Opening

“If I wanted to say something with my work, I wouldn’t do sculpture, I’d write a book.” 2 With this statement back in 1992, Angelo Venosa assumed opacity as a trademark of his work, whose physical presence in space resolutely siphons off all trace of rhetoric. His forms are charged with the estrangement of a will to express that rejects eloquence or anything adjectival. At the same time, his poetic centres upon the choice of materials that carry a speech of their own. His sculpture transits between the organic and the specular, seeking processes of formalization capable of conferring some visualization to what can not make itself seen: seeming to expel the insides – bones, teeth and skeletal fragments – one minute, only to reflect the interiority of the external the next – as with the series of profiles, glass panes and mirrors. In this play between inside and outside, what spills over is the opacity of what reveals itself without ever putting itself on show.
It is no accident, fifteen years after the initial statement, that his Master’s degree dissertation in Visual Languages, defended at the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro (UFRJ), bears the title Elogio da opacidade (In Praise of Opacity) . Less about his work than about its confrontation with the world, his thesis focused on resistance to the theme as the sole feature of poetic language. When he did decide to write, it was in defence of silence. Besides sharing his malaise in the face of the current state of art, Venosa and I also share the premise that it is through the displacement of the conventional forms of seeing, speaking and feeling, and thus in the rejection of transparency and immediate communication, that art produces meaning and broadens our modes of perception, and thereby also the way we think about our world.
In defending his dissertation, a requirement for the conferral of the title of master, he held a small “exhibition”. Venosa availed of the singularity of his clash with opacity to rethink his creative process within that context using the materiality of the word, of his relationship with the voice, the image and meaning. In one of the two works presented, an electronically generated voice read a passage from Samuel Beckett’s The Unnamable. The inexpressiveness of the reading, void of intonation, radicalized the anguish of the subjective emptying and potentized a voice that was all metal in a world drunk on extravagant eloquence. His sculptures in cut glass and drawings in laser on weathering steel immediately spring to mind. In these works, the issue of opacity achieved a new materiality while maintaining the poetic thread running through his artistic thought, combining precision, austerity and fragility.
Born in São Paulo in 1954, of Italian parents from a region at the frontier between Campania and Basilicata, Venosa inherited his father’s ability with wood, or rather with the arts and crafts, design, the desire to make things you don’t have to name. His work and personality share the same affable dryness, with a touch of sharp irony mixed with a delicateness of spirit. In the first phase of his career, between 1985 and 1988, his work assumed an organic character with a shapeless materiality built up around a wooden structure draped in black painted resin. The interiority had found its skin, imposing a precarious limit on a process of formalization that closed itself over with an epidermis pulled tight from the inside. His sculptures are alien to the festive clamour of Geração 80 (The 80s Generation). Whence his resistance to the mundanity of art. Between 1989 and 1994 the organic element shifted from the form to the relations between the materials, relying on the tension between textures, temperatures and affective tonalities. They nonetheless retained a certain expansiveness in space.
From 1996 on, he was to shift the constructional emphasis of the work. Where he had previously favoured exteriorization, moving from the inside out and exploring the informality of the materials, he began to segment the material, now more resistant, and to serialize the form. The opacity remained, though now leaning toward a certain stutter, a stammering of material phonemes in search of a moment of meaningful form, albeit still precarious. We shall take these two poetic stages (1985-1994 and 1996-2007) as the parameters of our analysis, though without meaning to postulate any interior rupture in his work. Constant are the estrangement of the materials, the opacity and the belief in the silent speech of form always teetering on the brink of formlessness, despite the changes in process and endless renewal of the final plastic results. Let us return to this developmental path and take a closer look.


Venosa and Geração 80: friends, friends, poetics apart

The artistic career of Angelo Venosa begins with Geração 80, though the nature of his work, with its affective tonality derived from a mixture of a serious tone and phenomenological estrangement, soon sets him entirely apart from this generational context. The work of Leonilson, especially the embroiderings from the end of the decade, despite their distinct plastic intensity, leave a similar existential aftertaste. That said, we can affirm that Venosa’s work walks alone, opening its own historical shortcuts, dialoguing transversally with modern sculpture. Alongside Nelson Felix and Ivens Machado, his poetic was to rethink the paths taken by Brazilian sculpture, its scale, processes of formalization and articulation with space – both real and symbolic.
Going back in time to mention his formation as a graphic designer at the ESDI in Rio de Janeiro is perhaps no mere biographical detail. I bring this apparently secondary fact up in order to underscore a constructivist gaze intrinsic to this sculptor that the organic forms of his early works would appear to conceal. His affinities of choice with the concrete tradition in Brazilian sculpture, based more on temperament than on poetic emulation or formal interest, have a lot to do with this training.
When I asked him about his influences during one of our conversations, in the hope of establishing relations with surrealist sculpture, like the work of a Giacometti or Maria Martins, he did not hesitate in his reply: “paradoxically, I liked Amílcar. I didn’t think of anything as I worked. Naively, I wanted total freedom; nobody looking over my shoulder. There were occasional recollections of some of the forms of Arp...A mental scrapbook of images from childhood”. 3 Despite an obvious distinction in the temperament of form, this indirect dialogue with Amílcar would reveal itself later on, particularly in his use of weathering steel and in the precision with which he cut his plates.
One way or another, this intimacy with the constructivist tradition would result in his graduation as a graphic designer and his belief in a process of formalization based on restraint and rigour. Not at all like the communicative yearning and gestural energy that marked the artists of his generation. Another factor worth remembering in relation to his background was his participation in mounting the exhibition “Projeto construtivo brasileiro” (The Brazilian constructive project) at the Pinacoteca in São Paulo in 1977. The first revision of the constructive legacy in Brazil, this more intimate contact with milestone works from our concrete past would have afforded him, whether consciously recognized or not, a formal measure that would accompany him along his entire career as a sculptor. During the mounting of the exhibition, through the sketches he made detailing the museography, Venosa certainly acquired an inevitable intimacy with those works.
