[EN] — Talles Lopes

MOMUMENAL SURPLUS
MAPA (Museum of Plastic Arts of Anápolis)
2021

SPACE, HISTORY, CARTOGRAPHY AND ARCHITECTURE IN THE WORK OF TALLES LOPES

Text by Divino Sobral

In his first solo exhibition, Talles Lopes deepens his research on space, having as major references the histories of cartography and architecture. He is an artist and researcher who delves into the layers of meanings disposed in mapping, recognition, construction, use, and representation of space, understood as a set of relationships between elements of physical and social order. His interest turns, especially, to the place where the human experience tales place, called Brazil.

The artist problematizes the map as a visual record of space and a measurement of the actions that take place in it. He emphasizes the role of cartography both as art and as an ideological tool of control over territory, and, using cartographic conventions, comments on everything from the invention of cartographic space to actual statistical data concerning social, economic, and political issues.

Talles Lopes reflects on the representation of the country’s interior in cartography made from the 16th century to the 1960s, and observes in the colonial maps the complete distinction between the wild interior and the civilized coast where the Portuguese invasion and colonization started; notes that the abundant mineral riches in the unknown wilderness drove the ambition of the bandeirantes (explorers), who caused the expansion of the territory at the cost of genocide; points out that the modern project of national integration and occupation of demographic voids, promoted by Getúlio Vargas with the Marcha para o Oeste (March Westward), is similar to another modernizing program of Juscelino Kubitschek, which led to the creation of Brasília in the Central Plateau.

For the artist, the production of the maps that accompanied the discourses of occupation and modernization of the Brazilian interior was updated according to the interests of each era, and remained with the same argumentation of an undominated place to be permanently occupied and explored.

In ‘A Marcha’ (2018) and ‘Mapa estriado’ (2020) he employs the Tordesillas Meridian (1494) - created by the diplomatic treaty dividing the lands belonging to Portugal and Spain on the American continent - to create from it an anamorphosis, a type of cartographic deformation that emphasizes the endless and unreachable, the always unknown Brazilian interior, which expands in an aggravated way towards the west. The result of the deformation is a representation of the monumentality of the country’s interior, and also a metaphor for the current difficulty in overcoming the permanence of the colonialist-based arguments imposed over the territory for more than five centuries.

A Marcha (The March) Acrylic and ink on canvas. 160 x 83 cm. 2018.

Mapa Estriado (Striated Map). 2020. Acrylic and ink on canvas. 160 x 83 cm.

Untitled. 2018. Gouache and ink on paper. 125 x 115 cm.

Talles Lopes criticizes monumentality as rhetoric at the service of power. The installation ‘Excedente monumental’ (2020) deals with the excess of monumentality of the architecture built in the most important public buildings of Brasília, markedly modernist. Five pieces that play at almost replicating the shape of the column of the Alvorada Palace (1958), a work by architect Oscar Niemeyer (1907-2012), are placed against the wall from one corner of the gallery. Without the care of good museography display, they are propped up and enchanted one on top of the other like surplus or remnants of what did not work out in construction.

Without the theater of power and taken to the interior of the gallery, the columns grow before the body in the same intensity in which they show themselves as parody, making fun of the great modernist architecture, they exhibit a humor that arises in large part due to the aspects of the materials used, the mason’s bill, the plaster as surface finish, and also the piled up way of displaying the pieces assumedly carnivalized.

Between quotation and appropriation, Excedente monumental either results in a scenographic architecture that criticizes the theatricality of the original column, whose unique characteristics make the opulence, elegance, lightness, grace and power of the Alvorada Palace, or reflects the presence of popular and anonymous architecture that appropriated Niemeyer’s form and recreated it in different contexts, scales, techniques and materials in Brazil.

Talles Lopes’ training as an architect is clearly shown in works dedicated to inventorying aspects of national architecture, surveying popular production created under the influence of erudite modern work through the appropriation of the canonical, in a movement that starts from the center and reaches the peripheries. This is how the artist rewrites the history of architecture in Brazil in the work constituted as a book and entitled ‘Construção Brasileira: arquitetura moderna e antiga’ (2018).

