by Paulo Herkenhoff
published on the book ArteBra
A heterogeneous group of Raul Mourão’s works involves our glance with irony. Mourão operates with the subtraction of rules and with gentle ways of transgressing them. The artist destabilizes. Everything is an object for irony, from power to fear. Every work seems to aim to act as a device for the practice of such perversity. In his repertoire, there is a confrontation with juridical order, the law of Physics, structures of behavior, norms and mores, the aesthetical canon, the rules of the games, the fence, the network or the Cubist grid. For transgressing, the artist deals with physical softness, elasticity, the geometry of fear, solid drawings, the culture of survival in Rio de Janeiro’s streets and the politics of form.
Drawings in longa manus
Despite his control of drawing, Mourão made some works that are texts done by a painter of popular posters. Using a legal term for the crime in which one employs the physical actions of a third party, the artist uses a longa manus for his drawing. The material drive, a Bachelardian way of organizing the world, is transferred to a third party who is anonymous to and alienated of the work division in artistic production:
“Tenho dois filhos e ninguém sabe.
Ninguém conhece.
(…) Poesia come tudo.
Aguardando sol para lavagem”
Alguns são uma escritura da suspeita. Já não é do artista que se suspeita (uma hipotética falta de virtuosismo resolvida com o convite a um outro para operar a artesania), mas da agenda de significados: os filhos mantidos em segredo, a devoração pela poética, a lavagem. Há um teor de desregulamentação infiltrado no desenho.
90 minutes of sculpture
Raul Mourão produced sculptures and objects for a predetermined temporal space: the 90 minutes of the regular time of a football game. In 1863, the Football Association established the rules that define the space of the field, the free kick and the penalty kick, the off side and the prohibition of touching the ball with the hands as well as the exceptions. The game’s rules and discipline are subverted in the sensitive investigation. It is in this 90minute field that Mourão establishes a poetics of space in which the elements that order football undergo a permanent deregulamentation.
Cartões [Cards] (2000) are two flat surfaces (rectangular solid acrylic sheets) inside a box. The monochromatic surfaces form a Concretist play. Their ludic quality of this work nears them to other objects with moveable parts made by Abraham Palatnik, Osmar Dillon or Paulo Roberto Leal in Brazilian Constructive tradition. Red and yellow, with the solar quality of Hélio Oiticica’s chromatic tones, are the protocol colors for advertence and expulsion in a football game. In the box, the planar movements of color stubbornly are not adjustable to the color “cards”, keeping some geometric indiscipline, instability and a certain lack of control. The spectator is faced with the hypothesis of sanction, symbols of censure and castration, of the control of rules.
In this interplay between dimensions, Mourão’s drawing may be a solid body. Like the kind of linear drawing produced by Franz Weissmann in the beginning of the 1950’s, which granted a sculptural corporeity to the virtual image of solid objects, Mourão constituted a geometry of football solids. A grande área (The big area) (2001) shapes a drawing of the football field within a stainless steel tube. Another large sculpture has the same dimensions of a penalty kick situation, between the penalty mark and the extremes of the two goal poles. There are two oblique lines in relation to the goal area line 18 yards of distance. The foot – the kick – will make the final drawing. The ball describes the drawing. The single and continuous structure that unmasks the unity between the adversaries. We are talking of a device that measures tension: around the ball, the goal-keeper and the player who will kick the penalty there are the antagonist One, face to face. Mourão exhibits the unavoidable opposition between Two that are merged and divided in the attraction of the opposites. The eye-ball is now blind. It goes without looking. To look is not to see, but to perceive beyond the five senses and to calculate with precision.
Defense and attack are related with absurd exaggeration. “Half-goal” in Esporte (Sport) (1994) is a hypothesis. A hundred and thirty four (134) is the number for strangeness. It refers to “almost”. “Half-goal is the expression used to convey the situation in which a player gives a pass to a companion that is almost a goal”, says Mourão. This is the height (134 cm) of a sculpture corresponding to half the total height of the goal poles (268 cm). In Mourão’s work, the width remains the same: 768 cm. Mourão’s drawing of the football field is not built through perturbing relations between architecture and anamorphosis, like the ones introduced by Cildo Meireles in Brazilian art, but through strangeness and humor.
