Fertile solos: on João Modé’s ‘Solos”1, by Daniela Mattos
Solitude and freedom are aspects inexorably present in João Modé’s Solos. The work took shape throughout the course of his participation in the Road project – a Capacete Entretenimentos initiative of which the ‘mobile residency’ program is a part. By focusing on regions of Central and South America, the initiative offers guest artists an opportunity to do research within situations of displacement. Modé’s proposition for Road was to investigate the journey itself and whatever the experience might engender – a sort of ‘on the road_site specific_work in progress’.
Certain fragments of João’s record of this trip were used in making a video called Solos. Scenes shot by the artist depict what appear to be utterly isolated dogs, banking the arid landscape of Peruvian roads. At once strange and strangers, they are unaccompanied by humans and do not even travel in packs. Roaming images of the desert captured on video, these ‘wandering dogs’ present features that are often in diametrical opposition to one another – hairy/naked, skinny/stout, distrustful/friendly – and their reactions to the camera are equally diverse. Some of them stop dead in their tracks, alertly observing their observers; others continue on their way, pilgrim drifters.
An absence of meaning – and the impossibility and disparity contained therein – leaves us doubting their ability to survive and beg the question of whether they might be wild dogs, possibly guarding some type of community – unknown even to locals who would deny the existence of people living near those highways. How do the ‘Solos’ manage to stay alive? This is actually quite difficult to answer for sure. However, reality occasionally reveals something to us in the rawness of an event, even as it allows us to find some answers (and many questions). Might this encounter be an experience of the ‘space between’, posited as an infra(in)fin(it)e2 distance between dream and reality?
“The deepest [things] are always on the surface”3. The artist attempts to dig up, scarify, and draw the surface of reality, somehow touching a point of convergence with that which he wishes to render as language. “Art does not exist, it is”4, resting upon life, calmly awaiting the artist’s gesture that will make it Real5, fragment it, revive it and somehow facilitate access by an other to this Real, offering such an other something to “bury within himself”6 and, in exchange, with which to nourish himself anew from such a possibility of exchange.
Capturing, gathering, reactivating and rearticulating ‘excerpts of reality’ are procedures that may be discerned on João Modé’s poetic horizon in Solos and in his other work in video or photography, in his objects and installations. A work from 2002 provides an index of this operation. In it, by ‘peeling away’ the walls of a hotel room in an old building, the artist configures an action that unveils/reveals some of the possible material traces of the place’s7 former reality, connecting them to another reality – that of the ‘space without’ – through the use of a rope made from cotton and sisal.
These are but excerpts of the solos Modé offers us as perspective. Such fertile grounds are territories in which it is possible to ‘sow’; whether the ‘sowing’ is done by the artist planting his extremities in the earth8 or whether it germinates in his experience of the Real; whether it is we who do the seeding with that which he offers us up for viewing. In this soil there is also space for the “errant/wandering” dog who, in his wandering, reaffirms our condition as Solos (in both senses, here: ‘solitary’ and ‘telluric’) and at times foreign. With meshes and on NETS9, João joins us in designing the architecture of his space – a space that might also be our own.
1 - Translator’s Note: Regrettably, the author’s pun on the plural of the Portuguese noun plural ‘solos’ [with its identical meaning in English and its concomitant meaning as ‘soil’] is lost in translation. Not to the extent, however, that an echo of the intended jeu de mots does not reverberate in its coupling with the Portuguese adjective ‘férteis’ (meaning ‘fertile’).
2 - The author’s poetic appropriation of Marcel Duchamp’s concept of the “Infrafine”.
3 - Excerpted from poetry. “Living is super hard / the deepest [things] / are always on the surface / (…). In: Leminski, Paulo. Caprichos e relaxos. São Paulo, Círculo do Livro, 1987.
4 - Phrase taken from an article by Guilherme Vaz published in issue number 12 of the journal Arte&Ensaios (2005).
5 - The author’s poetic appropriation of Jacques Lacan’s concept of the “Real”.
6 - Excerpted from a phrase by artist Jorge Menna Barreto “To see is to bury within oneself”.
7 - Work presented by João Modé at the Love´s House group exhibition, held in 2002 under the auspices of the Agora agency in an old hotel located in Rio de Janeiro’s Lapa quarter.
8 - A photograph/object by João Modé called Plantação [Plantation] made during the period 1996-2004.
9 - Reference to João Modé’s REDE [NETS] Project, which took place from 2003-2006.
