Eduardo Haesbaert specialized in metal engraving. He worked as Iberê Camargo’s assistant. At Fundação Iberê Camargo, he coordinates the Engraving Workshop. The artist’s experimental act reveals itself through the unfoldment of metal engraving, his fundamental means of expression, in drawings and paintings. He showed individual exhibitions at Galeria Bolsa de Arte de Porto Alegre| São Paulo (2011, 2015, 2017), at Paço Municipal de Porto Alegre (2017), at Espaço Cultural ESPM-Sul (2016) and at Fundação Ecarta (2014).
The artist’s experimental act reveals itself through the unfoldment of metal engraving, his fundamental means of expression, in drawings and paintings.
He started his studies in visual arts at Escola ASPES, in Santana do Livramento, in 1980. In Porto Alegre, he specialized in metal engraving at Atelier Livre da Prefeitura (Porto Alegre Open Studio) from 1986 to 1989. He worked as Iberê Camargo’s assistant, working as a technician and pressman for his engravings between 1990 and 1994. At Fundação Iberê Camargo, he coordinates the Engraving Workshop, where he develops the Guest Artist project, a residency of national and international artists who are invited to experiment with metal engraving, as well as being a member of the Archives team.
He showed his works at the following individual exhibitions: Desumano – Galeria Bolsa de Arte, Porto Alegre, 2017; Remove – Porto Alegre City Hall, 2017; Corte
Seco | Pó – Espaço Cultura ESPM Sul, 2016; Negro de Fumo – Galeria Bolsa de Arte, São Paulo, 2015; Anotações de uma obra depois das cinco – Fundação
Ecarta, Porto Alegre, 2014; Última Cena – Galeria Bolsa de Arte, Porto Alegre, 2011.
He also participated in the following collective exhibitions: Acervo em Movimento – Aldo Malagoli Art Museum (MARGS), Porto Alegre, 2019; Unânime Noite – Galeria Bolsa de Arte, São Paulo, 2016 – Contemporary Art Centre, Vilnius, 2017; Fundação Iberê Camargo, 2018; 10th Mercosur Biennale, Porto Alegre, 2015; O Triunfo do Contemporâneo – Santander Cultural, Porto Alegre, 2012; Do Ateliê ao Cubo Branco – Rio Grande do Sul Art Museum (MARGS), Porto Alegre, 2011.
His works are part of the collection of the following museums: Ado Malagoli Rio Grande do Sul Art Museum (MARGS), the Porto Alegre Contemporary Art Museum (MAC-RS), the Aldo Locatelli Pinacotheca – Porto Alegre Municipal Government and the Paraná Contemporary Art Museum (MAC-PR). He received the following awards: 6th Açorianos Visual Arts Awards – Best Individual Exhibition (Última Cena); Honorable Mention – 6th Porto Alegre Hall of Painting, 1995; Special Jury Prize – Body of Work – 2nd Victor Meirelles Art Hall, Florianópolis, 1994; First Prize – 16th Hall of Visual Arts of the Chico Lisboa Association, 1993; Paraná Department of Culture Awards – 49th Paraná Art Hall, 1992; Brasilia Award of Visual Arts – 12th National Visual Arts Hall, 1992.
Text by Nuno Ramos
Negro de Fumo Exhibition
Galeria Bolsa de Arte de Porto Alegre – São Paulo | 2015
Speaks true who speaks shadow
The sentence above, from Romanian-born German poet Paul Celan, seems to perfectly describe the landscape of Eduardo Haesbaert’s work. Shadow – made using coal, oil paint, pigment, and mezzotint, and found on engravings or casual dimmed lights, found in the gap between the wall and the sink captured through digital photography – is always there, as a semi-solid matter that spreads to everything else, and is a major protagonist in his works. It seems to be present both in object and in the spaces between them, making them switch positions and reveal some kind of shared primal origin (and density).
Therefore, through this search for a semi-solid aspect (almost felt-like) that permeates his works, this all makes reference to Iberê Camargo’s tutelage (as Eduardo knew and assisted Camargo for many years), thanks to the poetics in the background – the promise residing in an eclipse, as well to the works of Goeldi, another association that can be clearly seen.
There is a calm obscurity here, expressed by an artist who is used to the meticulous and daily contact with materials and its effects. The mark of a true artists, who can get what he wants from copper, acid, oil paint and wax, permeates the poetics found in his work. Maybe that is why the time conveyed by these works are also somewhat dense and slow-paced, infiltrating through gaps, withering silhouettes, preventing the clock hand from moving, escaping from light.