Returning to this formative phase, with its supposed constructive links, is by no means an attempt to create poetic affiliations. Venosa is not a constructive artist, but his creative process, from the joints to the cuts, dialogues transversally with this past. Among his core differences there is not only what he describes as a “mental scrapbook of childhood images”, or a formal constitution deeply rooted in instability and precariousness, but, above all, a radical disbelief in the affirmative insertion of art in the world. His sculpture does not work from an agenda, as its vocation is not constructive but sceptical; as if he were forever doubting the emphatic presence of form. He lives off the leftovers and shadows of the modern project.
Even if running against the grain, Venosa’s work betrays a crestfallen modern formation that operates through the registration of the opacity of language and the always destabilizing presence of form – however low profile it may be. Allied with this is the fundamental source of its disenchanted tone, a reflexive distancing distrustful of the utopian tonality of the modern repertoire. After the hangover of the dictatorship years, dealing with the modern and its teleology meant deconstructing its imposing certainties and the optimistic verve of its promises. Between cynicism and naiveté there was room in which to rethink art and its history, without having to accept it as a model or destination. It was not a matter of relativising history, of bundling together references and styles from the past in an eclectic composition, but of realising that it is through contact and conflict with the languages that comprise the past of art that one generates new possibilities of meaning. In the words of Octavio Paz: “I’m not saying that the young ought to continue from, repeat or imitate their predecessors, but simply that all negation, except perhaps a scream in the void, implies a contentious relationship with what it negates” 4. This disenchanted relationship with the modern past can be seen in the way Venosa’s earlier sculptures cover the wooden structure with formless material. A near-constructive geometry is given a new skin, incorporating other temporalities and putting all its faith in an imagetic suggestion and perceptual estrangement. The image insinuates and negates itself, undoing any immediate adhesion, scrambling the habitual codes of identification, causing a short circuit between form and image, presence and interpretation.
This indirect dialogue with the modern is also important to perceiving the unique position his poetic occupied in the context of Geração 80. His work did not adhere to the critical discourse that pitted the “rock-painting” 5 of the period, with its effusion of gestures and colours, against the cerebral and hermetic art of the 70s. In one of the period’s most referential texts, the critic Frederico Morais advanced the theory of an art that broke with the history of art in order to assume the authenticity and spontaneity of emotion. According to the critic, “some artists who take history as a reference insist on preserving painting like some pictorial theorem. Painting is emotion; it has to grow inside people, in the stomach, in the heart, the head alone is not enough. [There] art becomes illustrated ideas, and that’s where the error lies” 6. To what degree would it have been possible in that decade, given a generation of artists described as neo-expressionist, to break with the past of art and painting? How does one make art without a frame of reference with which to articulate/generate meaning? On the other hand, how could one restore to art, now definitively captured by institutional insertion, something of its destabilizing power, some desire toward cultural intervention?
The suspension of history was a response to the historicist tendency in modernism, in which an evolutionist vision determined the modes of thinking and producing art. Regardless of the risks of this historical determinism, it was not going to be through the outright rejection of history, as if art were pure subjective inspiration, that a creative breach would be found through which to unleash heterogeneous poetics. Historicist terror was not to be confronted with a-historical eclecticism, but by a repositioning, at once distant and engaged, before the incorporated forms of modern art. Distanced insofar as it knows the limits of art’s capacity to interfere in the world; engaged to the extent that it is aware that the effective “non-power” of art, its negativity, is always insinuating virtual potencies through which society discusses its forms of life (and art). In the words of Jaques Rancière:
the teleological model of modernity has become unsustainable, as have its distinctions between the properties of the different arts, or the separation of a pure domain of art. In a certain sense, post-modernism was just a name by which certain artists and thinkers expressed awareness that modernism was over: a desperate attempt to found “a domain for art” by tagging it with a simple evolutionary teleology, an historical rupture. Indeed, there was no need to make such tardy recognition of what was a fundamental fact in the aesthetic regime of the arts, an effective temporal severing, the real end of an historical period7.
The beginning of the 80s was undeniably marked by a sense of liberty and optimism that had not been felt in the country for a long time. Celebration was a new possibility of political engagement. After an art of resistance, like the art of the 70s, a new approach was born, one less combative and more affirmative. This affirmative character was about throwing everything behind a diversity and joy the dictatorship had repressed and which was now made viable again through the amnesty and democratic re-opening. However, was it really to be through the negation of the past and of history that art would affirm its cultural and political relevance? To what extent, one might ask, was the joy of painting called for by the critics and curators in synch with the market reaction before the dematerialization of art so much in vogue during the previous decade? The opposition between cerebral and emotional is not enough to account for the complexity of artistic production, its forms of cultural insertion and generation of meaning.
In this respect, it was Jorge Guinle who managed to perceive most clearly the new challenges facing painting in that decade, linking it historically to the open past of art and, culturally, to a present moment in which the utopian projection of the future converted into a valorisation of the present. This contribution would not solely be made through his own painting, but also through his critical and theoretical reflections at that time. Commenting on the flagship exhibition of the decade – “Como vai você, Geração 80?” (How are you, 80s Generation?) – in an interview with the publication Revista Módulo, he made some highly pertinent observations amongst which I would like to underscore one that interests me above all as a means of considering the connection between Geração 80, or at least some of its members, and the recent past in Brazilian art:
one of the surprises of this exhibition will be precisely that of seeing whether or not there are already values (and if that is actually what it proposes) capable of withstanding comparison with what was best in the previous decade. [...] The ephemerality of the new art derives from the ideological plane, and that’s where its reversion of values in relation to the previous decade resides. With no theoretical repertoire to prolong it, with the wholesale negation of all ‘isms’, what it proposes is a rupture in the history of Brazilian vanguard art. This lack of ideological definition translates metaphorically into images painted onto canvas, fished from the day-to-day of the mass media now invading our privacy, from television images, comic strips. [...] Basically, they constitute instantly recognizable images to be consumed and enjoyed right there and then as they disappear, traces of their persuasive flash of radiance.8
The ephemerality on the ideological plane Guinle identifies points to a dissolution of the project-based nature of the modernist poetics. The punk movement, with its negative stance, “wanting No” instead of knowing what to want, demolished the utopian certainties and opened up space for a multiplication of disparate desires. Geração 80 inherited this ideological indefiniteness and delved into the precariousness of a life devoid of hegemonic certainties. Plurality becomes the rule – in politics, as in aesthetics, as in ethics. However, it is important not to confuse plurality with relativism. The fact that anything can be art does not mean that any old thing actually is; the viability of new forms of behaviour does not justify irresponsible behaviour. The lack of strict rules and set standards – whether in art or in politics – , contrary to what one might think, actually increases the responsibility of the artistic gesture and the need for sound judgement. It is not a matter of resting cynically on one’s laurels before the actuality, but of openness toward what could take its place, without knowing beforehand the means of making it happen.