In the space of the lawn, a solid is unable to roll. An iron ball is on the field: Bolas 1 e 2 (Balls 1 and 2) (1999). It weights dozens of pounds (much more than the 14 or 15 ounces established by FIFA). It is there to confuse our glance before which is not apprehensible by our retina: weight. Here, the historical reference is Cildo Meireles’ Eurekablindhotland, with its balls of identical materials and shapes but diversified weights. Nevertheless, the crucial difference is the dynamics. While in Meireles’ installation sounds function as reading index of speed, in Mourão’s sculpture the sphere is pure immobility. Which means, in this case, that football is not about a rolling ball. This invisible different transforms ball into eye, with its double phallacy: the spectator’s optical illusion and the unpredictable trajectories of the not rolling ball. An eye in the state of magic is required, since art is kept between the Logos (the Cartesian reasoning, including the sport’s techniques and the rules of the FIFA) and Sobrenatural de Almeida, which is the name of the Imponderable given by Nelson Rodrigues. Let’s say that at some point the work pursues the ‘dry leaf’ geometry, that is, an exact imprecision of an accurate and tricky excessiveness.
Active [I]mmobility
To grow a garden inside a car and to transport it through the city: Carro/Árvore/Rua 1 e 2 [Car/Tree/Street 1 and 2] (1999). It is the mobility of that which is immovable. We would have here, then, a metaphor on the very metaphor as a semantic displacement (the Medieval usurpata translatio). Mourão displaces the verbal code to a condition of an inconstant locus. With its unfixed space/time relation, the ambulant garden could be a chapter of Jorge Luis Borges’ A history of eternity.
In the work Surdo-mudo [Deaf-mute] (1999), a large stone smothers a surdo, a Brazilian percussion instrument. The surdo is a key musical instrument in the percussion group of Rio de Janeiro’s school of sambas, introduced by the musician Bidê in the school of samba Estácio de Sá in the end of the 1920’s and beginning of the 1930’s. It is the instrument that gives rhythm, determines the progress of the school of samba, conducts the carnival. In Surdo-mudo [Deaf-mute], Mourão performs a double antithetical operation of meaning alteration, keeping the signifier “surdo” (“deaf”). The noun (the musical instrument) becomes and adjective (“deaf”, unable to hear its own impossible music). It is proper of Mourão’s art to take the glance towards a settlement on the dysfunctionality of known objects. If the surdo defines the carnival tempo, in Mourão’s work there is a frozen process of time/tempo itself, and its imprisonment in muteness.
In the video Cão/Leão [Dog/Lion] (2002), a video camera uninterruptedly followed a stray dog during twelve hours, from 6am to 6pm, from dawn to sunset, without end. The film is almost a parody of a reality show. In a world where civil rights are more than ever threatened by State control and surveillance, the reality shows are the inverted proposal of the mass communication companies: to celebrate the alienating desire of being permanently watched in search of the fifteen minutes of Warholian fame in exchange of the judge and the censor’s aim – the consuming public. It is the desire of a fascist state of being produced by the channels of communication in the perfect game of the voyeur/exhibitionist. The electronic eye of Cão/Leão [Dog/Lion], in an omniscient filming, is the superego of this human dog, like the dog in Albert Camus’ The plague and Baleia (Whale), the she-dog of Graciliano Ramos’ Dry lives, were indexes for the subject’s misery and greatness. Man, says Louise Bourgeois about her symbolic vocabulary, is “like an inventory of the animals” of a place. The friction between the dog and the camera, produced by Cão/Leão [Dog/Lion], opens the eye of consciousness. “Today we feel it is no longer necessary a war in order to kill the reality of the world”, says Paul Virilio in The information bomb. The dog of the Lapa neighborhood knows it. Raul Mourão says it only needs the struggle between a dog and a video camera.
Almost
The unsettling political agenda of Luladepelúcia [CuddlyLula] (2005) and its numerical or modal variations place this production by Raul Mourão in the limits of tri-dimensional caricatureg. If it were a caricature, Luladepelúcia [CuddlyLula] would join the family of the reduction and the sharp humor’s geometry of J. Carlos, Nássara and Cássio Loredano in Brazilian culture.
