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Iole de Freitas
The Atrium Programme opens a new series of exhibitions at the Iberê Camargo Foundation. These interventions expand the field of action and dissemination in contemporary art, in a proposal present from the actual process of installation: produced in front of the eyes of the public, the work takes shape day after day, opening the space in which it is situated to new interpretations.
More than just bringing the public and the work closer together, this interaction involves a healthy familiarity with the routes of artistic creation. An interaction which is also a dialogue: placed in the privileged space of the atrium, the work creates a bridge between Álvaro Siza’s design and the artists on display.
With this first intervention, from the hand of Iole de Freitas, proposed by Mônica Zielinsky, Paulo Sergio Duarte and Sônia Salzstein, the Foundation offers the public a continuous renewal of the perception of its space, bringing it even more to the centre of discussion in art.
Since the early 1970s Iole de Freitas’s work has created a prolific network of languages, in which the tradition of sculpture, revisited in more heterodox ways, becomes crucially problematic in the light of the contemporary conditions of the impersonal – and increasingly virtual – technique, materials and procedures that technology has brought into play in art practice, as it has in all fields of human activity. It can moreover be stated that in each of the works by this artist, from the earliest to the most recent, her approach to materials and processes will always say something about the venture of stretching the calculation, resistance and efficiency of technology to dramatic extremes, in which the pleasure of the game, the amorous coming and going of construction and deconstruction certainly triumphs over foreseeability and finality.
Super eight film, photographs, reliefs, sculptures, installations, spatial interventions on an architectural scale, drawings, models – these are the floating and interchangeable forms the artist’s work has adopted over the past four decades, all of them marked by such simple and discerning procedures as folding, tightening and rearranging surfaces into new and surprising equilibriums. In each work we find the idea of traversing boundaries, the experience of movement not as it is routinely known – as a successive unfolding in space – but as expansion and densification of forces, continuously contacting still untouched boundaries.
In all these works, moreover, we can find the same underlying concern: with the hope of a de-automation of gestures corrupted by habit and accommodation, in a search finally for a successful scale in the relation of the human body with the space.
This work, produced especially for the atrium of the Iberê Camargo Foundation building designed by Álvaro Siza, perhaps displays the joy in taking the expressive possibilities of movement to a further extreme, as never before in Iole de Freitas’s work, sharing this generous architecture which is both an encounter and active withdrawal, without, however, neglecting the expressive complexity and singularity of the body in its confrontations with the public spaces of the contemporary city.
Sônia Salzstein
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