Looking back over the 1980s, we see artists looking for new pictorial possibilities based on the fragments left behind by the modern tradition. What is most interesting in Jorge Guinle’s work during the period 1983 to 1986 is the way it returns to expressionist painting, though robbed of its heroism and gestural despair. It is a body of work at once distanced and involving, which knows that historical legacy is something hard-won as opposed to simply dumped there for the taking. Willingness to contemporize and recycle the fragmented legacy of modern painting is discernable in some of the most interesting pictorial trajectories of that generation - in Cristina Canale, Luiz Zerbini, Daniel Senise, Fabio Miguez and Paulo Pasta, for example. This artists gave painting a reinvigorated lease of life that never fails to surprise in its contact with the modern past.

On the black sculptures of the Venice Biennial: organic estrangement

The opposition between cerebral and emotional art so often used by the critics that ushered in that generation does not actually apply to these artists, just as the charge of hermeticism does not stand against the best Brazilian artists of the 70s. In Venosa’s earliest sculptures one can sense a tense relationship between image and form. Form comes from bleeding the image, which makes itself present regardless of its formlessness. The previously mentioned “mental scrapbook of childhood images” reveals itself, without any intentionality, through the process of constituting the form. The artist goes about wrapping the sculpture in gauze and resin until he achieves the desired effect – the estrangement presents itself through an image void of identity, though always reminiscent of a fossil or other nameless archaeological element.
Venosa’s images are never immediately recognisable. They refuse to be identified with anything for which we have a set reference. What they are is residue, fragments of something strange that offers the faintest of clues as to its nature. They could be seen as traces of that persuasive flash of radiance, inciting us to imagine what is not there for us to see. Daniel Senise’s paintings from that period (with whom Venosa shared a studio) have that same imagetic power, though they stop short of being figurative paintings in the proper sense. We could discuss the proximity between these two bodies of work at that time by slightly recalibrating another analysis by Jorge Guinle in which he discusses the superposition of two cultural moments in the paintings of that generation. According to Guinle:
The new painting is characterized by its representation of two cultural moments, with the drawing/painting conflict being one of the most striking aspects of 1980s painting: the first movement retains the old wisdom of the painter’s craft, simultaneously employed and put in check, subjected to vigorous commentary and engaged in combat in one fell swoop. This operative formula apparently presupposes the presence of the image as an element to be set against the pictorial background. 9
In Venosa and in Senise the cultural moment does not superimpose itself upon the art and its historical craft. What can be discussed is the way in which the historical memory and its processes of formalization are eclipsed by the will-to-express, by the accumulation of pictorial or sculptural matter, extracting the image as a trace of an archaic, unconscious memory. Both artists reveal the same appreciation for the poetic procedures of their chosen medium, both dialogue with the past of art as a reservoir of craft while at the same time attacking that memory with its expressive material. In this process of including another expressive moment, the now and its estrangement, draped over the craft, the past of art, imagetic insinuations are evoked, which we might call proto-images, whose hint of unidentified figurative forms sends us on an expedition in search of the memory of unconscious figures.
In David Sylvester’s book of interviews with Francis Bacon there are various passages that deal with this process of achieving an indefinable image, in which chance and intention mix. In this combination, the key is to know when to stop, to be able intuit when the form in which the intended image emerges is complete. The intended image that existed in that “mental scrapbook” will not correspond to the image achieved, but something does emerge from the process in which the image presences an experience that interests the artist. “I think the best works by modern artists are those that always give the impression of having been made without them knowing what they were doing”, writes Sylvester in a question to Bacon, who responds by adding something about the creative process that would be interesting to mention here, in order to understand how Venosa “arrives at the image”:
I can say that, in my case, I know what I want to do, I just don’t know how to get there. That’s when I have to wait for chance or luck, or whatever else you might want to call it, to come to my rescue and make the thing for me. As such, it is something continuous that goes on between intuition, critical sense and what we normally call luck or chance. But the crux of the process is critical sense, because criticism of your own instincts in relation to a given form, or an accidental form, crystallizes into the thing you desire. 10
In Venosa, I have the impression that when the internal structure of the sculptures - generally wood, the form materialized - is covered with the resin “skin”, the instinct is unleashed without loss of critical sense, while the form acquires a more organic character, eviscerating itself of an undefined, suggested and unknown image. The size of these first pieces is generally greater than their scale, as this strange figuration that worms its way into the form tends to concentrate its presence in space, without expanding. It tends to incubate in the organic, de-structured volume, making it seem heavier than it really is.
Observing photographs taken at various stages in the construction of his black sculptures, we see an initial phase in wood, in which geometric fragments are pieced together, creating a constructive and segmented structure like a skeletal frame. The artist then wraps this base in a layer of canvas and other materials that conceals the articulations, followed by the layers of resin that comprise the skin and hide the joints of the construction. What emerges is a formless image upon a rigorous structure. This layer of material, like a second temporality, goes in search of the strange, the undefined, the suggestive, plucking the sculpture from its constructive domain and stealing it away toward surrealist imagination.
