Redemptive Glimpses from the Future World
ARTISTS Ben Cauchi (NZ), Lola Lustosa (BR) and Ze Carlos Garcia (BR)
In art, actions and gestures are maybe the most intuitive and honest on their purposes. They are like dreams to be seen in real or to be remembered, questions and propositions to be thought and answered. Still what is the content of these actions and gestures is the past among us, what has moved us to the point of creation.
As Freud was pointing out, our super-ego is in less active role when we are sleeping due to the absence of voluntary motor activity. Therefore it seems that artists are dreaming awake and independent of their super-ego. Reality is only a topic or a starting point, and the representation of the dreams propose us to think about the content, that in interaction with others is still the unknown, the future.
Ben Cauchi works with photography using wet-collodion, one of the earliest forms of the medium. His imagery is based often on studio constructions – still items and staged scenarios. Nevertheless, the images of Ben Cauchi are ambiguous and ageless. They address the primary questions of photography: What is photography and what kind of an image of reality does it give? They bring us moments, stilling time and preserving it in solid form and as an object. As Glenn Barkley, curator at the Museum of Contemporary Art (MCA) Sydney, writes in Cauchi’s new publication THE EVENING HOURS: “This heightened sense of the past, and its depiction in the present, is paramount in the work of Ben Cauchi. He works very purposefully within a reconstructed material history rebooted for the present. Like his fellow travellers working with seemingly archaic print methods, or carving, or even painting, he has carefully rebuilt his skills base to reinvigorate a technique that technology had rendered obsolete. That is why photography’s past tends to dominate in any discussion of his work—it is one of its central distinctions, perhaps its most important thematic.” www.bencauchi.com
Ze Carlos Garcia’s feather sculptures are assemblages, collages of the movements. They are hybrids creating aesthetic species and functions. He makes complex sculptures whose subject is fundamentally the process of their creation: he starts each work without a preconceived composition or a recognizable form. Guided by intuition, he manipulates a wide range of bird’s feathers merged with pieces of old furniture and those possibilities of altered forms initially conceived by nature or proposed by some of the vanguard art movements from the early 20th century, therefore Garcia’s works do not fit into any movement or recognizable historical moment. Garcia worked for years for carnivals in Rio de Janeiro and later developed a personal technique and language. www.zecarlosgarcia.com.br
Lola Lustosa’s work Estudantina is a sequence of moments based on a short performance. It shows six seconds in six photographs. As in photography and dance, the actualization and specification of the moment are the main focus of her attention. The time of exposure is what makes everything visible. Gesture of the sequence is to disappear in light and to be exposed because of its existence. Lustosa works as a dancer, performer and photographer. Most of the time her works are a combination of these three elements. www.lolalustosa.com