Fertile solos: on João Modé’s Solos, translated by Steve Berg
Ricardo Basbaum, folder of the exhibition “Outra Paisagem“, Galeria Millan, São Paulo, 1999.
João Modé’s work is characterized by a quasi-religious, hyper-sensorial investment in a wide variety of procedures and materials. The artists is interested in pursuing an intense relationship with things by exploring interconnections with everything that surrounds him. This attitude has already led him to investigate his own body, and he has made use of his own bodily materials (such as nails and hair) in his work. It also led him to the use of "natural" elements in the construction of installations: plants, lianas which grow in search of water, insects, burning incense and stones. In both cases, the search for environments which close in on themselves is clearly perceptible, as he creates spaces for sensory immersion – the air is impregnated with an autonomous temporality integrated to the chaotic rhythm of nature. Modé wants the spectator to plunge into these environments of "artificial nature" (some of which possess architectural references) to experience the possibilities of networks of sensory expansion.
“The meshes of the net of Heaven are large; far apart, but letting nothing escape.” Lao-Tsé
The wise and disconcerting Tao-te-ching teaches us that we are immersed in the water of things, caught in the net of events. Connected to others by ties of affection, we are, additionally, imprisoned in the web of language. We are seduced and, at times, exasperated by our exchanges with others. We exist like spiders in their webs.
João Modé invites people from different communities to engage in weaving rituals. As they weave an eternally unfinished net, they are plunging momentarily into the metaphor of the weft, intertwining and tying knots in the imaginary carpet of life.
In its allusion to fishermen, tapestries, and the symbolic work of relationships, the Net is the embodiment of our destiny as cosmic weavers.
New anew, by Raul Mourão, published in folder of the exhibition "Estímulo Puro", no Espaço Agora em 2002.
The exhibition is called Estímulo Puro (Pure stimulus) and the works will be ready for display only a few minutes prior to the opening. There is no studio, nor drawing. There is no Project – only a script with images. Art as plain idea and action. Matter-less, clue-less art. Airplane coming in the opposite direction on a one-way street. João Modé lets the balloon fly high. In the gallery, necklace and curtains. Scent with wood. Unlevelled floor. Non-flush plane. The swan is the lake. The lake is the sea. The sea is the salt. Each day, precariousness and frailty transform the exhibition. For the third time, João Modé will try to build the sky-bound wooden tower. Feet buried in the ground. Pillow of butter. Bed of hairs. Clipped-off fingernail bits fill the small jar up to the brim, up to the top. A line crosses the space. The flower slowly devours the white horse. João Modé wakes up early every day. Root, torso and limbs. Soundless sound.
Text about the exhibition ‘Love’s House’, by Luis Andrade
The situation created by João Modé was one of the thirteen proposals in the exhibition that adhered most closely to the reality of the exhibition space. And, albeit unwillingly, it makes a reflection on unsuspecting issues in other artistic procedures, as we will see.
The two-tones walls were peeled off in his room in kind of stripping down to the bone. The peelings remained on the floor. With this gesture, and with the exhibition of his rubble, the room for a moment became transparent to the look and to the memory of its visitors, giving the impression one was before its secrets or its mnemonic records impregnated with multiple lives, marked by past experiences.
There exists an extension of time in this kind of operation, which is corroborated by another element in the whole: a thread pulled tight - a string - that extends from the wall of the corridor which the room opens onto, crossing its interior and going out through the window, becoming lost from sight outside. The continuity of the spaces - the room and that which is not the room - is reflected in the continuity of the moments - past, present and future - that the peeling suggest to us, like a palimpsest list in the actual space.
And nonetheless, surprisingly, this whole procedure has, to the usual two-dimensional glance, something to say about the means and techniques of painting itself: issues relating to lines and planes, about layers, gain another dimension, as it is not involved with the strict practice of pictorial process.
João Modé’s (Resende, Rio de Janeiro, 1961) first intervention on the building that houses the Agora exhibition space can be seen from any of the nearby corners. A dark-yellow canvas serves as support for a series of delicate line drawings in red, while at the same time playing the part of an improvised tent to cover the entrance to the gallery. Both the material and the way it is tied bring immediately to mind those stalls one finds in any Brazilian city’s street markets. We are protected, even before entering the gallery, by that rectangle of color and by the tree canopies; an orangish light surrounds us, indicating we are entering a differentiated space. If we look up to the tent, instead of forward towards the gallery, we’ll see that the painted, bifurcated lines are joined by the shadows that some nearby branches project on the canvas’ surface. Inside, next to the door (open wide, all the way against the wall), a raw-wood catwalk rises some 40 cm above the cement floor on a multitude of stilts. If we climb on the catwalk and advance, listening to the sound of our own steps, it will take us towards the end of the room; part of the show will pass by, softly inaccessible, to our left. The floor underneath is slanted so that near the end it meets the catwalk; at this point we descend and find ourselves right in front of Modé’s third and last intervention on architecture.