The function of humor, a psycho-economic phenomenon, is to distend tensions. The unconscious in manifestations of laughter was studied by Freud in Jokes and their relation to the unconscious (1905) and in Humor (1927). Mourão objects break social conventions and inquire into the logic of the senses. Glance and touch are at the service of the sexual or aggressive impulses involved in the humor about the puffy – the materiality of the stuffed toy is an essential part of the work’s character. In Laughter: an essay on the meaning of the comic (1900), Henri Bergson notes that “matters resists and becomes obstinate”, exactly in the chapter where he analyzes the “the comic of forms”. By displacing his irony in Luladepelúcia [CuddlyLula] to the very instance of the object’s material (and less to the instance of form), Mourão established his focus on the materiality of the plush with acid irony. He settled a direct paradox in order to install an intimate strangeness. His haptic invitation to puffiness, in a pulsion exercise of touch and laughter, is the key to the work’s erotic dispositive.
The artist merged two characters of the struggle for political transformation in Latin America: Lula and Guevara. Lula resignifies “El Che” in a historical aggiornamento. There is another “almost”, now physiognomic, that displaces toward a fusion by ambivalence. Still being one and already being the other. In parallel to the merging of two images/personalities in the individual portrait Luiz Inácio Guevara da Silva (2006) by Raul Mourão, Douglas Gordon created the diptych Louise Duchamp and Marcel Bourgeois, a pair of portraits that alternates the faces of the two transgressive artists in their most well-known photos. For Mourão, nevertheless, Lula is not worthy of Guevara’s work. His gesture was to merge two communication phenomena, converted into T-shirts illustrations. Lula is inscribed in the new war operation of the telemarketing campaigns of presidential elections, with the commodification of the ideary (the conversion of the elector into a product), while Che Guevara, since the 1960’s, is the single pop symbol of international circulation produced in Latin America.
Elastic history of art
Luladepelúcia [CuddlyLula] corresponds to that discipline in Physics that studies the properties of elastic materials. Mourão projects meanings on them, displacing them from the political commentary to more properly visual, plastic and perceptive phenomena. The soft plush object is elastic because it is deformed by outer pressure, but once the pressure is gone it returns to the original shape. It is a law of Physics (Hooke’s law) with which Mourão constitutes the poetical regime of the object. It is like a complacent man. It is like a complacent hymen. An outer pressure may indifferently be a child’s caress or a punch on the stomach. The doll always returns to its original shape. And here the work demands a phenomelogy of the senses, since it is both visual and tactile.
It is in art history that Luladepelúcia [CuddlyLula] simulates belonging to the order of malleability of Lygia Clark’s works O dentro é o fora [The inside is the outside] (1963) and Obra mole [Soft work] (1964). If Clark’s rubberish Obra mole [Soft work] is related to the movements of Baroque shapes, but above all with the notion of the “soul’s enfoldment” in the geometry of the interiority of being – Luladepelúcia [CuddlyLula] deliberately unknown reference is Gilles Deleuze’s The fold: Leibniz and the baroque – here the body is squeezed and its fold is on the outside. One can see it clearly in the transparency of the box for Lulacaixa2 [Lulabox2] (2006). The title denotes the double and the countable deregulamentation. Armored inside its box – there – is impossible to touch the untouchable. After the haptic experience, one learns that the object Luladepelúcia [CuddlyLula] is nothing but stuffing. It is not the monad that each Baroque individual is in his/her singularity. The luggage-boxes of Lulacaixa1 [Lulabox1] (2005), Lulacaixa2 [Lulabox2] and Lulacaixa10 [Lulabox10] (2005) make it very clear. There is only room for the doll. In two of Antonio Dias’ works Um pouco de prata para você [A little bit of silver for you] (1965) and Cabeças [Heads] (1968), a set of proliferated cube-safes, the relations between capitalism and schizophrenia are stripped for everyone to see.
