A heterogeneous group of Raul Mour\u00e3o\u2019s works involves our glance with irony. Mour\u00e3o 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\u2019s streets and the politics of form.<\/p>\n
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Drawings in longa manus<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n Despite his control of drawing, Mour\u00e3o 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:<\/p>\n \u201cTenho dois filhos e ningu\u00e9m sabe.<\/p>\n Ningu\u00e9m conhece.<\/p>\n (…) Poesia come tudo.<\/p>\n Aguardando sol para lavagem\u201d<\/p>\n Alguns s\u00e3o uma escritura da suspeita. J\u00e1 n\u00e3o \u00e9 do artista que se suspeita (uma hipot\u00e9tica 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 devora\u00e7\u00e3o pela po\u00e9tica, a lavagem. H\u00e1 um teor de desregulamenta\u00e7\u00e3o infiltrado no desenho.<\/p>\n 90 minutes of sculpture<\/strong><\/p>\n Raul Mour\u00e3o 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\u2019s rules and discipline are subverted in the sensitive investigation. It is in this 90minute field that Mour\u00e3o establishes a poetics of space in which the elements that order football undergo a permanent deregulamentation.<\/p>\n Cart\u00f5es<\/em> [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 H\u00e9lio Oiticica\u2019s 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 \u201ccards\u201d, 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.<\/p>\n In this interplay between dimensions, Mour\u00e3o\u2019s drawing may be a solid body. Like the kind of linear drawing produced by Franz Weissmann in the beginning of the 1950\u2019s, which granted a sculptural corporeity to the virtual image of solid objects, Mour\u00e3o constituted a geometry of football solids. A grande \u00e1rea (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 \u2013 the kick \u2013 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. Mour\u00e3o 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.<\/p>\n Defense and attack are related with absurd exaggeration. \u201cHalf-goal\u201d in Esporte (Sport) (1994) is a hypothesis. A hundred and thirty four (134) is the number for strangeness. It refers to \u201calmost\u201d. \u201cHalf-goal is the expression used to convey the situation in which a player gives a pass to a companion that is almost a goal\u201d, says Mour\u00e3o. This is the height (134 cm) of a sculpture corresponding to half the total height of the goal poles (268 cm). In Mour\u00e3o\u2019s work, the width remains the same: 768 cm. Mour\u00e3o\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n 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\u2019 Eurekablindhotland, with its balls of identical materials and shapes but diversified weights. Nevertheless, the crucial difference is the dynamics. While in Meireles\u2019 installation sounds function as reading index of speed, in Mour\u00e3o\u2019s 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\u2019s 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\u2019s techniques and the rules of the FIFA) and Sobrenatural de Almeida, which is the name of the Imponderable given by Nelson Rodrigues. Let\u2019s say that at some point the work pursues the \u2018dry leaf\u2019 geometry, that is, an exact imprecision of an accurate and tricky excessiveness.<\/p>\n Active [I]mmobility<\/strong><\/p>\n To grow a garden inside a car and to transport it through the city: Carro\/\u00c1rvore\/Rua 1 e 2<\/em> [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<\/em>). Mour\u00e3o displaces the verbal code to a condition of an inconstant locus<\/em>. With its unfixed space\/time relation, the ambulant garden could be a chapter of Jorge Luis Borges\u2019 A history of eternity<\/em>.<\/p>\n In the work Surdo-mudo<\/em> [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\u2019s school of sambas, introduced by the musician Bid\u00ea in the school of samba Est\u00e1cio de S\u00e1 in the end of the 1920\u2019s and beginning of the 1930\u2019s. It is the instrument that gives rhythm, determines the progress of the school of samba, conducts the carnival. In Surdo-mudo<\/em> [Deaf-mute], Mour\u00e3o performs a double antithetical operation of meaning alteration, keeping the signifier \u201csurdo\u201d (\u201cdeaf\u201d). The noun (the musical instrument) becomes and adjective (\u201cdeaf\u201d, unable to hear its own impossible music). It is proper of Mour\u00e3o\u2019s art to take the glance towards a settlement on the dysfunctionality of known objects. If the surdo defines the carnival tempo, in Mour\u00e3o\u2019s work there is a frozen process of time\/tempo itself, and its imprisonment in muteness.