As Ronaldo Brito observed of Venosa’s early sculpture, “so saturatedly historical are these things that they acquire a prehistoric connotation” 11. In this unveiling of a time alien to the present, these sculptures speak of a sharp malaise in the face of reality and seek to create images that can free us from the obvious presence of things we have already seen. This rejection of naturalized perception, along with the “mental scrapbook” of images, leads his sculptures toward this unnamable form, this symbolic estrangement. However problematic it may be to call these initial pieces figurative, having detected an imagetic dimension (I have made a point of modalizing this aspect, referring to proto-images instead, to imagetic suggestion), this reference would remain a singular element of his work up to the mid-90s. I say this because the image, or its suggestion, is not detached from the form, does not stand out from the sculptural process as something visualized in advance by the artist. It emerges from the process, revealing itself as the making of the piece unfolds. The image does not restore any figurative or representational logic to the sculpture, in other words, it does not rescue any academic or pre-modern procedure.
There is an interesting comment Deleuze made about Bacon that fits well here: “The body only reveals itself when it is no longer sustained by the bones, when the flesh no longer clings to the bones, when one exists for the other, but each in its own place, the bones as the material structure of the body and the flesh as the bodily matter of the figure” 12. The articulated wooden frame inside the pieces is the skeleton, the structure; while the resin covering is the flesh, understood here as the body of the figure. In these works, as in the later pieces, mixing tree branches, opaque resin, wax, teeth, etc., the figure is born of this covering over with skin and its articulation with the bones. The figure is appearance, the body of the sculpture, which is constituted by its indeterminate and therefore unstable presence in the world. The figure, the imagetic insinuation, does not determine the sculptural act, but derives from its process of striving for form. It is as if the sculpture produced the figuration regardless of the artist’s will.
The use of such organic materials as branches, bones and teeth gradually displaced these modes of figurative insinuation, which became more indirect, more indicative, formulating a residual reference to a body that once was. Organic materials mix with the man-made, creating a hybrid creature, half-animal, half-prosthesis, cold and dry. This can be seen in many pieces produced between 1989 and 1992, which exhibited fragments of bodies, chunks of bone and strange organic deformations.
The internal articulation, the skeletal framework of the piece, gradually loses its function and begins to externalize. On one hand, these works from the first half of the 1990s incorporate organic material that they leave exposed, spared the resin covering. Form is achieved through the opposition with other materials, from the different textures and temperatures, while the poetic power stems from the containment of the strange. The polyurethane foam, for example, expands almost randomly, leaving the artist little room for manoeuvre, more or less consigned to accept the “will” of the material. The form surges from the mixture with other materials. These works are the most abstract of this first phase and ratchet up a tension between antagonistic materialities: hot and cold, dry and wet, soft and hard, organic and artificial.
These oppositions highlight the conflict between the informality and the formal rigour we see in the making of the pieces. Responding to a question put to him by Bernardo Carvalho during a conversation between the two for a Venezuelan art magazine, Venosa makes an interesting assertion: “My work tends to walk a tight-rope. I serve two masters, and that creates the ambiguity. The formal side risks this preciosity, but that risk fascinates me. It’s about making it up as you go along. Hence the danger”.13 If, on one hand, there is estrangement among the materials, there is also a rigour to keep them formally in place. The teeth that line the hollowed inside of a paraffin cube suck the space into the interior where they reveal a silent intensity that stifles the expressive scream. The impression one has is that there is a constant confrontation between the expressiveness of the materials and the containment of the process of formalization. This containment, rather than taming the presence of form, makes it more intense in its economy and concentration.
Besides stressing its lateral connection with the rigour and rhetorical silence of the constructive tradition, this constant concern with form, despite all the throbbing materiality, distinguished Venosa’s work from the scatological, abject aesthetic trend that surfaced at the same time and used organic materials much like his own. Despite the abyssal differences between them in terms of poetic temperament, one artist that calls for attention here, given the repercussion of his international rise to prominence at the same Venice Biennial as Venosa, in 1993, is Damien Hirst. Among the pieces the Brazilian artist submitted to the biennial was a sculpture made with ox bones spread out on the floor, while the English artist showed his sliced cows (Mother and Child Divided). The comparison is interesting insofar as it shows the distinction between a spectacular asepsis of form and an expressive containment of material. The former refers to Hirst – though we could also mention Marc Quinn’s Blood Heads, which also date from the early 90s -, the shock effect comes from the sheer unusualness of it, whether of the precise slicing of the animals and their suspension in an aquarium of formaldehyde, or of the mould of the artist’s head made from his own congealed blood. The material loses its time, the body becomes a fleshless image. In Venosa’s bonework, scattered randomly across the floor, designing the space in small groups of bones, the material is revealed, but does not give itself up to the viewer. Not quite an image, not quite a skeleton or an organism, it is all that is left of the animal presence.
It is intriguing that a photo of this piece taken at Venosa’s old studio in Lapa appears in Luiz Zerbini’s book alongside a small reproduction of a painting by Francis Bacon. The eye of a fellow artist catching interesting poetic affinities. Bacon’s assertion that he “wanted to paint the scream more than the horror” fits well with the containment with which Venosa works his organic materials, potentizing their sculptural presence. The organicity of the materials does not allow itself to be imprisoned or organized by the formal composition – there is a certain leaving-be that has nothing to do with arbitrariness or informality. This meeting between containment and chance is the hallmark of his poetic.
Another interesting example, also from 1993, is the sculpture made with two ox skulls and cast bronze. Joined at the “mouth”, the skulls concentrate all their power in the communion of a desperate yet contained scream/kiss. What would have been the abjection of a monstrous and violent scene is replaced by a precise instant in which two bodies integrate with and sustain each other. The piece certainly retains the power of its hard-hitting sculptural presence, but it does not trade on shock value alone. Likewise, in other works from the same period, teeth embedded in beeswax or chunks of lead rending and protruding from paraffin blocks reveal this tense play between the organic and the inorganic, the living and the inanimate, temporality and its suspension. I am reminded of a passage from Rosalind Krauss in which she defines some specificities of modern sculpture in relation to its traditional conception as a form perceived in conjunction and simultaneously. For Krauss, the insertion of time is a difference of modern sculptural form. In her own words: “one of the most notable aspects of modern sculpture is the way it manifests the increasingly heightened awareness of its practitioners that sculpture is a medium of expression uniquely situated at the junction between rest and movement, captured time and passing time. It is from this tension, which defines its very condition as sculpture, that it derives its enormous expressive power”. 14 In Venosa’s work from the early 1990s we can see precisely this junction between rest and movement, captured time and passing time. In other words, the materiality of the pieces testifies to the passing of time, while the formal containment reveals its capture, its suspension. If in the early works the tension stemmed from the relationship between a mounted structure and a formless skin, now everything occurs on the surface, with two times clashing and empowering each other in the very space of the appearance.
