Talles Lopes
By Charlene Cabral
Critical text written for the exhibition Contar o tempo. 2022.
Curated by Dária Jaremchuk at the Maria Antônia University Center.
USP - University of São Paulo.
Being the stage in which the sun has already surpassed the horizon line, the dawn can be defined as the beginning of the day itself, and the instant preceded by the aurora, which is the light seen before the sun rises. Notice the subtle difference: between the aurora and the dawn, only a few minutes, and the poetic possibility of assigning to the former a certain dose of hope, for what it announces, and of mystery, for what it does not make evident; whereas the latter is an ongoing situation, visible, with more explicit stages. In this one, the origin of the name Palácio da Alvorada (“Palace of the Dawn”, in English), Oscar Niemeyer’s design for the Brazilian president’s official residence, the first masonry work inaugurated in Brasília, in 1958, amidst the expansionist project euphoria.
It would have been much more humble to name the Palace through the bias of hope and mystery than to name it through the visible achievements - most importantly because these achievements began symbolically with itself -, but the design of Brasília was exactly that: the embodiment of an idea, a dream of progress, with no place to nuances or the absence of certainty. And architecture, as in so many other times in human history, would outstandingly accomplish its role of the power’s spectacular portfolio, whichever was the position in the ideological and political spectrum of the individuals involved in the planning of these emblematic buildings or their future inhabitants. From this dawn, a shared bet on the future of the country was born.
In the same year, the Brazilian Pavillion was presented at the International Exhibition in Brussels, showing a model of modern tropical civilization, in which the building of Brasília was in the spotlight and a big picture of the Palácio da Alvorada was shown to the world.
Graduated in Architecture, Talles Lopes lined this and other symbolic episodes in the presentation of the work Brazil Builds” (2022), an installation composed of a big metallic panel with black and white pictures, accompanied by a garden with usual plants in Brazilian landscaping. The species are planted in asbestos concrete vases from the 1960s, designed by the Swiss designer Willy Guhl and made by the company Eternit in Brazil. According to the advertisement from that time - also exposed in Lopes’ panel - these vases were inspired by the “architectural beauty of Brasília”, and, indeed, their clean and sinuous shapes, balancing weight and lightness, enable a visual relation with the modernist design. The material, very resistant and flexible, widely used as raw material in construction throughout the 20th Century, is nowadays forbidden in Brazil and many other countries for being highly harmful when inhaled. At this moment, if desired, a dark metaphor about the euphorias that concern certain ways of producing development can be added.
Lopes is an artist born in 1997 who since 2015 - thus rather young - has been placing himself into the art system through awards, such as Prêmio EDP nas Artes (Tomie Ohtake Institute), and through taking part in exhibitions such as the São Paulo International Architecture Biennial (CCSP) and Vaivém, curated by Raphael Fonseca at Banco do Brasil Cultural Center, amongst many others. Most recently, he held the individual exhibitions Excendente Monumental (“Monumental Excedent”, in English) at Museu de Arte de Anápolis - MAPA (Anápolis Art Museum), and Colonial Oasis at C.A.M.A., a showcase organized by the Portuguese gallery Kubik Gallery in the capital of São Paulo. At the time these lines are being written, he is a resident at Delfina Foundation in London and already has other participations in line over the year.
His career has been coherent not only in terms of placement but also, overall, in terms of the conceptual and aesthetic outcomes of his works. The design, in the architectural sense, is the support of his production, and from there Talles Lopes works solutions out. His “Sem Título” (“No Title”, in English) (2015-2018) map series, in which he uses gouache, watercolor, acrylics, and ink on paper, achieving a clean and precise result, unfolds the possibilities of the cartographic drawing, adding images and other composition elements that require an interpretative will from the spectator, at the same time they put themselves into an intuitive exam or, to the less restless, purely visual. In these works, the mastery of his lines is evident; that is just the beginning, though.
In his most recent works, the designformat shows up in an even more evident way. The drawing is still the foundation but behind the main scene. The pieces are signed by different collaborators, in many distinct raw materials, that are always credited in the technical specifications of the pieces. In some cases, the performer presumably literally executes the project, as in the structures; in other cases, it is indeed a commission: Talles Lopes counts on the lines of the person that has been hired, as seen in the large size paintings that compose A Grande Orla de Novo Aripuanã (“Novo Aripuanã’s Great Waterfront”, in English) (2020), made by Valdson Ramos, based in Lopes’ design for the Goiás Museum of Contemporary Art’s span (2018), made by Jaime Pureza.
This scrambling logic in authorship permeates his production, which does not change in Construção Brasileira - in both the photobook from 2018 and its unfoldings and in the installation presented in “Contar o tempo” (“Counting time”, in English). Here, the pillars from Palácio da Alvorada are once again the main element. The artist has been thinking about this element and unfolding it every other time throughout his path. A few years ago he started to collect images of vernacular buildings spread all over Brazil, where the modernist pillar comes up as an ornament on the façades of these buildings. It is clear the many kinds of quotations, replicas, or tributes that have certainly not been expected by the celebrated Oscar Niemeyer. A further and not-planned stage of this dawn that seems to never finish beginning.
Despite being born in Guarujá (in the coastal area of São Paulo), Talles Lopes was brought up and still lives in the Brazilian midwestern region, in the city of Anápolis, located approximately 140km from the federal capital and strategic point for transshipment during the building of Brasília. That is from where he has been visiting buildings scattered all over the inner parts of the Brazilian states, in a sort of architectural mapping. With a method that gathers the search of keywords on social platforms, consulting literature on popular architecture, long toursthrough Wikipedia and Google Street View, and pictures sent by acquaintances, he has already mapped more than 60 buildings that recreate the pillar, not only in the central region of Brazil but also in states such as Acre, Rio Grande do Sul, Amazonas, and Paraíba. Putting together such a collection, it does not make any difference if Lopes has been to these places in person or not, once the traveling artist is always an outsider; it also does not matter if he was the one to take the pictures or not. The main point in a work like this one is the statement he produces when he decides to present them all together under the same black and white aesthetics, emulating a vision from the past, even though it is clear these images have been taken from Google since they show their typical distortions, watermarks or shadows.
A collection that points thus to the frictions between copyright architecture (rare, distinct, exclusive) and ordinary architecture (common, banal, unrestricted), motivating thoughts on the ways of popular assimilation of visualities connected to power or the spectacular, and also of its subversions, voluntary or not. In addition to that, it allows us to reflect upon the official (or officious) historical speeches and the role of the images in both their reaffirmation and scrambling, resulting in a research that is capable of informing and exposing certain margins of a national map essentially centralized and therefore unknown.