The work rehearses the catalog of the exhibition ‘Brazil builds: Architecture new and old 1652-1942’, held at the Museum of Modern Art in New York (MOMA) in 1943. The exhibition bore the signatures of the museum’s director, architect Philip Lippincott Goodwin (1885-1958), and photographer Kidder Smith (1913-1997), who also signed the catalog, which became a reference publication on national architecture.

Following the principles of the original layout, in ‘Construção Brasileira: arquitetura moderna e antiga’ Talles Lopes recreates the publication with another narrative, inserting photographs, taken from street view, of forty buildings built in fifteen Brazilian states, which appropriate the column of the Alvorada Palace as a symbol of the modernization that reached Brazil after the second half of the 20th century.

These are residential construction projects of unknown authorship and a markedly popular nature, which make exaggerated use of the column as ornament, employing materials and colors on the order of kitsch, and thus the realm of dubious taste and provincial flavor joins the desire to demonstrate modern vision and social distinction.

In the exhibition, the book ‘Construção Brasileira: arquitetura moderna e antiga’ is displayed for public handling on a wooden shelf, affixed to the wall at the height of a base. It is placed in close proximity with two other elements: on the wall: ‘Estudo para Excedente monumental’ (2020), a watercolor representing a column of the Alvorada; ‘in space: Untitled’ (2021), a ready-made that is partly an industrial object and partly a living being, in short, a pot in which a Swiss cheese plant (Monstera deliciosa) is planted.

Here there is the alignment of different operations of the artist to reflect on Brazilian architecture and the ways of presenting it. Situated as a ready-made, the vase appropriated by Talles Lopes is signed by Willy Guhl (1915-2004), Swiss architect and designer, member of the neo-functionalist movement that worked focused on the research of new materials during the reconstruction of Europe after the Second World War. The round model used by the artist is part of a series of vases with modernist lines created in the early 1950s for the Swiss company Eternit and produced with a mixture of concrete and asbestos. Guhl’s vases were also manufactured in Brazil and began to accompany the modernization of the domestic landscape of the middle classes.

Exuberant and very plastic, the Swiss cheese plant (Monstera deliciosa) was part of the list of ornamental plants that were exhibited among photographs, houseplants and models, in the exhibition ‘Brazil builds: Architecture new and old 1652-1942’. With this operation, Talles Lopes resumes MOMA’s expographic proposal of putting in dialogue modernist architecture and tropical landscape, while reaffirming Guhl’s intervention in Brazilian gardening. It is necessary to note that native plants only had their plastic potential for landscaping recognized and used in the second half of the 1930s. Previously the taste for exotic, mainly European, species predominated.

Landscape is one of the genres Talles Lopes uses to think about and approach the modernization of space resulting from technical development, economic progress, and the installation of the new as a strategy to overcome the old. He investigates landscapes in inland and distant places in Brazil, marked by isolation and backwardness, dominated by buildings that somehow reproduce the canonical form of modernist architecture, the column of the Alvorada Palace, symbol of modern Brazil turned towards progress and the future embedded in the popular imagination after the construction of Brasília.

Executed from a street view photograph that has peculiar distortions, made with a historical painting scale, the imposing painting ‘Clube Belavistense’ (2021) depicts a landscape of Bela Vista, a small town on the border of Mato Grosso do Sul with Paraguay, and focuses on the strange construction raised on the corner of two streets of pitted asphalt; exceptional for the context around it, the construction draws attention by the size of its built area and by the presence of an architectural design that cites the Alvorada column. On the distant border it displays to the neighboring country the sign of modernity intended for all the country’s borders.

‘The great waterfront of Novo Aripuanã’ (2020) is an installation composed of two elements: a painting representing the landscape of the port city of Novo Aripuanã, on the banks of the Madeira River, in Amazonas; a wooden replica of a bench in a square in the city of Três Lagoas, in Mato Grosso do Sul. Both address the appropriation of the Alvorada column by official constructions, linked to the municipal sphere. There is in the architecture of the port a mention of the patriotism typical of the period of the Military Dictatorship, expressed in the façade where one can read “We love Brazil”.

The small bench positioned in the space in front of the painting contemplates the harbor landscape. In this work, very distinct Brazils, the Amazon and South Mato Grosso interiors converse quite closely as they replicate the same icon of modernity. Through this installation, Talles Lopes thinks the unity and diversity of Brazil, and simultaneously calls up the different histories of its occupation, its construction, and its modernization.