The crowning moment of what we could call the first step on his poetic journey, with all the risks involved in these divisions at the core of works still in process, occurred at the Camargo Vilaça Gallery in 1994. It was not a matter of a turning point or rupture from that moment on, but rather a formal reduction that concentrated his pieces materially, making them even drier and more opaque. The figurative issue became more conceptual and less morphological. Deriving from some bodily fragment, the form/image is now reworked in scale, configuration, materiality, texture, etc. The estrangement, which had come entwined with the organic element and with the scrapbook of mental images that coupled with the form, now shifted toward the sculptural process and the way the image inserted itself and dissolved in the most varied material surfaces. It is interesting to note that this change occurred a year after the exhibition at the Venice Biennial and his contact with the young English generation and its fixation on the spectacle and abjection.
As an example of this development we can take a piece in weathering steel exhibited on the floor of the Camargo Vilaça in 1994. The piece in question is a horizontal composition of numerous steel plates pressed together to form an enormous femur head. What we have here is no longer an organic figuration disseminating in space, as the supposed image of the femur is concentrated in the material, itself sliced and compressed. Drawing a connection between these moments, as it were, the same 1994 exhibition also featured a circle and a cube made from paraffin in which the organic material and the estrangement it engendered withdrew into the rhythmical presence of the teeth. The serialization no longer resides in an articulating structure that expands in space from the inside out, but is now compressed into an accelerated rhythm that moves from the outside in. It is not so much a rupture in his poetic as a shift. In fact, we will see him return to this morphological procedure of expansion in space at a later date, in 1999, when he produces a sculpture in burnt MDF that figures a skeleton hovering in the middle of the gallery hall, suspended from nylon threads. This piece is a clear dialogue with Baleia (Whale), produced at the end of the 80s and transferred to another site in Rio de Janeiro in 1998. We will exploit the opening here to analyze his works produced for public places.

Public sculptures

Angelo Venosa’s Baleia is well-known to the inhabitants of Rio city. Originally installed in Mauá Square, the result of a competition for a public commission held in 1998 and sponsored by the construction company João Fortes, his submission was chosen over projects by artists of the highest level, including Lygia Pape, Ivens Machado and Barrão. The artist’s first challenge was to find a material that was suited to the context but which would not blur his sculptural identity, as he had hitherto only worked with precarious materials that would not withstand exposure to the street or to the elements. After some experimentation, weathering steel proved the most appropriate, not only for its resistance, but because its surface allows it to aggregate the passage of time in a blend of organic and inorganic qualities. This change in material obliged the artist to reconsider his process of formalization. What was structuring the work internally, the geometry of jointed wood, had to be exteriorized when done in metal, while the empty spaces that left seemed to release the figure into its surroundings. It was with this work that the shift toward exteriorization began, as did the use of steel and of empty spaces in the formation of the figure – poetic uses that can still be felt today in his wall drawings in weathering steel and MDF derivatives.
It is important to stress that there actually was no “whale” in the original figuration of the work. Like most of his sculptures, this piece was untitled. It was the public who gave the work its name and the artist, intelligently, accepted it. This insinuated, but undeclared figuration is the trademark of his poetic. The piece originally “lived” in Mauá Square until 1998, when traffic reengineering in the city centre saw it moved to Ave. Atlântica, overlooking Leme beach. Nothing could be more appropriate than for a whale to move closer to the sea. Strangely, though, there was a strong public backlash against the sculpture in the early days of the transfer and installation, sparking a debate in the newspapers on the pertinence and criteria that determine the installation of a sculpture in the city. 15 Most surprising of all in that discussion – and typical of a certain privatised notion of public space – was that the residents felt in their rights to decide what should be installed there. The arguments against it rested on everything from conservative aesthetic considerations to complaints that it would get in the way of the child minders wheeling their pushchairs around. If Baleia fit the proportions of the place, if it was an important sculpture by a renowned artist and if it had been chosen through a public competition, then none of those arguments held any water. Certain questions arise from the debate over Venosa’s piece, such as: is it really a private sensibility – like or not like – that rules aesthetic decisions concerning public space? How should artistic criteria deal with and live with public taste? What is the role of the authorities in arbitrating the conflict? The key point is to acknowledge that the discussion and the decision have to be democratic without lapsing into populism or democratism. One way or another, Baleia moved there and we can say, beyond shadow of doubt, that there it found its place. It silently reigns on that small island between the buildings and the sea, with the material concreteness of steel and urban life seamlessly integrated with the organic and sinuous design of natural forms.
Besides this project, four other works for public spaces were to follow. In 1994, Venosa made a sculpture in Carrara marble that formed a circle out of lengths of femur bone. The noble material confers a certain dignity on the bones, stripping them of the time and organic quality that prevailed in earlier works. Something similar happens with another piece already mentioned, from that same year, comprised of plates of weathering steel placed in series. However, the circular design brings another, almost ritualistic variable that underscores the totemic layout, even if unintentional, of the marble bones on the floor. This work would assume a whole new scale in another material – aluminium - in 1997 in a piece installed in Ibirapuera Park in São Paulo, near the entrance to MAM-SP. Seen from a distance, it looks like concrete, which confers a roughness to the bones laid out on the ground, where they serve as a bench on which people can sit in groups and talk.