<\/p>\n In the video C\u00e3o\/Le\u00e3o<\/em> [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\u2019s aim \u2013 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<\/em>\/exhibitionist. The electronic eye of C\u00e3o\/Le\u00e3o<\/em> [Dog\/Lion], in an omniscient filming, is the superego of this human dog, like the dog in Albert Camus\u2019 The plague<\/em> and Baleia (Whale), the she-dog of Graciliano Ramos\u2019 Dry lives<\/em>, were indexes for the subject\u2019s misery and greatness. Man, says Louise Bourgeois about her symbolic vocabulary, is \u201clike an inventory of the animals\u201d of a place. The friction between the dog and the camera, produced by C\u00e3o\/Le\u00e3o<\/em> [Dog\/Lion], opens the eye of consciousness. \u201cToday we feel it is no longer necessary a war in order to kill the reality of the world\u201d, says Paul Virilio in The information bomb<\/em>. The dog of the Lapa neighborhood knows it. Raul Mour\u00e3o says it only needs the struggle between a dog and a video camera.<\/p>\n Almost<\/strong><\/p>\n The unsettling political agenda of Luladepel\u00facia<\/em> [CuddlyLula] (2005) and its numerical or modal variations place this production by Raul Mour\u00e3o in the limits of tri-dimensional caricatureg. If it were a caricature, Luladepel\u00facia<\/em> [CuddlyLula] would join the family of the reduction and the sharp humor\u2019s geometry of J. Carlos, N\u00e1ssara and C\u00e1ssio Loredano in Brazilian culture.<\/p>\n 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<\/em> (1905) and in Humor<\/em> (1927). Mour\u00e3o 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 \u2013 the materiality of the stuffed toy is an essential part of the work\u2019s character. In Laughter: an essay on the meaning of the comic<\/em> (1900), Henri Bergson notes that \u201cmatters resists and becomes obstinate\u201d, exactly in the chapter where he analyzes the \u201cthe comic of forms\u201d. By displacing his irony in Luladepel\u00facia<\/em> [CuddlyLula] to the very instance of the object\u2019s material (and less to the instance of form), Mour\u00e3o 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\u2019s erotic dispositive.<\/p>\n The artist merged two characters of the struggle for political transformation in Latin America: Lula and Guevara. Lula resignifies \u201cEl Che\u201d in a historical aggiornamento. There is another \u201calmost\u201d, 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 In\u00e1cio Guevara da Silva<\/em> (2006) by Raul Mour\u00e3o, Douglas Gordon created the diptych Louise Duchamp and Marcel Bourgeois<\/em>, a pair of portraits that alternates the faces of the two transgressive artists in their most well-known photos. For Mour\u00e3o, nevertheless, Lula is not worthy of Guevara\u2019s 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\u2019s, is the single pop symbol of international circulation produced in Latin America.<\/p>\n Elastic history of art<\/strong><\/p>\n Luladepel\u00facia<\/em> [CuddlyLula] corresponds to that discipline in Physics that studies the properties of elastic materials. Mour\u00e3o 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\u2019s law) with which Mour\u00e3o 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\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n It is in art history that Luladepel\u00facia<\/em> [CuddlyLula] simulates belonging to the order of malleability of Lygia Clark\u2019s works O dentro \u00e9 o fora<\/em> [The inside is the outside] (1963) and Obra mole<\/em> [Soft work] (1964). If Clark\u2019s rubberish Obra mole<\/em> [Soft work] is related to the movements of Baroque shapes, but above all with the notion of the \u201csoul\u2019s enfoldment\u201d in the geometry of the interiority of being \u2013 Luladepel\u00facia<\/em> [CuddlyLula] deliberately unknown reference is Gilles Deleuze\u2019s The fold: Leibniz and the baroque<\/em> \u2013 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<\/em> [Lulabox2] (2006). The title denotes the double and the countable deregulamentation. Armored inside its box \u2013 there \u2013 is impossible to touch the untouchable. After the haptic experience, one learns that the object Luladepel\u00facia<\/em> [CuddlyLula] is nothing but stuffing. It is not the monad that each Baroque individual is in his\/her singularity. The luggage-boxes of Lulacaixa1<\/em> [Lulabox1] (2005), Lulacaixa2<\/em> [Lulabox2] and Lulacaixa10<\/em> [Lulabox10] (2005) make it very clear. There is only room for the doll. In two of Antonio Dias\u2019 works Um pouco de prata para voc\u00ea<\/em> [A little bit of silver for you] (1965) and Cabe\u00e7as<\/em> [Heads] (1968), a set of proliferated cube-safes, the relations between capitalism and schizophrenia are stripped for everyone to see.