Avoid Accidents
by Eucanaã Ferraz
Sculpture. Painting. Sculpture. Photography. Painting. Drawing. Canvas. Paper. Steel. Clay. Wood. Painting. Field of experiences.
Avoid accidents. In place of haste, the extended time of fruition. In place of the careless gesture, intuitive calculation. In place of inattentive contact – empty of meaning – the touch that discovers itself and its capacity to respond to the invitation extended by form, matter, and its qualities.
Avoid accidents. A manifesto against brutality? A rejection of catastrophe in favor of ethics. Avoid accidents. A manifesto against the perils of irresponsibility? Down with rudeness! Against destruction! For dialogue! Against negligence! Against carelessness! Avoid accidents. For an alliance between mathematics and the unexpected! Avoid accidents. A manifesto in favor of kindness?
The balance sculptures are flawlessly designed and crafted with the care and refinement required to produce unique works of art. They are held up by bottles: industrial, mass-produced, purely utilitarian objects. They also represent the contemporary resting on the timelessness of clay. Steel goes back to the iron age. Times are muddled up. Look! See! Touch. Pay attention! Take care! Look again. Understand.
The studio has been brought into the gallery with all its bareness of workspace and project, the wholeness of project and play. Avoid accidents. Pleasure wins out over tedium. Pleasure triumphs over aversion.
Sculpture. Painting. Photography. Quantity: everything + paper. Quality: everything plus paper. Care. Dedication. Experimentation with the sensible. More paper + more diligence. More paper = little. More paper = poem.
A play of presences. A play of scales: steel in large dimensions and a sheet of paper inked with black. A play of memories: the graphic world, the print and the subway car caught on the cell phone screen. A play of geographies: a photograph of the beach and an iron stone, Rio de Janeiro and Minas.
A play of materials/natures: vegetable and mineral. Which is more yielding? Which is more severe? The steel sways, plays, replies; what was once inflexible invites you to dance. But one must be careful – because it is light, fragile; because it is large, heavy. Avoid accidents! The paper appears – at first sight – to be accommodating, easy, accessible; but, when worked on, it is, on the contrary, a demanding, complex material, requiring rigor and turning away anyone who seeks it out lightly. Its memory stretches back millennia, its presence reflects the timelessness of forests. It is intransigent in relation to untruths. It is delicately in-tran-si-gent. You need to be very, very careful. You need truth.
Everything else paper! Down with the ignorance that demolishes everything that has been achieved by hope and hard work! More proficiency! More dreaming! More expertise! More understanding! Down with rudeness! Out with the brutality that revels in obscurity! A little more politeness, please. Avoid accidents! Down with cruelty!
Experiment: make the right gesture. Hear what the weight, the textures, the configurations of the body are saying. Accept doubt, do not be shocked by the size of something that appears large; do not disdain the demands of something that appears small. Long live gentleness! Down with the exorbitance of force, of power, of darkness! More courtesy! Long live the apostles of kindness! Down with the prophets of stupidity and discourteousness!
Let us start like this: avoid accidents.
Eucanaã Ferraz
Poet, professor of Brazilian Literature at the Faculty of Letters from the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro (UFRJ) and literature consultant at Instituto Moreira Salles in São Paulo, where he develops publications, exhibitions, debates, courses and spectacles.
