Raul Mourão

“To see the Visible”
 Eucanaã Ferraz | Version by Lis Horta Moriconi

In this exhibition, Raul Mourão once more devotes himself to the difficult marriage of construction and chance. Careful not to override each other, the entwined tensions engender through taut interplay solutions that reject judgements of decision or classification. Thus, with such destabilizing interconnections, Mourão’s works convey familiarity with the principles of printmaking without however being defined by reproducibility. Mourão borrows procedures from monotyping, but his images do not emerge from the usual process of painting on the surface of what is often a sheet of glass, subsequently presse against paper. It would be too little to say they share an affinity with stamps. Nor are they completely alien from the procedures of painting. Mourão’s work is not about choosing this or that surface, this or that material, or even this or that pigment. It is not the definition of a technique that is paramount: all efforts are directed toward the experimentation of technical possibilities, from which solutions will burst out to engender new problems to be resolved later.
A critical review overly concerned with classifications would also find it challenging to define the conjunction of straight lines and the fluid abstraction of space between them. Even as we are faced with Mourão’s frugal economy, how to speak of minimalism when his methods are not hidden away in his works, but rather embrace unpredictability, prizing imperfection? Or how to define his work as informal, when we are offered rigorous construction of planes and geometric arrangements?
Abstraction in the works of Raul Mourão has always been based on indistinct and problematic dynamics at play. Mourão after all, takes his geometry from day-to-day objects, such as building facades, soccer fields, railings and signs from public worksites. If, during his career, Mourão aspired towards progressively freer formal arrangements, at the same time he never hid from view the memory of his research processes rooted in the everyday experience of city life. This has led to a form of recognizable abstraction, one that is contaminated by bodily, symbolic, emotional experiences, individual and collective reminiscences. In other words, we are looking at impure geometry’.
Earlier works from Chão Parede Gente (Lurix 2010) had taken that direction. And this new exhibition brings greater depth to those issues. Looking at the window-sculptures we see that Mourão continues investigations that, while unceasing, are not linear. Mourão’s steel sculptures at first suggested an urban chronicle or sociological commentary in as far as they displayed the aesthetic situation that was born of a crisis in public security: the overpowering and indiscriminate use of bars and railings for protection. His sculptures came out of a process of de-functionalization, their lines and volumes dimmed due to utility. Over the past few years however, Mourão has moved towards more classic abstraction, closer to the works of Amilcar de Castro, Franz Weissmann or even Calder. In the sculptures on show at LURIXS, bars have exited the focus of interest, abstraction has also retreated, offering us instead, something prosaic and recognizable, something that they had prevented us from seeing: the windows themselves. What we have before us is invention, and an invented architecture that is fragmentary and mobile, it dances thanks to kinetic matter that brings back to us spectators, to our eyes, and touch, states of weight, volume, movement, balance, time and value.
What draws our attention here is less the functionality or usefulness of things than their situation or ontological nature. Mourão’s gaze is turned above all to the apparent intelligibility of shapes, as if they spoke directly to us. His ensemble of works – sculptures, drawings, painting, prints, videos, installations, performances- always scoured subjectivities in action, in permanent coincidence with the real space in which they move. Since however cities do not separate themselves from their inhabitants and vice-versa, there is no real interest to be found in landscapes or time and space contingencies treated as mere background: shapes pulled out from cities are important in as far as they allow us a vision of the memory of social practices. For that reason, instead of pure forms we have an impure geometry, it is not abstraction strictly speaking nor is this a case of mere figurative art. Looking at Mourão’s “stamps” we experience the illusion that there is something to be seen in the in-between spaces, the intervals, created by the window frames as if there were something to look through to, an outside. Is there something to see outside? Is there an inside and an outside? Our eyes tend to see something, want to see something. Mourão knows that and teases us. Almost inevitably we are reminded of Alfred Hitchcock’s Rear Window. In the film, windows exist because of what can be seen through them: a world where the old bourgeois privacy dissolved as middle class clustered promiscuously together in apartment buildings. It is a gaze that delves, indiscretely, into narratives, facts, into the intimacy of others. By refusing that content, Raul Mourão creates windows, and doors, that are facts in themselves. Or even, concentrates on surfaces, creating a universe that lacks another side, it is bottomless, and there is no inside-out. I recall the Portuguese poet Sophia de Melo Breyner Andresen, who mentions the “vehemence of the visible”. Raul Mourão’s every gesture seems to look for this type of total presence.
We are a world apart from the effects of the trompe l´oeil. With no desire to imitate reality, but quite the opposite, Raul Mourão’s works are an effort to make the eye see. Even when Mourão recreates the LURIXS Gallery façade windows inside the main exhibition area – his aim is not to make visitors feel they are inside a (false) reality. Instead of feigned reality, visitors experience a displacement, an estrangement and are made to ponder, sharpening their perception. All is what it seems: form, texture, color, weight, volume, movement, density, rhythm, memory. Each construction has the “vehemence of the visible”. Instead of sleight of hand, we are faced with a lucid play, with the playful proposition of an art that will return us the pleasure of seeing things, and our own selves, in new situations. Thus by rejecting illusion, tricks, and falsity, Raul Mourão reaffirms the ethical and political dimension of his work even here, in this new exhibition whose works are at a considerable distance from those that carried a more explicit political statement.
Duchamp’s 1920 Fresh Widow steel multiples created a curious historic line, since they at once recovered the ready-mades (a key strategy in Mourão’s work) and the historicity of objects -in this case the window- in the history of architecture and the discursive fields that adopted it as a privileged sign. In much the same way, Mourão’s various versions of window frames remind us of the cubist grid or concrete art. In this sense it is possible to detect a clear critical and metalinguistic aspect that prevails over the entire exhibition – the drawings, paintings, sculptures, photographs (as far as it is possible to use such definitions) –whose subjective expression reveals aspects of philosophical commentary, both on Raul Mourão’s singular poetics – there are many echoes here of his obsessions – as well as of
(his own) history of art, always understood as, to use an expression by Giulio Carlo Argan, “storia dell’arte come della città”.

