Invited by art critic and curator Agnaldo Farias, Raul Mourão created the installation ENTONCES for the group show SP 450 PARIS at Instituto Tomie Ohtake, in São Paulo. It was the biggest installation in the series GRADES, which the artist began in 1989 and is a work in progress.
Made up of a total of one hundred steel sculptures, ENTONCES is about excess and it questions the use of security fences in cities, ridiculing their purpose. The overlapping of several lines of steel creates an optical disruption. Subsequently the installation was taken to Paço Imperial, in Rio de Janeiro.
Luiz Camillo Osorio – who at the time was an art critic for the newspaper O Globo – wrote about Mourão’s piece: “ENTONCES (meaning Therefore, in Spanish), which is a suggestive title, seems to unfold into a question about what we have done with our urban space. We have protected ourselves behind bars; this is the paradox of a city under panic. (…) Similarly to other points in his career, the ambivalence between symbol and form is decisive in ENTONCES. The deconstruction of the symbol and the construction of form are processed in the displacement of the ‘fences’ to the gallery, in the disruption of its functionality, in the production of a non-place”.