<\/p>\n In the apprehension of the perceptive apparatus, Luladepel\u00facia<\/em> [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\u2019s Soft pay-telephone<\/em> (1963), Soft toilet<\/em> (1966) and Grand soft drum set<\/em> (1967) are pop simulacra of a non-existing sound. Each one works as an antithesis of itself: percussion is a non-played sound. Luladepel\u00facia<\/em> [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, Luladepel\u00facia<\/em> [CuddlyLula] is as mute as Mour\u00e3o\u2019s Surdo-mudo<\/em> [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 Luladepel\u00facia<\/em> [CuddlyLula]. It belongs to its plastic character. In Latin American art, Luladepel\u00facia<\/em> [CuddlyLula] would be near to La indecision<\/em> [Indecision], a canvas by Jorge de la Vega (1963, collection MAM-RJ). Stuffing in the Argentinean\u2019s bestiary produces a poignant viscerality, peculiar to the aesthetics of the 1960\u2019s group Otra Figuraci\u00f3n<\/em>. The elasticity of Luladepel\u00facia<\/em> [CuddlyLula] must be juxtaposed to the anamorphous distortions of La indecision<\/em> [Indecision]. The ambivalent sense of this Esquizobestia<\/em> [Schizobeast] formulates a critical view of the subject. In Jorge de la Vega\u2019s work, according to Mercedes Casanegra, anamorphosis are molded according to an inner attitude of vitality: fright, deflation, tension, reception of shocks, surprise.<\/p>\n In Luladepel\u00facia<\/em> [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, Mour\u00e3o\u2019s character Luladejardim<\/em> [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 \u2013 tongue and phallus \u2013 of Dans mon jardin<\/em> [On my garden] (1967), Dias\u2019 body without organs.<\/p>\n The erotic violence of Antonio Dias\u2019 work from the 1960\u2019s is found in the viscera and phallic volumes, some displayed as organized leftovers of a cannibal banquet. Luladepel\u00facia<\/em> [CuddlyLula] seems to be in conditions to dispense the father\u2019s law, transferring it to its double: Luladegeladeira<\/em> [Lulaforthefridge] (2006) (definitely, Luladepel\u00facia<\/em> [CuddlyLula]\u2019s double is not the same in a serial industrial production). Through an ontogenetic distortion, the beak of this lustrous penguin grew crocked as Pinocchio\u2019s nose. Luladegeladeira<\/em> [Lulaforthefridge] does not lie. It is what it looks \u2013 like the known market rule: \u201cwhat you see is what you get\u201d. 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\u2019 onanist index Solit\u00e1rio<\/em> [Solitary] (1967). Explicit sex is not appropriate for the moral fridge of the middle-class, even though Luladegeladeira<\/em> [Lulaforthefridge] struggles for inconspicuously restoring the phallic order asleep in Luladepel\u00facia<\/em> [CuddlyLula].<\/p>\n It was published in Playboy<\/em> magazine<\/strong><\/p>\n Since perhaps Juscelino presidents were not so genuinely interested by a work of art as Luladepel\u00facia<\/em> [CuddlyLula]. \u201cI liked the doll a lot because it is like the real Lula: it adapts to anything\u201d, said the former president Fernando Henrique Cardoso in a political-phenomenological analysis of Mour\u00e3o\u2019s work, in an interview for the magazine Playboy<\/em> during a period Theory of representation<\/strong><\/p>\n In the political and constitutional theory of representation, Luladepel\u00facia<\/em> [CuddlyLula] represents the \u201ccuddlyvoter\u201d?<\/p>\n Narcissism<\/strong><\/p>\n Why did the model want to have the Luladepel\u00facia<\/em> [CuddlyLula]? Why didn\u2019t he choose the Luladegeladeira<\/em> [Lulaforthefridge]? Along with Lacan, could we be, in the specific case of Luladepel\u00facia<\/em> [CuddlyLula], in the mirror stage as formative of the function of the I (Je) as revealed in psychoanalytic experience?<\/p>\n Equation: if it were a mirror, Luladepel\u00facia<\/em> [CuddlyLula] would be loyal to one only. What this one would be? Its model or the voter?