NEW SCALES, DE-ESCALED

“Freedom, Sancho, is one of the most precious gifts given to man by the heavens, the treasures of the land and sea connot be equaled by it: for freedom, as well as for honour, one can and must risk one’s life” Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra, the Ingenious Hidalgo, Don Quixot de la Mancha. The metaphor of an adventurous hero who that in his crazy fantsies reinvents itslef as giants, where others think they see ordinary windmills, it crosses the centuries of universal culture.

 Antoine de Saint-Exupery confesses to the Little Prince:

When I was a child, I showed my masterpiece to the elders and asked them if my drawing scared them. They answered: “why would a hat scare me? ” “My drawing did not represent a hat. It represented a boa constrictor digesting an elephant. I then drew the inside of the boa snake so that the elders could understand.”

Freedom; freedom of thought and expression; art and artistic creation and its experimental processes; the subjectivity of truth and the way we perceive reality; the construction of narrative discourses, of history, of knowledge and of the understanding of the world are concepts on which the visual artists presented by the Scales project, in its second edition. On this occasion through the virtual space offered to us by the Miami Hispanic Cultural Art Center.

These seven artists from the Midwest region of Brazil, a region less known and promoted internationally in comparison with the larger cities, economies and culutures that identify the Brazilian geography, come together in a promotional platform that enables a collective exchange from the personal individuality of each of their experiences and artistic practices. And they have done so apparently with the excuse of reflecting on the relationships between the dimensions of a design, drawing or object represented in its real dimension, in works that show links to the graphic-spatial, architecture, environmental design, inhabited space, and remembered space; but Scales highlights, in my view, above all, the dissimiliar ways in which we can learn to see the world, beyond the notions learned and legitimized from the centers of power, from those narratives promoted as absolute truths and that art and freedom of creation disprove, in that human capacity to imagine possible worlds where dreams can be lived.

The plans and drawings by Ana Flavia Maru rebuilds possible universes and resemanticize objects; André Felipe Cardoso searches the space-time connections that recompile fragments of possible identities; Estevão Parreiras’ drawings reformuate a symbolic universe that feeds on Brazilian popular sources and magic-religious cosmogonies, having the human being as the center, in an aesthetic that transits between the oneiric and the absurd.

Harriel Ravignet rethinks through collage the personal and collective historical memory of his ancestral heritage; Isabella Brito reformulates the inhabitable space, as if starting from a blank canvas, to imagine and capture agonizing fantasies between the phobia and hedonism of forms; Gerson Fogaça appeals to color to intervene in the world he thinks he sees, in what always strikes me as an obsessive allegory between life and death, lights, shapes, and shadows, which run through his pictorial experience; Evandro Soares blurs the real architecture camouflaged in another possible architecture: deep down it’s just that, to understand that nothing is true, that nothing is unreal, that everything is possible in a world of infinite dimensions and nuances.

Reviewing the work of these artists for the Scales project, I can’t help but hear Jarabe de Palo’s song “Depende, depende ¿de que depende? De según como se mire, todo depende…”( It depends It depends, on what does it depends on? It all depends on how you look at it ) This could very well be the soundtrack to this project. Or in the manner of José Saramago: “(…) each of us sees the world with the eyes we have and the eyes see what they want, the eyes make the diversity of the world and makes wonders, even if they are of stone and high bows, even if they are an illusion”

DAYALIS GONZALES PERDOMO

Hialeah Gardens, May 2022.