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At first sight, Angelo Venosa's recent sculptures appear enigmatic. They dislodge the gaze to a lower place, a once deeplyrooted ground which these pieces attempt to harrow and potentialize. Teeth, which bite the retina, fragments that support a terrified memory, they possess a strange beauty which the eye cannot resist and which it contemplates (even as one shudders). Vestiges of cadavers, witnesses to lives already lived out, theirs would be the mystery of those who have no mystery, mere exhibition without meaning which nonetheless allows viewing as a means of ensuring their painful significance. As the evocation of an archeology, "they should announce the serenity of the senses" in vents past, but carry instead "the uneasiness of the indeterminate" (Carlos Basualdo).

As described by Ronaldo Brito, the artist's first sculptures are akin to "living fossils: large, spacedevouring masses, inconsistent insofar as they do not possess a correspondent weight; urgent yet groping shapes, bearing enormous metaphorical potential, perhaps even a tendency towards the allegorical, which present themselves almost shyly." Scorched, post apocalyptic forms, structured from an interiority, from the framing of a certain void; they play with the tension between surface and interior, presupposing a virtual expansion of form, and they refer to the impossibility of design, of a project, of the concept of good form. In the advances and retreats of a work's creation, they reveal the artist's collision with the conditions of contemporary production; a determined, vigorous and obsessive action is required so that he may proceed with a disenchanted plan because he is conscious of the depletion of modern forms.

In the following stage, his works began to reveal the interior of these forms. Instead of exposing their organicity, however, their "nature", the work which gave birth to them is noticeable: "structures of wire and wood, moments of a making which did not know how to camouflage its stages, for it became too coarse to accomplish the double leap which constitutes hiding within the very matter upon which it acts. In several passages these supports even repel the covering, and appear in their awkward rawness, for that which ought to protect or energetically expand appears now with disturbing impotence" (Rodrigo Naves). Even though they are made up of strongly articulated and interconnected parts, they are always on the verge of breaking, of fragmenting into splinters. They are archaic and sensual irruptions, which broke loose from the territory of the imaginary to seek an existence with no clear purpose, yet heavy and overflowing in space.

We are now faced with, unrepentant and inexorable objects, constructed from the juxtaposition and accumulation of debris, of fragments, of objects collected, created, reproduced and organized in logical groups so as to remake an archeology of memory. The different parts, which make up the work, emerge as bodies ordered primarily by the artist's obsessive, maniacal drive to test and experiment. They touch upon sculpture in the enigma of its form, insoluble and yet sensitive to investigation. The frontally of some of these pieces underlines the idea of an object with autonomous, threedimensional life. Like the memory of sculpture itself, this body of work emerges from a desire for formal and material exploration, from a constructive and organizational obsession, informing a vision which dissects, determined to test and experiment. On one hand they suggest that these forms, under these circumstances, might be understood as the punctual emergence of a series of conditions, which constitute the specificity of a language under the realm of modernism.

Nevertheless, the materiality of these forms refuses to be part of a world inhabited by the ghostly residues of chaos.

They do not become fragments of a lost language, traces of past sensations and events, vestiges of bodies which have lived and been obliterated, which form a knot over their secret. They do not express the belief that a complete inventory might produce a total body.

The ordering, the assembling of the gathered parts, the casting and the multiplication of these vestiges of bodies all reinforce these intriguing presences and point beyond them to the artist's preoccupations with the subtle game of the various manipulations of language. Metaphors indeed, even if, before them, we should hesitate between surprise and disdain. Venosa mobilizes the spectator's imagination, surrounded by these mute residues, fragments of bodies irreparably alienated from the existence, which they witnessed so as to formalize abstract histories, metaphysical meanderings, to better refer to the landmarks of a perverted history which bites its own tail, rather than to the facts of a true history. If, at first, his works astonish because of their enigmatic nature, they also stimulate the sagacity of the spectator, who is pressured into unraveling the artist's stories. For these bodies possess an abstract history (of the nature of the enigma), and their constituent elements are computed as remains from which it becomes evident that there is no first nor final destiny.

São Paulo, April 1993

References

BASUALDO, Carlos Cadáveres ("Cadavers"), a project presented to the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, 1993, unpublished.
BRITO, Ronaldo Angelo Venosa (catalogue), Subdistrito Comercial de Arte, São Paulo, 1986.
NAVES, Rodrigo "Naturezas Mortas" ("Still Lives"), Angelo Venosa (catalogue), Galeria Sergio Milliet, Funarte, Rio de Janeiro, 1989.