Text by Adolfo Montejo Navas
Corte Seco | Pó Exhibition
Espaço Cultural ESPM-Sul | 2016
“Without handrails, but with foundations
The Earth is not a building but a body.”
Wallace Stevens
Eduardo Haesbaert’s poetics have been constituted by the communion between modus operandi and raw materials, as explicitly conveyed by the title of this exhibition. Dry cutting/plan for visual montage, gesture and dust / organic corpus, matter. Also there is the visual reflection and the conceptualization of virtual spaces as executed through painting, with its immanent surfaces and noises from the world which are then translated and challenged. There are two elements and circumstances in one, as if another space overtakes all a priori concepts associated with any kind of serene aesthetic equation. This is more of a visual impregnation, an image-based porosity (once again, there is dust) that relates to internal architectures and to architectures that may be seen on the horizon; in fact, the space where image occurs (its inner aspect) and its translated density -(its outer aspect) makes reference to ancient frescos (especially classical Italian frescos), to paintings
that can be comprised within various distances and spatial, synergistic and perceptive apprehensions, not only aimed at representing but also to presenting images.
In fact, we are facing space-time scenarios that are paradoxical, in full conflict, even, where the dialectic of rigid, sustainable and geometric forms take on an opposing visual element: something that is liquid, shapeless and unknown, which permeates everything in a mysterious way: columns, stairs, walls, floors, bulkheads, boards, posts, doors and pipes, all of which forming an internal and at the same time external landscape, transforming any glimpse of reality into visions, mirages and imagination. Actually, architectures are never definitive and safe, there is no sure science to this – even in terms of where cropped-out negative and positive areas are (either in dark, solid areas or in airy, liquid areas) -, since osmosis prevails over any area, as reciprocal, inside-out painting-engraving. It is as if architectures are bathed in another reality, floating, in suspension, and it seems impossible to ignore a certain kind of existential drama, since we always return to the material world, to dust, especially with a graveyard nearby, besides. In this sense, Eduardo Haesbaert’s unsettling works, as well as his thin-layered imaginary, is not intended for the gutless and for bourgeois outlooks coming from people comfortably sitting on their sofas. Who said that painting can only fit into the sacrosanct limits of a square or a rectangle, of convenient measures or limited signs?
But Corte seco/pó also addresses the slippery nature of images, their motions/movements and status. Then we must also recognize in his message the marks of a phantasmatic kind of painting that provides various scenes in one: flooded platforms, canvases that float in the air, semi-guessed shadows, partly rendered – we must say – through the white areas and gaps that are also presented, as well as through beams of light, and frames of a white, transparent film – the cinema of apparition, of forthrightness. Actually, in this case, we can sometimes even hear words such as “Action!” or “Rolling!”, because nothing here is stratified, despite the fact that such works are paintings, as the chromatic nuances, the fragmented manifestations reveal what is seen and what is not seen; an image interval is generated, one in which enigmas are not to be feared, of shadows or the high skylights of the invisible. We can perceive that Eduardo Haesbaert’s drawings-paintings always seeks to bring closer some sort of magma, like a sensation of suspension or a deep dive into images, something that is bigger than any subterfuge or conventional comfort brought by a similar element, topic, etc. Thus, his paradoxical skyline, the reliefs and cutouts of this kind of painting, which is always impure and mingled (wax, pastel, oil paint, canvas, wall), increasing material physicality and contact, was always aimed at casting true doubts as to which side we are on: are on the concave or on the convex side? Is it a trompe-l’oeil perspective or a surface dominated by planarity?
And in this peculiar, pictorial movie theatre without any handrails (with no defined place for us to hold on to) but with foundations (part of a partly-submerged architecture that seems to spring out from the ground), the ends of a stain invade space and becomes a hand, for instance. In summary, in this kind of painting, which does not have a narrative aspect to it – because it is not guided by mandatory concepts and because the scheme is more important than sequencing and mere illustration -, his graphic abyss continues to navigate, throbbing until it becomes adrift, without a definitive silhouette, towards its semi-hidden roots, or just navigating long enough until it bring together closeness and awayness, fragment and constellation. Nothing here seems coded; it remains on a surface level, in a loving relationship with its exclusive surface (not restricted to any marks). Hence, the surface of these works can breathe, and one can ever hear such breathing with their own eyes.
