are fixed to the floor and wall, presented both vertically and horizontally. They are straight and circular, which project into space, representing a garden. It establishes connections between the plastic universe of the artist and the environment surrounded by vegetation. The hard, rigid, cold structures of objects broaden our field of vision and our perception of the relations between art and nature. There is an interaction between the play of light and shadow in different situations, provided by natural and artificial light.

Para comemorar a décima edição do Intervenções foi convidada a artista portuguesa Gabriela Albergaria. No texto de introdução do projeto que apresentou ao Museu, Gabriela relatou a importância de algumas obras de Lasar Segall para sua produção. Ela disse sobre a série Florestas:“Alguns de seus trabalhos me perseguem desde que os vi pela primeira vez. Obras que representam algo da natureza, mas que em um certo ponto vão para além da mera representação. Ultrapassam o referencial e passam a ser algo em si mesmas. Estas peças instalaram-se em mim pela simples razão de que eu própria persigo uma ideia de representação que parte do princípio da observação, mas que num jogo de palimpsesto acaba por se transformar em algo mais”.O trabalho apresentado por Gabriela, intitulado Pinch Pinch Pinch, é composto por 2.500 cubos de argila dispostos sobre uma base de terra batida, assim formando uma espécie de jardim suspenso imerso no piso de pedras portuguesas do próprio jardim do museu. A ideia é a de uma plantação onde tempo e espaço são delimitados e manipulados pela ação da artista. No interior de alguns desses cubos, confeccionados um a um, encontramos sementes de feijão. A terra que compõe a argila é em sua maior parte brasileira, mas também encontramos amostras de terra colombiana, inglesa e portuguesa.O trabalho cria dessa forma uma situação, uma expectativa em torno do que poderá acontecer: As sementes germinarão? A matéria rígida da argila irá se romper? Quem sabe este estado latente, imposto pela artista, faz parte de uma investigação sobre a relação entre homem e natureza. Quem sabe trata-se de uma afirmação das potências regeneradoras da natureza. Neste sentido, como já foi observado em outros trabalhos de Albergaria, há um movimento deliberado de observação das possibilidades da matéria e de suas potencialidades por parte da artista, assim como sua ressignificação.