In 1998, Venosa was invited to produce a monumental sculpture for the Itaú Cultural Fronteiras (Frontiers) Project just outside the town of Santana do Livramento. On a disused tract of land near a man-made lake he installed a large labyrinth made with blocks of the reddish sandstone typical of the region. The design of the labyrinth is a deformation of his own fingerprint and spreads out like an ancient archaeological site. The Aleph, the title given to this sculpture – a rare fact in itself, highlights the labyrinthine dimensions of this landscape intervention. This shift from a small bodily “motif”, the fingerprint, to monumental scale, deformed and converted into abstract design, points to the relationship between the intentional and accidental that recurs throughout his entire poetic. The deformation of scale is the chance element that causes the conceptual shift and sets it to work. The photo of this sculpture, with the clouds in the background reproducing the serial movement of the labyrinth, is another stroke of chance, underlining the sculpture’s involuntary integration with its natural and cosmic environment.
The piece from 2000, on show in the sculpture garden of the Pinacoteca, harks back to Baleia, revealing the artist’s propensity to revisit processes and formal structures from earlier moments in ex-temporary works. A year earlier, in 1999, he had already exhibited a similar skeleton at the Marcantonio (ou Camargo) Vilaça Gallery, though this time suspended above the floor from nylon threads. Without wanting to force any arbitrary causalities, perhaps this unconscious repetition of Baleia was a response to the public debate caused by its relocation to Leme Beach.
Closing the list of sculptures made for public spaces is the concrete piece installed in a park in Curitiba, based on a plaster mould of his face which he then tomographed and cut into slices. Verisimilitude is not an issue here, what matters is the organic origin displaced and rendered artificial by the sculptural process that abstracted it. In some works, the portrait (or self-portrait) is more evident, as in the piece in MDF from the Cisneros collection, which he, intentionally or otherwise, installed face-down, thus hiding the resemblance.
Within the category of public pieces, we should also include two monumental sculptures produced for specific projects, but which did not remain in their respective places after the exhibitions closed. One of these is the sculpture for the Mercosul Biennial of 2005, in which he produced an enormous graphic section in a plate of weathering steel. Normally hung from a wall, in this case the work was laid on the ground outside, on the river’s edge, where its variations in colour responded to the tones of light and sky. Moreover, as the piece is not exactly flat, laying it on the ground gave it a certain unsteadiness. The patterns in the iron maintain the premise of a virtual section through a body tampered with on computer and then warped in the transfer to metal.
Another monumental piece is that made in 2002 for the Arte-Cidade (Art/City) project in São Paulo. With a large abandoned and roofless railway warehouse for a context, exposed to the weather and to rain, Venosa opted against the weight of his traditional materials and resolved to work with the volume of the space itself, in which he inserted ten thick ropes draped at angles from either end of the crossbeams that had once supported the roof. The series of rings that we saw in Baleia and in the untitled piece from 1999, which he fixed to the ceiling of the Camargo Vilaça Gallery, reproducing the movement of the line and the void, now work upon the open space itself.
While preparing this work, the artist made a model using small ballchains that would give rise to a series of later works. It is interesting to wonder if perhaps the reflections of the ropes in the rainpools on the floor of the Arte-Cidade warehouse did not in some way inspire the use of mirrors that would become recurrent in a later phase.

From transparent silence to dry opacity

One utterly singular piece in Venosa’s oeuvre is a cast-iron plaque with a heavily textured surface, closed in its own opacity and left leaning in a corner of the Camargo Vilaça exhibition of 1994. It now belongs to his friend Daniel Senise. Never before or thereafter would his work be quite so arid and dense. It contains no figurative insinuation whatsoever. This singularity becomes even more curious when we acknowledge that, the following year, 1995, does not seem to have existed on the artist’s calendar. In fact, he was shut away taking stock. His work had developed, first of all, from the inside out, exteriorizing the constructive process that sustained his black and formless figurations; next, by using the surface of the work to explore tensions between the materials: organic/inorganic, flexible/inflexible, resistant/fragile - a process that was to end with Baleia and lead onto the works presented at the Venice Biennial. Then, seen for the first time at the exhibition of 1994, with the femur in weathering steel, the image and the body began to contract and serialize in a cleaner form, but with a coarser and drier materiality. As mentioned earlier, this poetic development is not linear, but somewhat looped, with re-appropriations and shifts, as occur in all bodies of work in constant renewal.
From 1996 on, the aspect of seriality would assume a key place in his artistic production. This seriality would present itself both as a sculptural procedure, through the “slicing” and the juxtaposition of materials, and as a segmentation of various sets or series of sculptures, simultaneously conceived, but self-nourishing in terms of poetics. For Flora Sussekind, the serial nature of Venosa’s work is not only manifested “in the repetition, with variations, of motifs, methods and materials, but also occasionally through the simultaneous presentation of a given series of pieces, thus accentuating both the perceptible differences of formal organization between them and the need for a temporalization of perception, as the viewer must take in the entire set while picking up on the transformations that carry from piece to piece” 16. The seriality can derive equally from the sequencing of the material and/or figurative elements as by the displacement of a common process of formalization regardless of the use of other materials. The passage from the monumental piece for the Arte-Cidade project to the delicate constructions using ballchains and mirrors is an example of this poetic process and how it shifts and transforms within the same series.
Venosa’s first work with glass, dating to 1996, is structured as a sequential chain of glass panes attached to a marble block, each containing the outline of a skull made with iron wire and glued to the pane with pitch. The figure can only be seen in conjunction, that is, it can only be made out if viewed frontally, with the glass panes aligned. The fragility of the line overlaps that of the glass. The various rings that figure the whale in open space in Baleia now seem imprisoned in the surface of the glass, making the image more compact and frontal. Variations on this procedure would recur, with various materials used to ‘sketch’ the figure, sometimes accentuating the more organic qualities, sometimes leaning toward the graphic. I would single out the work Maria, from 1999, for special mention. In this piece Venosa uses a tomogram of a head and transfers its imagetic outline to the glass plates as photographic prints. The lines blur and the form transfers as a subtle stain or shadow at the top of the glass, almost slipping off the rim or perhaps never actually entirely entering the frame. However, in the works with sea-salt on glass from 1997/98 we see the movement of the line emerge in all its lightness and precariousness. Despite the firmness of the glass pane, all teeters on the brink of dissolution.