______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

“Animal Traction”, 2012
Luiz Camillo Osorio

Animal Traction presents a collection of recent works by Raul Mourão. Sculpture has always been his trade, but images and the streets propelled the act of sculpturing, with its concern for volume and gravity, toward the flow of live. To clandestinely and silently spread iron structures throughout the city guarding and enveloping the trunk of trees, or to hook some friend artists on the walls of the Sergio Porto gallery were initial movements of the artist, answering to a call to contaminate circuits and to invert expectations in relation to the spaces of art creation and reception. From these initial gestures including the later incorporation of traffic signs, symbols and references of daily life, three elements articulate his poetics: geometry, eloquence and humour. Not necessarily the three of them are present in each work, but at least two of these qualities are always present. Geometry implies a commitment with structural simplicity. Eloquence points toward an always present and direct presence of form. Humour functions as a seasoning that allows the emergence of a wave of intelligence, breaking with geometrical austerity and preventing a too immediate communication. The modular structures employed in scaffolds are rigid and utilitarian in their everyday tasks. In Mourao swings, however, they are overwhelmed by movement, by a playful articulation and by the amusement of being useful only to a disarmed regard. To set them in motion depends on a gesture by the visitor. Once in movement, they swing according to different rhythms. Some more agitated and tense, other more insinuating and sensual; some slower and some briefer. All of them, however, producing together a choreography to be admired by the visitor, who sees the outer landscape through their hollow spaces, who notice the movement of trees and cars piercing the movement of the pieces. It is not the case to stop and just observe. In my view, these pieces invite the
spectator to move. The spectator’s body joins an interesting synergy with the sculptures. A body swings the other, a body depends on the other; as in soccer, who is found in the move has preference. The plastic and visual presence of the world enters his work not as a theme, but as energy that permeates the creative process, unfolding the curious regard into kinetic structures, rhythmic planes, dancing shadows. The movement of the swings is displaced to the vertical levels of the elevator and from there to the mysterious drawing of light and shadow. If, despite the physical presence of small sculptures, there is a somewhat magical enchantment in the room of shadows, that surprises the spectator and leads him/her to a quite dreamy and illusory plane, in the video, despite the medium’s virtuality, prevails the materiality insinuated between the planes of light, shadow and concrete. One takes us to the dream, while the other takes us to the city. Such play between dream and city permeates Raul’s poetics since the beginning and invites us to an unconditioning of perceptions. Things may be perceived without a
functional determination, without a defined prescription by any kind of need.
Such is the freedom of an aesthetic regard that allows itself to be seduced by the mere appearance of phenomena, by the simultaneity and singularity of sensible data of that which is happening. The open camera attentive to the slow movement of the elevator is available to change and to the mere fruition of whether presents itself in each passage of light. This is a looping exhibition; everything comes and goes in swing: from the physical to the virtual, from body to light, from light to shadow. In this continuous movement, a kind of visual mantra, that which becomes explicit is the capacity of aesthetical enchantment of his work and the power of capturing and activating our perception before the appearance of things. Surprise in its whole disarmed contingency.