In the apprehension of the perceptive apparatus, Luladepelúcia [CuddlyLula] allows the recognition of a form known in daily life, as it happens in the cases of the stuffed volumes of Claes Oldenbourg, Jorge de la Vega and Antonio Dias. Oldenbourg’s Soft pay-telephone (1963), Soft toilet (1966) and Grand soft drum set (1967) are pop simulacra of a non-existing sound. Each one works as an antithesis of itself: percussion is a non-played sound. Luladepelúcia [CuddlyLula] stifles. Technically it is an acoustical equipment with the property of stifling sounds, including voices and rumors. This is the acoustical property of the stuffed elastic volume. In the field of percussion, Luladepelúcia [CuddlyLula] is as mute as Mourão’s Surdo-mudo [Deaf-mute]. Both are signifiers equipped with the ability to annul any kind of noise. The capacity of deformation is a physical quality of the object Luladepelúcia [CuddlyLula]. It belongs to its plastic character. In Latin American art, Luladepelúcia [CuddlyLula] would be near to La indecision [Indecision], a canvas by Jorge de la Vega (1963, collection MAM-RJ). Stuffing in the Argentinean’s bestiary produces a poignant viscerality, peculiar to the aesthetics of the 1960’s group Otra Figuración. The elasticity of Luladepelúcia [CuddlyLula] must be juxtaposed to the anamorphous distortions of La indecision [Indecision]. The ambivalent sense of this Esquizobestia [Schizobeast] formulates a critical view of the subject. In Jorge de la Vega’s work, according to Mercedes Casanegra, anamorphosis are molded according to an inner attitude of vitality: fright, deflation, tension, reception of shocks, surprise.
In Luladepelúcia [CuddlyLula], the stuffed elasticity does not create tensions and dissolves all shock energy. It borders impotency. An anticipated vengeance of the artist against the Corinthians rooter and bearer of bad luck for the Brazilian national football team, Mourão’s character Luladejardim [Lulaforgarden] (2006) wears the white and light blue colors of the Argentinean national team. The amateur players lacks the desire invested on the partial objects – tongue and phallus – of Dans mon jardin [On my garden] (1967), Dias’ body without organs.
The erotic violence of Antonio Dias’ work from the 1960’s is found in the viscera and phallic volumes, some displayed as organized leftovers of a cannibal banquet. Luladepelúcia [CuddlyLula] seems to be in conditions to dispense the father’s law, transferring it to its double: Luladegeladeira [Lulaforthefridge] (2006) (definitely, Luladepelúcia [CuddlyLula]’s double is not the same in a serial industrial production). Through an ontogenetic distortion, the beak of this lustrous penguin grew crocked as Pinocchio’s nose. Luladegeladeira [Lulaforthefridge] does not lie. It is what it looks – like the known market rule: “what you see is what you get”. Its hard matter insists on restoring elasticity. The true is that now it points to a restless fact. The symbolic inadequateness of the kitsch object is patent, but sex falls within the art system, like Dias’ onanist index Solitário [Solitary] (1967). Explicit sex is not appropriate for the moral fridge of the middle-class, even though Luladegeladeira [Lulaforthefridge] struggles for inconspicuously restoring the phallic order asleep in Luladepelúcia [CuddlyLula].
It was published in Playboy magazine
Since perhaps Juscelino presidents were not so genuinely interested by a work of art as Luladepelúcia [CuddlyLula]. “I liked the doll a lot because it is like the real Lula: it adapts to anything”, said the former president Fernando Henrique Cardoso in a political-phenomenological analysis of Mourão’s work, in an interview for the magazine Playboy during a period
of electoral campaign.
Theory of representation
In the political and constitutional theory of representation, Luladepelúcia [CuddlyLula] represents the “cuddlyvoter”?
Narcissism
Why did the model want to have the Luladepelúcia [CuddlyLula]? Why didn’t he choose the Luladegeladeira [Lulaforthefridge]? Along with Lacan, could we be, in the specific case of Luladepelúcia [CuddlyLula], in the mirror stage as formative of the function of the I (Je) as revealed in psychoanalytic experience?
Equation: if it were a mirror, Luladepelúcia [CuddlyLula] would be loyal to one only. What this one would be? Its model or the voter?
Toys
The elasticity of Luladepelúcia [CuddlyLula] results in a similitude closer to Bob Bag than to Luladegeladeira [Lulaforthefridge], since it always return to its original position. There is a double reason for this: both volumes are dynamized by Physical laws and both look like toys.
Luladepelúcia [CuddlyLula] seems to have escaped from Jean Baudrillard’s system of objects. The destiny of many plush toys, a displaced target for affectivity, is to become fetish. In Fetishism (1927), Freud explains fetish as a substitute for the maternal phallus. Its function is to maintain the child’s believe in the existence of a mother’s penis.