<\/p>\n Toys<\/strong><\/p>\n The elasticity of Luladepel\u00facia<\/em> [CuddlyLula] results in a similitude closer to Bob Bag than to Luladegeladeira<\/em> [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.<\/p>\n Luladepel\u00facia<\/em> [CuddlyLula] seems to have escaped from Jean Baudrillard\u2019s system of objects. The destiny of many plush toys, a displaced target for affectivity, is to become fetish. In Fetishism<\/em> (1927), Freud explains fetish as a substitute for the maternal phallus. Its function is to maintain the child\u2019s believe in the existence of a mother\u2019s penis.<\/p>\n Walter Benjamin, not ignoring the conditions of both artisanal and industrial production, points out, along with other Freudian text (Beyond the principle of pleasure<\/em>) 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, \u201cchildren are hard and are distant from the world\u201d, ponders Benjamin in The cultural history of toys<\/em> (1928). In the cognitive and psychic field, a toy fulfills some tasks that Luladepel\u00facia<\/em> [CuddlyLula] could, though, volunteer to perform. Nevertheless, Luladepel\u00facia<\/em> [CuddlyLula] is not a toy. Being an \u201cimitation\u201d, acting on the field of political representation, it belongs to the field of \u201cgames\u201d, not of toys, in an interpretation still based on Benjamin.<\/p>\n Pair<\/strong><\/p>\n Raul Mour\u00e3o\u2019s Luladepel\u00facia<\/em> [CuddlyLula] and Piotr Uklanski\u2019s Portrait of Lula<\/em> (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 In\u00e1cio Lula da Silva in order to take his picture. When the scandal of the monthly bribe payment (known as \u201cmensal\u00e3o\u201d) is at its peak, Uklanski\u2019s 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\u2019t hide the loss of a finger due to a work accident. It is an ethical sign. Luladepel\u00facia<\/em> [CuddlyLula] can only arrive at perplexity.<\/p>\n Absurd<\/strong><\/p>\n Raul Mour\u00e3o 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 (\u201cthe most practiced sport in the world\u201d), on the image of a specific president of the Republic or on property.<\/p>\n In a new graphic syntax, Mour\u00e3o 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\u2019s Architects\u2019 data<\/em>, which regulates a great deal of Western professional architecture. The rules are not broken, but expectations are tricked. Maracan\u00e3 enterrado (Buried Maracan\u00e3) still is a football field, but without the noise of the rooters, without the etymological meaning of the word \u201cmaracan\u00e3\u201d, 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 Salom\u00e3o, his head is an island: EsculturaparaWaly<\/em> [SculptureforWaly] (2003). The poet is an island. It may be the very delirium of language.<\/p>\n In the extreme of architectural perversions, Mata-mata<\/em> [Kill-kill] (2003), whose homicide title is taken from the slang used by billiard players, proposes a leisure area for a building. Mata-mata<\/em> [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: \u201cIf you\u2019re sad, jump; if you\u2019re happy, fly\u201d. 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. Mour\u00e3o\u2019s 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\u2019s terrace that sends the resident in free-fall straight to the patio. It is his subtle criticism to real state capital.<\/p>\n Entropy of the document<\/strong><\/p>\n \u201cI 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\u201d \u2013 this is the technological process of the group of images of the photo series drama.doc<\/em> (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\u2019t find here Derrida\u2019s \u201cmal d\u2019archives\u201d16. 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 \u201cgrain\u201d), Mour\u00e3o\u2019s final photos requalify the entropic results of technological perversion as a critic quality of the image.<\/p>\n Geometry of fear<\/strong>.<\/p>\n From certain angles, Raul Mour\u00e3o\u2019s studio looks like a locksmith workshop. There are dozens of iron structures of different shapes. Each one is singular. Mour\u00e3o\u2019s structures, nevertheless, avoid the Minimalist precision of Sol LeWitt\u2019s geometry of perception. For Mour\u00e3o, a dose of unpredictableness is crucial in order to keep the depth of the social fabric from where these geometrical paradigms come.