______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

“Floor, wall and people”, 2010
Frederico Coelho

The exhibition is opened and still. Step by step, you enter the hall and walk with the certitude that everything is in place. Your confident glance no longer looks for the ground when walking inside a gallery. You only have to face the works. And here they are. Solidly waiting. Still, firm, impavid, straight. At the beginning, as if you were in an abandoned house, there is the fear of touching something that may break or the worry of inadvertently moving a piece of furniture. But from the moment when you touch one of the edges, the resting
house will never stop again. For it is impossible to resist the temptation of triggering the graceful and lazy swing of these objects. To try a light weight and to grant movement to that which is inanimate. Raw steel is recovered by sensuality and its unexpected beauty is transformed into a swing, a welcoming and relaxed coming and going. In this way, like you, the visitors will touch everything, until each sculpture cease its movement and return to the inert darkness of the closed hall.
Raul Mourão has always been scared. Armored in abstractions, he wandered through the streets and saw fences where others found salvation. He fenced cars, stones and trees, he chased dogs, smashed heads, silenced surdos, boxed myths, hung artists, expanded hate, cultivated partners. And then, through a crack, when we reconnect illusions and celebrate life for nothing, Raul found lightness. A manner of chasing away maladies and expand affections was presented to him where he least expected it: in the geometric swing of stainless steel. In the coldness of straight angles, the artist opened a new avenue for his eyes. Even still, panic remained. To be scared is not an option, but a condition. Raul and his studio locate the whole world from a street in the neighborhood of Lapa. Sometimes he stays at the foot of the staircase, where the gringos and the whores and the kids and the tiles and the families and the couples and the abandoned cross the artist’s frenetic days. Ignoring official orders and closed residential condos with gym academies, Lapa’s streets are still hallucinating. Raul knows that. The kinetic sculptures of this exhibition are a proof that even in the midst of this urban hallucination, even in the rust that corrodes forms, even if squeezed between floor, wall and people, there is still beauty.

II
Nowadays everyone knows how to behave in a gallery, even when art demands abnormal behaviors. To observe, to touch, to participate. Without the mysteries, questionings and transgressions of the past, today there is even a certain comfort in being part of the work. In Raul’s exhibition, nevertheless, it’s not enough to touch the sculptures to be a participant. It’s not enough to set the pieces in motion to meet some kind of concept proposed by the artist. Here, the point is not to participate in order to be part of the show. The proposal is not about the compensatory-individual relation between spectator and work, in which to participate is to satisfy his drive to interfere in somebody else’s work. Raul offers us neither an animal nor a cape. Neither a path nor a labyrinth. Here, the great work at play is THE WHOLE SPACE OF THE HALL in permanent transformation after each movement.
Expanding the view of the exhibition as a collection of these sculptures in movement, the individual touch in any of the sculptures activates a physical mechanism and enters in direct dialogue with the other movements around the hall. The movements made by different people, at different moments, rearrange the whole time the exhibition’s geography. In this way, a singular movement automatically becomes collective. We will never have the same design in the hall, for we never will have the same movement, made by the same hand, at the same speed. For each one, his own exhibition. For it’s the spectator, in an evidence of his desire, who will chose that must be touched first.
Each one attracts me more? At which point I will start my adventure with them? There is no rule, recipe or code of behavior before these works. There is only this sensual invitation with no voice or text requesting to activate them. A liberty implicit in the balance between the bases and their improbable pendulums. For it is also not only about kinetic art. The history of art doesn’t need to be invoked for us to mention this drive to touch. It’s because inside this hall is installed an organic relation between that which the spectator wishes to activate and that which the pieces draw after being triggered. Here you have responsibility over the exhibition’s dynamics. Each one, with his strength or fear, contributes for the movement and the rupture of the placidity of these attracting figures. The balance in a single axle, the improbable organicity of the solid object, everything is embraced by the coming and going of the swing. The exhibition is formed from this wonder: to make the pieces dance.
Raul said that, during a rehearsal of Intrépida Trupe, the acrobat danced with his fences. Raul saw the iron fence turn and smiled. He saw the acrobat climbing on the iron fence and feared. He saw the acrobat swinging the iron fence and his mind was blown. These swinging sculptures were not born from raw rational impulse, nor were they engendered after many days of solitary calculations over weights and measures. They were born from a swing. For this reason their geometry follows the sinuosity of the body and the streets. Their layers of angles, the juxtaposition of stakes, the edge of unexpected weight, all this blows the reason of the steel and involves us in a hypnotic dance. The origin of the swings is this transposition of a foreign movement. It’s the appropriation of this gesture, expanded by the artist’s plastic glance.

III
There is also a solemn silence around that which moves. Echoing in low frequency in the hollowness of this silence, there is a certain feeling of risk. There is around the Swings a diffuse form of fear, a frisson that doesn’t allow you to be removed from that which frightens you, an impulse to play with that which may not work (will it fall? Will it hurt me?), to put one’s hand inside the fire, to be mesmerized by that which fascinates. There is, finally, a feeling of love. For once the rejection that heavy, cold and dark steel pieces invoke on us is over, we start to see personal shapes, outlines of bodies in a warm beauty. We are seduced by the artist into proving each title of the pieces, observing the timing of the works in movement and establishing a commitment with the contemplation of that which we admire. Each time you touch this works, be ready to erase the drawing of the space that you found and to be the co-author of this cartography of kinetic desires. In this unexpected feast of forms, empty your mind in the placid rhythm of time while Raul’s sculptures dance for you. Or, better saying, dance with you.