Goiânia, October 2021

Brazil Builds and the possibility of a tropical modernism
Talles Lopes questions the attempt to establish a modern-country project through Brazilian architecture

By Mateus Nunes

Brazil Builds (2022), by Talles Lopes. Contar o tempo (Counting Time) exhibition. [Photo: Charlene Cabral]

Text originally published in Portuguese, on the Brazilian art magazine seLecT, in July 12th, 2022 [link].
Mateus Nunes is a writer, curator and researcher. Holds a PhD in Art History from Universidade de Lisboa (Lisbon, Portugal) and a BA in Architecture and Urbanism from Universidade Federal do Pará (Belém, Brazil). Guest Lecturer at Universidade de São Paulo (Brazil) and Professor at Museu de Arte de São Paulo (Brazil).

The Brazilian artist Talles Lopes, in his installationBrazil Builds (“Construção Brasileira”, in Portuguese) (2022), revisits Brazilian iconography and a photographic architectural tradition linked to a project to modernize the nation. Composed of printed and diagrammed photos on a metallic structure that combines orthogonal and curved elements, the installation also has a set of asbestos vases with plants commonly used in modern landscape projects in Brazil. The visual artist, graduated in Architecture and Urbanism from Universidade Estadual de Goiás, in 2020, recently joined the Delfina Foundation residency program, in London, with the support of the Inclusartiz Institute, and presented Brazil Builds at the group exhibition Contar o Tempo, at Centro Culturam MariAntonia (São Paulo, Brazil), in 2022.

The exhibition was structured around provocative and inquiring premises about the thought of time, based on the transdisciplinary arsenal available to tackle the problem in contemporary times, in addition to events that propose a review of the counting of that time in Brazil, such as the country's Bicentennial of Independence, and the Centenary of its Week of Modern Art (“Semana de Arte Moderna”), at Theatro Municipal, in São Paulo. The group exhibition brought together works by Adriana Moreno and Marina Zilbersztejn, Aline Motta, Carmela Gross, Clara Ianni, Diogo de Moraes, Dora Longo Bahia, Elilson, João Carlos Moreno de Sousa, Laís Myrrha, Marilá Dardot, Marcelo Moscheta, Rosana Paulino, Walmor Corrêa and the MAE USP Archaeological Center.

In the photos displayed in the installation, Lopes presents reverberations – or reappearances – of the characteristic columns that compose the main facade of the Palácio da Alvorada, in Brasília, designed by Oscar Niemeyer for the official residence of the presidency of the Republic of Brazil – in addition to being the first construction of reinforced concrete officially inaugurated in Brasília, in 1958. These elements, in the buildings researched by Lopes, reappear in colonnades of porches, balconies and marquises, balustrades and in ornaments applied or painted on external facade walls of what is read by a popular and non-erudite architectural expression – although clearly knowledgeable and attentive to important academicist architectural achievements.

The integration of these elements – which have become iconic in Brazilian architecture, in the order of the canon or the treatise – in popular buildings demonstrates a kind of development of a tropical civilization, accentuating the discrepancies between the Eurocentric attempts of a modernist enterprise around the world and the effective unfolding of this project of modernity in the tropics. The reception – and operation – of these foreign traditions follow one another like a second wave coming to Brazil across the Atlantic, following in due proportions the first colonialist onslaught in the 16th century.

In his solid research, the artist collects photos through bibliographic and digital research, by receiving photos sent by people familiar with Lopes' research, and by photographs taken by the artist himself, mapping dozens of buildings that replicate the column in the five major Brazilian geographical regions. This image bank fuels – and haunts – Lopes' research in recent years. In the installation Brazil Builds, the artist chooses to present only photographs from Google Street View, intensifying the friction between images of different natures: a modern international, sold abroad by Brazil and vice versa; a local one, materialized in Brazilian streets; and a digital and globally connected one, guided by the dynamics also imported from a surveillance policy.

Untitled, image of a building in Bela Vista (MS), collected by the artist through Google Street View.

The photographs shown in the installation present an effective Brazilian construction, culturally hybrid, in an imagetical fusion between the tradition considered “erudite” and the popular practice. They revisit canonical symbols in architectural culture in a non-academicist way, incorporating these ostentatious marks of modernity in unofficial buildings. The artist makes the photos displayed in the installation have visual aspects similar to those that were part of the exhibition Brazil Builds: Architecture New and Old, 1652-1942, from 1943, at the Museum of Modern Art in New York (MoMA), provocatively alluding to an artificial construction of history.