Walter Benjamin, not ignoring the conditions of both artisanal and industrial production, points out, along with other Freudian text (Beyond the principle of pleasure) that toys, on one hand, tend to certain realizations of libido and, on the other hand, tend to absorb adult projections, including ideological ones. In this sense, “children are hard and are distant from the world”, ponders Benjamin in The cultural history of toys (1928). In the cognitive and psychic field, a toy fulfills some tasks that Luladepelúcia [CuddlyLula] could, though, volunteer to perform. Nevertheless, Luladepelúcia [CuddlyLula] is not a toy. Being an “imitation”, acting on the field of political representation, it belongs to the field of “games”, not of toys, in an interpretation still based on Benjamin.
Pair
Raul Mourão’s Luladepelúcia [CuddlyLula] and Piotr Uklanski’s Portrait of Lula (2005, collection MNBA, Rio de Janeiro) indicate how a work of art may welcome a conjectural signification. In 2005, the same day that Brazilian newspapers highlighted the first news about the scandal of Post Office bribes involving congressmen, the Polish artist Piotr Uklanski had a meeting with the president Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva in order to take his picture. When the scandal of the monthly bribe payment (known as “mensalão”) is at its peak, Uklanski’s finished portrait depicted an evanescent Lula in the air, but his image reflected on the glass covering of his working table was precise. It was a diving, almost like a playing card in an unfaithful mirroring. The link between the two specular images was the juxtaposed strong hands, which didn’t hide the loss of a finger due to a work accident. It is an ethical sign. Luladepelúcia [CuddlyLula] can only arrive at perplexity.
Absurd
Raul Mourão thinks a kind of theory of strangeness from mass culture. He is not so interested in this Freudian unheimlich in an individual level as he is in a proposition of ample social impact. Hence, his work on football (“the most practiced sport in the world”), on the image of a specific president of the Republic or on property.
In a new graphic syntax, Mourão started to produce computer drawings with technical software, grating to a series of serigraphies a finishing-up similar to the graphic representation of architectural projects. There is no nonsense in these works; they are exercises of architectural perversion. Neither they are distortions of Ernest Neufert’s Architects’ data, which regulates a great deal of Western professional architecture. The rules are not broken, but expectations are tricked. Maracanã enterrado (Buried Maracanã) still is a football field, but without the noise of the rooters, without the etymological meaning of the word “maracanã”, in the sense of the hectic noise produced by a gathering of parrots. Raul creates a delirious architecture. In a project of monument made of stone blocks inside the sea for Waly Salomão, his head is an island: EsculturaparaWaly [SculptureforWaly] (2003). The poet is an island. It may be the very delirium of language.
In the extreme of architectural perversions, Mata-mata [Kill-kill] (2003), whose homicide title is taken from the slang used by billiard players, proposes a leisure area for a building. Mata-mata [Kill-kill] can be related to the issues of art and melancholy found in the drawings of the Austrian artist Werner Reiterer. With his Viennese psychoanalytical humor, a Reiterer drawing proposes two jumping-boards for the terrace of the former Kunsthallewien pavilion: “If you’re sad, jump; if you’re happy, fly”. For the first hypothesis, there is a net so one could have fun; for the second, the certainty of suicide. It is a work of institutional criticism. Mourão’s irony is to propose therapeutic advantages in the fashion of advertising releases of residential real state developers. The equipment of his building intends to cure depression in a radical way. There is a jumping-board in the sixth-floor hallway and a slide on the building’s terrace that sends the resident in free-fall straight to the patio. It is his subtle criticism to real state capital.
Entropy of the document
“I took over a thousand photos. They are part of a research. They were not originally black and white. One day I digitalized the images in low-resolution, printed them also in low-resolution, make a Xerox copy in a simple machine and then brought it to handle in the Photoshop” – this is the technological process of the group of images of the photo series drama.doc (2003). The documental archive of the grid scenes was not produced for a mere consignation of existence, the step just before its immediate disappearance into forgetfulness. We don’t find here Derrida’s “mal d’archives”16. The artist created a process of image transmigration between reproduction techniques in order to produce an ambivalent point of identity of the place and the objects. They were insistently activated in the process of transmigration. In the limit, the final image is almost a fence and almost the Cubist grid. The legibility of the photos borders the anatomy of architectural phantasms. The resolution and the definition of the image were violated. With the result of the semiological operation (each image technique offers its visual “grain”), Mourão’s final photos requalify the entropic results of technological perversion as a critic quality of the image.
Geometry of fear.