In each of the works in this series, in which the outline forms on the surfaces of juxtaposed glass panes, we see the line fix itself on the plane and construct itself as an image only through sequence and depth. These are three-dimensional drawings, seen frontally, but constituted only in space. In one shift within the series, a skull in weathering steel is hung freely in space from a sequence of threads, linking the procedure used in Baleia with that of the works in glass. Different series that would otherwise not seem to communicate within the same oeuvre – with its diversity of materials, procedures and sensations – meet at unexpected fulcra with the birth of a new piece.
If in the abovementioned works the glass is the support for the line and the outline, it little by little becomes the very line and sculptural happening itself. In the words of the artist, the glass initially served as a “crutch to sustain these floating pictures, but it revealed itself as too dirty, too material, and that is precisely how I came to view it in the later works.” 17 The first time he made such sculptural use of glass was in the 1997 exhibition at the Centro Cultural São Paulo, a slightly expanded version of which moved to the Paço Imperial in Rio de Janeiro the following year. Among other pieces, Venosa produced some portraits of friends and family cut from glass. First of all the profile was drawn on paper and then laid down and segmented. Venosa measured the heights and cut the glass accordingly, gluing piece upon piece in order to reconstruct the silhouette. It was a simple but labour-intensive process that hinged upon the imponderable fragility of the material and gave the sensation of an image that was all blade and no handle. From then on, the procedure of cutting and gluing glass shards would multiply and take on other, less figurative and more organic formalizations. In some of these works the artist starts from a base and sets about producing a free design whose volume may end up suggesting a bone, a mountain or nothing at all. Perhaps nothing would be better, as this is a blind sculpture that operates through the accumulation and juxtaposition of pieces of glass in search of a form that is pure poetic instant. The form is realized, but, at the same time, sews the seeds of something that will unfold in another piece, and thus the series multiplies indefinitely. These works can be placed on a table, on the floor or hung on a wall, where they become more representation than object. In some pieces the glass is embedded in plaster, acquiring a certain dramatic touch through the pressure of the rending. On other occasions, shards broken or lost from earlier pieces are reused, sometimes resulting in a mixture of colours – green and transparent, for example -, sometimes availing of a dark stain left over from the photo printing of a tomogram on the glass.
The use of tomography, already mentioned in relation to Maria, signals the decision to avail of imagetic “information” about the body, those inner portraits, which has served as a conceptual motif for a series of works produced since 1996 in MDF, weathering steel and glass. This appropriation would also lead to the use of a computer programme called The Visible Human. This project originated with the cadaver of an executed prisoner who donated his remains to science. Once frozen and given due technical treatment, the cadaver was sliced up longitudinally, scanned and transformed into a programme that Venosa later acquired. According to the artist, “the Visible Human came at precisely the right time, as it provided the type of information I had been producing through tomograms or scans of sectioned pieces of plaster (the femur, for example, was moulded in plaster and sliced with a hand saw)” 18. In a glass piece from the 1997/98 period, shown at the exhibitions mentioned above, he drew the Visible Human head in pen on the glass panes and stuck them together with no space between them and glued them into a wooden support. The lines on the panes further back appear fainter, thus creating a sense of depth.
This computer programme enables him to take “parts” of the body and compress them into squashed, flattened forms which are then transferred to some other material, such as paper, glass or weathering steel, in which case they are cut in with laser. The reference is lost in the making, as when manipulating the images on computer Venosa reduces them to their contours, making holes of spaces previously filled. The engravings exhibited at the Celma Albuquerque Gallery in 2000 were made by squashing images of bodily contours, leaving them compressed on the plane, so that they looked rather like free-drawn sketches, as if they were the blind repetition of the same circular motion of hand over paper or aluminium plate.
This same procedure also holds for the designs in weathering steel, which gain their plastic potency from the power of the material. The holes in the steel that define the contours of the image transform into lines that combine urgency and chance. The original bodily reference virtually disappears in order to make room for the freedom of the graphic gesture that so precisely cuts the steel. These works indirectly resuscitate the dialogue with Amílcar de Castro, Venosa’s initial reference - differences notwithstanding -, not just in their use of material, but for the precision with which the cut is made in the steel and the overall plastic impact of the work. In the numerous works in weathering steel in this series, the part of the body chosen for the design on the plate will determine the general format of the piece (when he works with the legs, the steel is divided into two volumes, for example) – this influence is all that remains of the initial image, as the result functions plastically in and of itself. These works are defined by the potency of the form rather than by the insinuation of a figurative section. If there is an undeniable decorative appeal in these works, this does not in any way diminish their potency or surprise.
Another series already mentioned in passing and which demands more detailed examination is that which mixes ballchains and mirrors. Somewhere between object, sculpture and installation, these pieces create virtual displacements in space, in the form and in the material through the mirror play of reflections and duplication of the chains. The estrangement no longer stems from the materiality or from the process itself, but from perception, which becomes disoriented, unable to delimit what is seen. The contours of the form are lost, or rather, they unfurl virtually. While in the weathering steel designs, made using a computer programme of sectioned images of the human body, the form was reduced to the plane as a superposing of contour lines, here, the lines disseminate virtually on the plane of the mirror, creating an inexistent three-dimensional duplication. In the former, the body becomes lines, in the latter, lines become body. In both, the precision of the process, the cleanness of the materials and the containment of the form coincide in difference. In this series, however, the optical illusion is a new given.
In fact, this perceptual vertigo has a precedent in the video Venosa presented in 2001 at the Banco do Brasil Cultural Centre in Rio de Janeiro, in which he divides the viewer’s perception of what appears to be his or her reflection in a mirror, but which is actually footage filmed and projected, such that the right-hand half runs in real-time while the left lags behind at a second’s delay. Filmed in the dark by a small hidden camera, the procedure is veiled to us and we find ourselves confused to see one half in real movement and the other in some virtual time. In this work, the virtuality is of time, not space, as occurs with the ballchains and mirrors. Seriality, sectioning, precision, surprise, containment, opacity... characteristics that unfold and reinvent themselves in Venosa’s poetic through a continuously renewed materiality and formalization.
