Who doesn’t recall, as a child, taking advantage of the lonely minutes in bed, before falling asleep, creating with ones hands and fingers images of ghosts and winged beings on the bedroom wall? With this playful activity, we invented our dreamworld. Phantasmagories that will never be forgotten.
“Relicário” (2020), installation that Leandro Lima (1976) presents in Vermelho’s white cube, uses a clay vase, a filtered light source and the gallery wall as a projection surface. The light passing through the filter superimposes the silhouette of a plant on the leftover of the vase. A familiar image but without materiality, like the ghost of something that is not there.
Hence, we ask ourselves what constitutes absence and what consitutes completeness in “Relicário”? It is certainly not the lack of, or excess of materialities, but precisely the question that the work establishes.
The representation of absence always implies its opposite: presence. Genuine emptiness is not viable simply because it is not possible in a world full of things. In “Relicário”, Lima dedicates himself to occupy the peripheral space, leaving the central area to be inhabited by a form of dialogue.
In the installation, the notion of absence, literally, reveals much more than what an object could possibly reveal. The effect of this absence in the observer’s mind can cause a kind of anxiety: like the one we experience when familiar things are displaced or not fulfilling their usual role. Watching this optical effect and illusion might cause anxiety, but what is totally mysterious is, at the same time, a psychic relief.
When faced with the installation, confirmation arises that the absence in its literal state cannot exist as the property of a work of art, as, as in the world, in art, there are no neutral surfaces or discoures. A space is never empty; as long as the human eye is looking, there will always be something to see.
Art is a technique to attract attention. The eye scans the environment, naming it, making a limited selection of things that then becomes consciousness, a signifier, pleasurable, complex or not. Lima’s “Relicário” suggests new demands for the gaze. Before being an invitation to look, the installation engenders the look.
Traditionally, the effects of a work of art are unevenly distributed in order to induce a certain sequence of experiences in the viewer. “Relicário” does not require the observer to assign meaning or sympathy; on the contrary, it requires that the viewer adds nothing but remains open to a multiplicity of experiences and consequent dialogues.
Throughout history, mankind has continued trying to reinvent the project of transcendence. In contemporaneity, one of the most effective representations of the spiritual project is art. Painting, music, poetry or dance have become the stage where, as in a shadow theater, dramas that beguile the human conscience are played out.
Who doesn’t recall, as a child, taking advantage of the lonely minutes in bed, before falling asleep, creating with ones hands and fingers images of ghosts and winged beings on the bedroom wall? With this playful activity, we invented our dreamworld. Phantasmagories that will never be forgotten.
“Relicário” (2020), installation that Leandro Lima (1976) presents in Vermelho’s white cube, uses a clay vase, a filtered light source and the gallery wall as a projection surface. The light passing through the filter superimposes the silhouette of a plant on the leftover of the vase. A familiar image but without materiality, like the ghost of something that is not there.
Hence, we ask ourselves what constitutes absence and what consitutes completeness in “Relicário”? It is certainly not the lack of, or excess of materialities, but precisely the question that the work establishes.
The representation of absence always implies its opposite: presence. Genuine emptiness is not viable simply because it is not possible in a world full of things. In “Relicário”, Lima dedicates himself to occupy the peripheral space, leaving the central area to be inhabited by a form of dialogue.
In the installation, the notion of absence, literally, reveals much more than what an object could possibly reveal. The effect of this absence in the observer’s mind can cause a kind of anxiety: like the one we experience when familiar things are displaced or not fulfilling their usual role. Watching this optical effect and illusion might cause anxiety, but what is totally mysterious is, at the same time, a psychic relief.
When faced with the installation, confirmation arises that the absence in its literal state cannot exist as the property of a work of art, as, as in the world, in art, there are no neutral surfaces or discoures. A space is never empty; as long as the human eye is looking, there will always be something to see.
Art is a technique to attract attention. The eye scans the environment, naming it, making a limited selection of things that then becomes consciousness, a signifier, pleasurable, complex or not. Lima’s “Relicário” suggests new demands for the gaze. Before being an invitation to look, the installation engenders the look.
Traditionally, the effects of a work of art are unevenly distributed in order to induce a certain sequence of experiences in the viewer. “Relicário” does not require the observer to assign meaning or sympathy; on the contrary, it requires that the viewer adds nothing but remains open to a multiplicity of experiences and consequent dialogues.
Throughout history, mankind has continued trying to reinvent the project of transcendence. In contemporaneity, one of the most effective representations of the spiritual project is art. Painting, music, poetry or dance have become the stage where, as in a shadow theater, dramas that beguile the human conscience are played out.