<\/p>\n \u201cOften no longer there is an air-conditioner device. There is only emptiness\u201d, says Raul Mour\u00e3o 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 \u2013 another perversity by Mour\u00e3o \u2013 distances itself from the psychological frame of Lygia Clark\u2019s \u201cinner emptiness\u201d or \u201cfulfilled emptiness\u201d and from Mira Schendel\u2019s metaphysics of the emptiness of the world (“vuoto del mondo\u201d).<\/p>\n Raul Mour\u00e3o 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, Mour\u00e3o\u2019s 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 Mour\u00e3o are co-related to Ivens Machado\u2019s walls and objects with broken glass by Machado and Bispo do Ros\u00e1rio. In the exhibition Obst\u00e1culos\/Medidas<\/em> [Obstacles\/Measures] in the \u00c1rea Experimental (Experimental Field)17 in 1975, Ivens Machado displayed an installation composed by the rebuilding, in crescent height, of the city\u2019s walls. A vertical column of photographs presented \u2013 against each one\u2019s height \u2013 the original walls. For Bispo do Ros\u00e1rio, the desire of owning a house is fixed on a long wooden object covered by cement and pieces of broken glass, with the legend: \u201c434 \u2013 how should I build a wall in the back of my house\u201d. 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. Mour\u00e3o, Machado and Bispo do Ros\u00e1rio produce afflictive objects.<\/p>\n Raul Mour\u00e3o\u2019s 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. Mour\u00e3o refers to these sculptures as \u201chappenings of the fences\u201d. \u201cThey 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\u201d, he concludes. Raul Mour\u00e3o produced a collection of sculptures of fear (and caution). Another sculpture proposed by Mour\u00e3o is a tent of a street-vendor, an emblem of informal economy, an indicative of another marginal activity in peripherycal capitalism.<\/p>\n There is a kind of symmetrical fear, which implies an opposition of alterities. Departing from it, Mour\u00e3o constructs his grid. Ivens Machado\u2019s Obst\u00e1culos\/Medidas<\/em> [Obstacles\/Measures] dealt with this confusion between dominance and prison. Always straight to the point, Bispo do Ros\u00e1rio didn\u2019t allow the entrance of anyone in his psychiatric hospital cell. He segregated the world outside<\/em> his room. In 1993, I\u00f1igo Manglano-Ovalle developed the project Video neighbors\u2019 network<\/em> 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. Mour\u00e3o\u2019s sculptures are constituted as fear apparatus, triggers of paranoia. Some of his works are defined by the logics of the object\u2019s form, such as the car-fence and the air-conditioner-fence.<\/p>\n 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<\/em>). The sculptures are piled, articulated, interpenetrated, juxtaposed. The spectator faces absence fluxes. And should place his\/her regard on them.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" by Paulo Herkenhoff published on the book ArteBra A heterogeneous group of Raul Mour\u00e3o\u2019s works involves our glance with irony. Mour\u00e3o 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 asContinue reading →<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[65],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.raulmourao.com\/portfolio\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3061"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.raulmourao.com\/portfolio\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.raulmourao.com\/portfolio\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.raulmourao.com\/portfolio\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.raulmourao.com\/portfolio\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3061"}],"version-history":[{"count":10,"href":"https:\/\/archive.raulmourao.com\/portfolio\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3061\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3073,"href":"https:\/\/archive.raulmourao.com\/portfolio\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3061\/revisions\/3073"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.raulmourao.com\/portfolio\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3061"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.raulmourao.com\/portfolio\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3061"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.raulmourao.com\/portfolio\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3061"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
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