Photos from the Brazil Builds exhibition at MoMA NY (1943).
Source: MoMA

The modern historiographical project imposed on Brazil privileged, through photography, the imagery display of a narrative construction that, at the same time that showed the solidity of the architectural traditions of certain countries, used this framework as a justification for the implementation of a project of modernity. Brazil, therefore, with “four centuries of history”, would be able to live a new phase in its civilization. In this way, photography was used not only as a symbol of modernity, but as an effective and easy institutional dissemination vehicle around the world of what supposedly happened in modern Brazil.

In addition to presenting the photos in a way similar to that shown in the historic exhibition Brazil Builds: Architecture New and Old, 1652-1942, from 1943, at MoMA, the artist uses the same typography in his work that tops the structure of the expography of the Brazilian Pavilion atExpo 58 (Brussels World's Fair in 1958). The official translation of Brazil Builds into Portuguese resulted in the name Construção Brasileira, which Lopes uses as the Portuguese title of his installation. In this work, the artist continues to use the citation of these historical events as a review tool: he also recreates the expographic project of the Brazilian pavilion of Expo 58, designed by architect Sergio Bernardes, which featured the column of Palácio da Alvorada – designed by Oscar Niemeyer – for the first time in a European exhibition.

George Everard Kidder Smith, responsible for most of the photographs shown in the exhibition and in the Brazil Builds’s catalog at MoMA, was an American architectural photographer, with a solid production on modernist architectural development in countries such as Sweden, Italy and Switzerland – to the Stockholm Builds exhibition, also at the MoMa (1941); and for the publications Switzerland Builds – Its Native and Modern Architecture (1950) and Italy Builds: Its Modern Architecture and Native Inheritance (1955), respectively. He was the author of Source Book of American Architecture: 500 Notable Buildings from the 10th Century to the Present, originally published in 1981, a kind of imagery compendium of buildings in the United States. It can be seen that the thinking, not only of Kidder Smith, but of other institutional protagonists of his time — such as Philip L. Goodwin, board member and curator of MoMA — sought to portray the modernization of different countries through architecture, incorporating – albeit narrowly – local specificities. Goodwin and Kidder Smith led the organization of the Brazil Builds exhibition in 1943.

Seaplane station, Areroporto Santos Dumont, Rio de Janeiro, Atilio Corrêa Lima, architect, 1940, photo by George Everald Kidder Smith in the catalog for the exhibition Brazil Builds (1943) at MoMA NY (page 151)

Lopes' work allows us to rethink the temporal arc established by the remarkable 1943 exhibition – which proposed a cut from 1652 to 1942 – and by its subtitle, which decreed that Brazilian architectural culture only began in the 17th century. This chronological section reiterates a colonialist view that despises the cultural, artistic and architectural traditions of the native peoples of Brazilian territory before the Portuguese invasion. The very modus operandi of photographer Kidder Smith, according to historian Robert Elwall, followed a classic speed of traveling artists and naturalists who, coming from abroad, sought to portray the fauna, flora, geography and people of Brazil in a vertiginous way, without paying attention to the heterogeneous Brazilian complexities. It even shares an ethnographic approach on photography, by portraying the territory of the other, as Felipe Augusto Fidanza and Pierre Verger did. Studies that share decolonial matrices – such as Brazil Builds, by Lopes – provide critical reviews regarding the temporal and evolutionary historiographical understanding, an epistemological model of European origin, which defends a linear accumulation of knowledge throughout history that would lead modern Western society to be more and more evolved.

Lopes aims to present a trustworthy Brazilian genealogy of the architecture of his country, which builds in a non-erudite way, replicates fads that serve as imagetic and social distinctions and brings together the erudite and the popular in an inseparable amalgam, rooted in the country's history. Would the history of Brazil begin, then, with the construction of the pillars of Palácio da Alvorada? This trans-historical vertigo is even purposely made by Lopes: the columns of the Palácio do Alvorada were built between 1957 and 1958, therefore outside the temporal arc delimited by the Brazil Builds exhibition, which included buildings until 1942. This confusion reaffirms the ineffectiveness of modern and positivist chronological models to analyze Brazilian cultural complexities, in addition to criticizing the establishment of stereotyped visual narratives based on a narrow exoticism linked to Brazil.