I began this text mentioning one of the two works presented in defence of his master’s dissertation at UFRJ, a passage from Beckett’s The Unnamables read in electronic voice. I stressed the poetic and sensorial affinities with the sharp and clustered glass shards or with the precise incision of the designs on weathering steel. I end by discussing the second work presented at his defence, a reading of Borges’ poem Spinoza. Here the affinities are with his later works, the video and the ballchains reflected in mirrors, and with the vertigo of spatio-temporal perception that they reveal. In this second work, Venosa filmed himself reading the poem in Spanish and played a recording of it on his computer during the presentation. Hidden behind the monitor at the other end of the table, Venosa transferred the sound to his earphones and gave another reading in synch with the film, with the sound in real time. Presence and absence, actuality and virtuality mix between the reading and its reproduction on the monitor. As the poem reads: “No lo turba la fama, ese reflejo/ de sueños en el sueño de otro espejo,/ ni el temeroso amor de las doncellas/ Libre de la metáfora y del mito/ labra un arduo cristal: el infinito/ mapa de Aquel que es todas Sus estrellas”19. Reflections, mirrors, dreams, metaphors, crystals and stars. The organic and the inorganic, the material and the immaterial, the visible and the invisible are in constant metamorphosis on the way toward an opacity that is the expressive silence of a possibility of art.
In an age anxious for answers and certainties, art must resist in its productive impotence. No-one knows what art can do, but between a gesture, a form and a gaze meanings are begotten that transform habitual ways of feeling and thinking. In this process, without knowing it, without awareness of it, worlds are made. By way of closing, I leave the final word to Venosa, in the form of the imaginary letter addressed to an unknown artist with which his dissertation ends:

Dear unknown artist,

Sometime in the mid 80s my father gave me a piece of stone he had found on the beach at Ilha Bela, where he and my mother lived. In fact, it was something less natural than that; a shard of tile, concrete, a fragment of some human endeavour or other that had been rounded on that tiny beach, and which my father had plucked from the Brazilian sea, as it drags large rocks to and fro, winning centimetres of sand in a useless fight, because if the sea were to win back its space, or at least a single beach, it would be a Pyrrhic victory, as in all the years he had lived there, the seawater and the sun he had bathed in were mere by-products of the toil of giving meaning to life, in its tug-of-war with nature.
That rounded little stone was a silent gesture of the father trying to find some way into the inutilities his son was producing. A conversation between a pair of mutes, like the response years later, when, on a visit to my old man (I see now), I placed that little cobble on the table and asked: remember? Only to hear, after a long silence, that at least the stone I had brought back from Italy, plucked from the paving of a street in his old village, had a meaning: practical, archaic, in the way it fit amongst other stones, making fanlike shapes on the ground. We spoke in such slow gestures of stone, and that was where I learned this love of things, of processes, mechanisms, the traces things leave in the world. And how grand, futile and fleeting it is to make things, to love things.
That’s why stones, stone-like things, the Sisyphean labour of rolling stones up hills for nothing, are emblems of what art ought to be...for me. If there is some minimum condition, it is the mysterious presence of something, the effort of making it work upon space and the mute intelligence that goes in to that effort.
The criticism I make of excessive concern with articulation with the world, and the transparent and immediate relationship between problems and solutions, hails from the suspicion that these qualities I insist on describing will, at the very least, slip into the background and be buried. My hope is that, in all good works, whatever their inclination, these qualities will be impossible to repress, but will ram the surface from the inside, beat the eardrum with an insupportable deafness.
Salutations,
A…

1 Title taken from the poem “Poema sujo” by Ferreira Gullar.
2 Manya Millen, “Os ossos de um tímido em Veneza”, Jornal O Globo, Segundo Caderno (Rio de Janeiro, 25/12/1992).
3 E-mail conversation between June and July 2007.
4 Octavio Paz, “Os novos acólitos”, in: Signos em rotação (São Paulo: Perspectiva, 1976), p. 141.
5 Term used by Frederico Morais in the text “A pintura vive viva a pintura”, published in the catalogue for the exhibition “Pintura/Brasil” (Belo Horizonte: Palácio das Artes, 1983).
6 Frederico Morais, “Gute nacht herr Baselitz, ou Hélio Oiticica, onde está você?”. Special issue of Revista Módulo, official exhibition catalogue “Como vai você, Geração 80?”, Rio de Janeiro, Jul/Aug. 1984.
7 Jacques Rancière, A partilha do sensível (São Paulo: Editora 34, 2005), pp. 41-42.
8 Jorge Guinle, “Papai era surfista profissional, mamãe fazia mapa astral legal – geração 80 ou como matei uma aula de arte num shopping center”. Special issue of Revista Módulo, official catalogue for the exhibition “Como vai você, Geração 80?”, Rio de Janeiro, Jul/Aug. 1984.
9 Ricardo Basbaum, “Pintura dos anos 80: algumas observações críticas”. Revista Gávea 6, magazine of the specialization course in the history of art and architecture in Brazil, PUC-Rio, Rio de Janeiro, Dec. 1988, p. 55.
10 David Sylvester, Entrevistas com Francis Bacon (São Paulo: Cosac Naify, 2007), pp. 101-2.
11 Ronaldo Brito, “Singular and Equivocal”, a text included in this book.
12 Gilles Deleuze, Francis Bacon: lógica da sensação (Rio de Janeiro: Jorge Zahar, 2007), p. 30.
13 Bernardo Carvalho and Angelo Venosa, a conversation transcribed in this volume.
14 Rosalind Krauss, Caminhos da escultura moderna (São Paulo: Martins Fontes, 1998), p. 6.
15 Jornal O Globo, 16/10/1998. A small text of mine entitled “Arte e espaço público” (Art and public space), in which I discussed the piece, its installation there, and the public dimension of artworks.
16 Text by Flora Sussekind included in this book.
17 E-mail conversation with the author between June and July, 2007.
18 E-mail from the artist to the author on 16/11/2007.
19 Do not disturb the fame, this reflection/ of dreams in the sleep of another mirror/ Nor the timorous love of damsels/ Free from the metaphor and the myth/ Polish a hard crystal: the infinite/ Map of He who is all His own stars.