THE URGENCY OF THE SUBLIME
These are not clouds. This is not the sky. This black wall is not a wall. This is not a landscape. And this is not a gallery. From René Magritte’s “This is not a pipe” to Lygia Pape’s “This is not a cloud,” artists have been discussing the domain of representation as spaces for small or large farces transformed into established truths. Fábio Tremonte, in presenting his project for the facade of the Vermelho gallery, knows that the sky is not the sky and that the black wall is not really there. What the artist proposes for the gallery’s facade is his disguise, his non-representation, his camouflage—a word he uses to name his work.
The gallery is invisible. The landscape/camouflage makes possible the invisibility of “real” things. Fábio reveals the exterior of the white cube and takes it for himself. He turns to the street to communicate his minimal gesture. Zen. He presents his space of silence and brings us his revelation in a poetics of the sublime. He makes his disguise evident and does not seek transcendence; he seeks to blend in, to merge, to confuse. He does not rise to the heavens; he descends with the sky to the ordinary earthly plane. And he does not want the sky as a realistic representation; he wants it as an organism that changes its characteristics to adapt to the environment in which it lives. And to adapt, he turns to the sublime.
Another important element is the presence of blue. Fábio has been pursuing it in his poetics for some time. From the blue of the sky, the sea, to the color itself. As in his drawings, photographs, installations, and paintings, where blue is a constant. Perhaps because blue is the most immaterial of colors—and for this reason, writer Clarice Lispector once said that “the unattainable is always blue”—Tremonte relentlessly chases it.
Black, also present, in a stripe-wall, can evoke the night sky, death, nothingness, chaos, or simply the absence of light. It emerges as a transitional element and contrast, bearing the burden of blue on its back, giving it luminosity. As poet Murilo Mendes wrote: “Without the filter of death / who makes me absorb the blue?”
Extracting the metaphysical and Zen aspect of Tremonte’s project, it is important to think about the banal urgency of posters (the medium used by the artist) that cover the city walls with their advertising, exposed to the whims of time, such as rain—ironically produced by the very nature of clouds. The impermanence of things, also disguised in their communion with the real, in that the work does not exist within the logic of everyday life, but, inevitably, is there and can be seen.
In his installation Camuflagem (Camouflage), Fábio uses urgent elements from street communication to compose his disguise because he also has urgency. Urgency to invent a sublime gesture in space and time. Urgency to poetize our perception.
—
Marcelo Maluf is a writer, musician, and master’s student in Arts at the Institute of Arts of UNESP.
THE URGENCY OF THE SUBLIME
These are not clouds. This is not the sky. This black wall is not a wall. This is not a landscape. And this is not a gallery. From René Magritte’s “This is not a pipe” to Lygia Pape’s “This is not a cloud,” artists have been discussing the domain of representation as spaces for small or large farces transformed into established truths. Fábio Tremonte, in presenting his project for the facade of the Vermelho gallery, knows that the sky is not the sky and that the black wall is not really there. What the artist proposes for the gallery’s facade is his disguise, his non-representation, his camouflage—a word he uses to name his work.
The gallery is invisible. The landscape/camouflage makes possible the invisibility of “real” things. Fábio reveals the exterior of the white cube and takes it for himself. He turns to the street to communicate his minimal gesture. Zen. He presents his space of silence and brings us his revelation in a poetics of the sublime. He makes his disguise evident and does not seek transcendence; he seeks to blend in, to merge, to confuse. He does not rise to the heavens; he descends with the sky to the ordinary earthly plane. And he does not want the sky as a realistic representation; he wants it as an organism that changes its characteristics to adapt to the environment in which it lives. And to adapt, he turns to the sublime.
Another important element is the presence of blue. Fábio has been pursuing it in his poetics for some time. From the blue of the sky, the sea, to the color itself. As in his drawings, photographs, installations, and paintings, where blue is a constant. Perhaps because blue is the most immaterial of colors—and for this reason, writer Clarice Lispector once said that “the unattainable is always blue”—Tremonte relentlessly chases it.
Black, also present, in a stripe-wall, can evoke the night sky, death, nothingness, chaos, or simply the absence of light. It emerges as a transitional element and contrast, bearing the burden of blue on its back, giving it luminosity. As poet Murilo Mendes wrote: “Without the filter of death / who makes me absorb the blue?”
Extracting the metaphysical and Zen aspect of Tremonte’s project, it is important to think about the banal urgency of posters (the medium used by the artist) that cover the city walls with their advertising, exposed to the whims of time, such as rain—ironically produced by the very nature of clouds. The impermanence of things, also disguised in their communion with the real, in that the work does not exist within the logic of everyday life, but, inevitably, is there and can be seen.
In his installation Camuflagem (Camouflage), Fábio uses urgent elements from street communication to compose his disguise because he also has urgency. Urgency to invent a sublime gesture in space and time. Urgency to poetize our perception.
—
Marcelo Maluf is a writer, musician, and master’s student in Arts at the Institute of Arts of UNESP.