How to combine the potential for modern development with the exuberance and grandeur of Brazilian fauna? How to deal with this monumental and ornamental surplus – the name with which Lopes wisely baptized his work Monumental Surplus (“Excedente Monumental”), from 2022? Did Brazilian architecture propose a fusion between structure and ornament? Is the modern development plan concerned with sustainability and with the disposal of solid waste from its constructions, a problem that has long been resolved by Brazilian indigenous populations in their highly sustainable construction techniques? What, therefore, would sustainable development be if not a return to the understanding and time of the country's history, and not an incentive to promote modern industry? Lopes' work engenders, in multiple and rhizomatic questions, the shuffling of a history established as official with narratives always on the margins of historiography. In this way, a Brazilian imagery system is built based on historical colonialism, modernism and popular constructive practices, reiterating a hybrid Brazil.

In the Brazilian Builds installation, Lopes has several asbestos cement vases, designed by the Swiss designer Willy Guhl and produced in Brazil by the Eternit company. In the vases, the artist displays specimens of plants widely used in modern landscaping, in an operation of citation to the vegetation used in important publications and exhibitions of the time on modern architecture – such as Philodendron Burle Marx, peace lily, white anthurium and syngonium, used in the Brazil Buildsexhibition at MoMA, as possible props for a Brazilian flora.

Monumental Surplus (2021), by Talles Lopes [Photo: Ricardo Miyada]

The vases, with the shapes of parabolas, hyperbolas and rectangular prisms, suspended by discreet metallic supports, align themselves with the sinuosity and formal austerity of the aesthetic proposals for the architecture of Brasília. The images advertising the sale of this family of vases in Brazil present sketches of the facade of the Palácio da Alvorada in the background, with models whose names range from “Roman”, “Greek” and “Switzerland” to “ambient” and “tropical”. Creating a friction concerning the sinuosity of the curved line without necessarily entering into discussions about ornament in Brazilian modern architecture is one of the multiple issues engendered by Lopes in the installation.

Asbestos, a chemical component used in the construction of this type of vases and in an extensive range of civil construction products, was banned from trade in Brazil as of 2017, due to its high carcinogenic toxicity when inhaled. Therefore, we rethink how toxic are the practices linked to a hurried, forced modernity, based on unsustainable industrial production and extractive natural resource management. Subjecting themselves to practices of this nature can lead us to consider the price that these countries were willing to pay to implement an imported and harmful project of modernity in their structure.

How long will we repeat a problematic tradition, imagery and materially? The idea of “Brazil, a country of the future”, title of the book by Stefan Zweig originally published in 1941, and the idea that “Brazil has a huge past ahead of it”, as Millôr Fernandes claimed, clash. To understand the modern Brazilian architectural culture is to realize that decadence and development go hand in hand. Zweig defended Brazil as a land where civilization could develop peacefully after the traumas and blemishes of the Second World War, just as the European colonists found in Brazil, in the 16th century, their “New World”, and how the Brazilian government and the great extractive industries found in the Amazon pure developmental potential. Brazil is always a land of promise of dreams, gradually exhausted.

Lopes' work allows us to reflect on the oscillating and rhizomatic dynamics of the irradiating poles of artistic models, demonstrating that places can behave as a center and as a periphery at the same time, portraying an ambiguity inherent to contemporaneity and post-colonial dynamics. Brasília, for example, from a positivist and modern perspective, would be in a position on the periphery in relation to Europe, the center that established the guidelines that guided architectural modernism in a hegemonic way. At the same time, however, Brasília also established itself as a center, by radiating models resulting from Brazilian modern architecture to other cities that absorbed them. The images and aesthetic systems therefore cross the capital of Brazil, without being left unscathed by the operations and pluralities made in this movement, causing an untraceable reverberation that diffuses these images in a capillary way, at the same time that it receives them. This tug of war that pulls in both directions at the same time illustrates the cultural hybridisms that have guided Brazilian cultural production for centuries, without forgetting to denounce the imposition – sometimes subtle, other times wide open – of a Eurocentric ideological and iconological violence.