Exhibition "José Resende: In the Membrane of the World

We live in a time marked by virtuality, by the dilution of the corporeal dimension in the relationship with the world, by the massive presence of images. This is also a time in which attention deficit prevails, a gaze that sees everything and sees nothing. The work of José Resende runs counter to these imperatives that mark our present. Leather, paraffin, felt, steel, iron, lead, brass, copper, wood, stone, rubber. The materials found in the works brought together today at the Iberê Foundation are those that anonymously inhabit everyday urban spaces. Here they are always in contact with each other, setting up a chain of fertile neighbours: hot/cold, liquid/solid, rigid/soft, opaque/transparent, smooth/rough. If in daily life our retinas are flooded by images that seem to bring more certainties than doubts, with each of Resende's sculptures the opposite occurs. Before them, a kind of bewilderment crosses us and we are questioned by that form that has no parallel in the world, since it is the result of a gesture that inaugurates a singular imaginary based on what was until then dormant in the prosaic everyday life. We are faced with a plastic act that opposes "the generalised automatism and dispersion" of the current world.

If his work subverts a simultaneously hurried and anaesthetised gaze, it also possesses the capacity to promote a diversion in a time characterised by the increasing dissolution of the corporeal and eroticised dimensions of life. Sometimes her sculptures evoke movement or leave traces of some manual passage. Some of his materials refer to membranes, skins, surfaces that cover the interior of bodies. This choice to inhabit a space "in between", capable of revealing and concealing at the same time, alludes in turn to the sphere of eroticism, as well as the countless times in which two distinct elements touch, rub, come together, come close to each other in order to form a continuous whole.

The set of eighteen works gathered here (the most remote has its origin in 1974, the most recent in 2018), added to the presence of "Olhos atentos" (2006) on the banks of the Guaíba, reveals a variety capable of covering the main axes of his poetic programme. By giving an unsuspected meaning to the incessant murmur of small things that inhabit our days, by establishing fruitful neighbours between heterogeneous elements, by promoting a pause in the characteristic rush of urban life, the work of José Resende, without any fuss, ends up reminding us that the locus of our experience in the world resides in the link between body and look and, in that same move, awakens us from a persistent and opaque hibernation of the senses.

Luisa Duarte

 

Service

Exhibition "José Resende: in the membrane of the world"
Fundação Iberê Camargo
from 13 November to 06 March 2022
Av. Padre Cacique, 2000 Porto Alegre RS
For further information, visit the institution's website