From certain angles, Raul Mourão’s studio looks like a locksmith workshop. There are dozens of iron structures of different shapes. Each one is singular. Mourão’s structures, nevertheless, avoid the Minimalist precision of Sol LeWitt’s geometry of perception. For Mourão, a dose of unpredictableness is crucial in order to keep the depth of the social fabric from where these geometrical paradigms come.
“Often no longer there is an air-conditioner device. There is only emptiness”, says Raul Mourão about the situation of rails in the houses. The lack, states the artist, is emptiness and not warmth. There are melancholic phantasms that insist on molding an absence. Melancholy is not having the household device, the propriety of the object. The bastard emptiness – another perversity by Mourão – distances itself from the psychological frame of Lygia Clark’s “inner emptiness” or “fulfilled emptiness” and from Mira Schendel’s metaphysics of the emptiness of the world (“vuoto del mondo”).
Raul Mourão deals with a geometry of fear in a precise historical context. Fear is the symptom of Brazilian social violence, of social exclusion and poverty, as a psychical reaction against theft, burglary and armed robbery. The sculptures are monuments of our present time. In this sense, Mourão’s sculpture accuses History. Decades of absence of a social project for the incorporation of large masses to the work market and consumerism generated social tension, partially resolved by a diffuse social violence, especially crimes against property. These structures by Raul Mourão are co-related to Ivens Machado’s walls and objects with broken glass by Machado and Bispo do Rosário. In the exhibition Obstáculos/Medidas [Obstacles/Measures] in the Área Experimental (Experimental Field)17 in 1975, Ivens Machado displayed an installation composed by the rebuilding, in crescent height, of the city’s walls. A vertical column of photographs presented – against each one’s height – the original walls. For Bispo do Rosário, the desire of owning a house is fixed on a long wooden object covered by cement and pieces of broken glass, with the legend: “434 – how should I build a wall in the back of my house”. To cover walls with pointy pieces of broken glass is a popular construction technique that prevents intrusion. A defense of property is inscribed in the division between public and private in the works of the three artists. Mourão, Machado and Bispo do Rosário produce afflictive objects.
Raul Mourão’s work dislodges the Cubist grid to the middle-class experience of power and vernacular architectural logic, including its mechanisms for the protection of capital, symbols of status, working tools and household devices against robbery and vandalism. To begin with, it is necessary to acknowledge that the work follows a logic of peripherycal capital relations. Mourão refers to these sculptures as “happenings of the fences”. “They are linear security structures. From these I went to other objects that are spread throughout the city, like street-vendors tents. (…) I reproduce some of these structures and transform others”, he concludes. Raul Mourão produced a collection of sculptures of fear (and caution). Another sculpture proposed by Mourão is a tent of a street-vendor, an emblem of informal economy, an indicative of another marginal activity in peripherycal capitalism.
There is a kind of symmetrical fear, which implies an opposition of alterities. Departing from it, Mourão constructs his grid. Ivens Machado’s Obstáculos/Medidas [Obstacles/Measures] dealt with this confusion between dominance and prison. Always straight to the point, Bispo do Rosário didn’t allow the entrance of anyone in his psychiatric hospital cell. He segregated the world outside his room. In 1993, Iñigo Manglano-Ovalle developed the project Video neighbors’ network with the juvenile gangs that divide the city of Chicago in territories, in order to use video for building a neighborhood collective identity18. The iron-fenced structures in which the videos were exhibited worked as the transparent metaphor for the very territories of each group. The work exposed the territory both as dominance and prison of the gang. Extraterritoriality was annulled. Mourão’s sculptures are constituted as fear apparatus, triggers of paranoia. Some of his works are defined by the logics of the object’s form, such as the car-fence and the air-conditioner-fence.
If the object is confined by form, the final result builds a grid of fear. In their brutal harshness, the fences, in the instance of art, shape another volume. From the work with the absence of the protected objects, it ends up creating a sculpture of air and the impalpable. In the studio, the sculptures are mingled. They integrate one another, as if they followed the plan of the installation Entonces19. More than this, they search each other as desiring machines20. They form alleatory groupings. In the limit of formal saturation, these sculptures revert their regulamentory and mechanicist purpose and become partial objects. In the psychic level, that which is symbolically condensed in a body without organs is no longer emptiness, but lack (manque). The sculptures are piled, articulated, interpenetrated, juxtaposed. The spectator faces absence fluxes. And should place his/her regard on them.