In an action that is either contrary or complementary to the one he operated on the building’s outside front, here the artist has stripped the fiberglass roof that covered the enclosed patio. The space is thus opened, and the segment of the floor under it is bathed by sunlight and rain and all the natural elements. Modé replaced the gray stones that covered the patio with a darkly colored fertilized soil, and on this ground he placed some lit lamps and papers with drawings that resemble those on the canvas we encountered initially. The artist watered the soil, and plants started to grow: the patio was transformed into a garden. Several days after the show’s opening, Modé used some birdseed to draw on the ground, and later, after a heavy rain fell, the birdseed germinated and the new plants joined the garden. This is what later visitors found. Early visitors had seen an ice swan swimming in a small white tub on top of the wall that separated the gallery from the garden; the swan melted and became water for the soil. Starting at the unequal cement plane that levels the whole gallery area, we can backtrack and study more comfortably the works we had only passed by before. Threads and fragments of wool, white and colored, hang from the ceiling near the center of the room. Initially, the only clues for the combinations that the visitors built during the show were some braidings and knots, with interventions or adjustments strewn around by the artist. Again, the bifurcating lines repeat the logic of those drawings we saw from above in the garden or from below in the gallery’s front. Here the lines cross space vertically or in intricate diagonals.
One final piece waits for us near the exit A sequence of transparencies, the film unspooled and uncut, extends over a structure that, in turn, backlights it. Leaning on the shelf that supports this sequence of small images, a magnifying glass invites us to see them in more detail, one by one or in pairs. Photographs of clouds, landscapes, peacocks, tree roots bursting through the ground. Beautiful images, magazine clippings, quick glances that in isolation perhaps would not transcend the boundaries of their own simplicity. It is the sequence in which they are presented without fancy effects, as they were seen and recorded, what gives them the power to bring us in and remind us that we all have moments like that, and that we have them often.
Upon arriving, color and light; on entering, the suspended catwalk, the direction, the imposed rhythm; towards the back, soil and water and all that results from their encounter; in the middle, lines and the unfinished drawing that incites the hands to search for new solutions; before exiting, the investigation of a narrative in images, and the new meaning we find for them. At each of this moments, at each of these glances and steps, a new stimulus. Pure stimulus.
La proposición del artista carioca João Modé para su próxima individual en el espacio fundado y dirigido por artistas de Rio de Janeiro, Agora, incluye un collar de flores de jasmín y una escultura de hielo con la forma de un cisne. Largo, el collar será utilizado por dos personas simultáneamente y durante la inauguración será pasado de una a otra, evocando por medio directo del tacto su delicadeza y perfume durante la decomposición natural de su estado vivo.
Los procesos de transformación de la naturaleza, la relación entre el ser y su propia organicidad natural/animal, pasages entre tiempos y espacios reales e imaginarios, son algunos de los temas recorrientes en la obra de Modé. Imbuído de la poesia sutil con que articula sus proyectos artísticos, el cisne de hielo, por ejemplo, irá derritiéndose hasta transformarse en su propio lago. Estas son dos de las propuestas que el artista tiene definidas para la exposición, ya que opera dentro una libertad extra-burocrática en que fechas y agendas son coincidencias temporales y no condiciones formales.
Además de estudios sobre la condición efímera de la materia, Modé ha realizado interferencias arquitectónicas en Brasil y Portugal relacionando aspectos inesperados de un determinado espacio, su memoria cultural, física e histórica, otro foco que está considerando a partir de los desniveles del espacio Agora.
Ziba de Weck, ‘Unbound’ exhibition's catalogue, London, England, 2004.
João Modé’s philosophy has enabled him to truly embody boundlessness and immateriality in his work, which speaks to an amazingly wide audience and is open to a wide range of dialogue and interpretation. With such an unrestricted approach to art-making, is not surprising that Modé’s installations usually comprise interventions of space rather than transformations of it that change its identity. Space is certainly the leitmotif in Modé’s work.
All rights reserved. Copyright 2007 - Canal Contemporâneo, João Modé, Carla Zaccagnini, Daniela Mattos, José Thomaz Brum, Luis Andrade, Raul Mourão, Ricardo Basbaum, Veronica Cordeiro, Ziba de Weck.
