O lugar desatento — Architecture in CAPC's Collection

Adolf Loos, an anachronistic hero of Baudelairian Essentialism, described the architect as “a bricklayer with knowledge of Latin”. A humanist bricklayer. The architect was constituted by the conjunction between knowledge in action (erecting four walls and fenestrating them) and literacy, which in turn resulted from the use of the "lingua franca" of a Mediterranean civilization that has disappeared; an everyday life made of stoning and the vocalization of a language without everyday life; this constitution, of the architect, was not only the effect of a practice and a culture but had a positional nature, a historical and geographical demarcation; the bricklayer was European. Whether in Yokohama or Rio de Janeiro, whoever defined himself as an architect in the 20th century was intrinsically the cultural product of Europe, of the homogenization of European difference, of classicism, to the detriment of the artifices and artifacts of the context in which he inserted himself. The Architect colonized with his “rhetorical” way of breaking stones. Loos commented with some malice that Le Corbusier did not speak French, a novilatin language, a living language with no original author, but Esperanto, a universal language, a technocratic invention at the service of a utopia of universal cohesion and overcoming national differences. Loos' architect, was, on the contrary, exclusivist in his anthropocentrism; for this purpose, he used a code dominated by a few. Architecture was a secret, initiatory knowledge and the craftsman of the space did not give up his magic tricks, the esotericism of his ideas, but on the contrary made it difficult to access and use them. The deferred presence of Loos, in particular, his eurosyncretism, emerges in an excerpt from the trip of Che Guevara and Alberto Granado through South America, when in Machu Pichu an Inca child fulfilling an informal role of tour guide explains the eccentricity of a wall where two construction methods are juxtaposed: “on this side (with an imperceptible fit and a greater purification of lithic materials) those who knew how to make walls, the Indians” on the other side, with a more misaligned and casuistic stereotomy, the “It's from the Spanish. They didn't know how to build walls.” It is this contradiction that generates strong images spatializing ambiguity, gluing hesitation to dogma, memory to lies.

Places are filled with dust — an endless path — and periods of architecture a pathless end. Architecture is, in fact, the inscription of an exile. The inscription of the form lost in the form used; of which it is not known if it will work out properly. Art is retroactive in relation to this form used, it works on nostalgia for the useless, the world in draft, with a desperate obsession that often becomes a nihilist surrender to the impossibility of difference. She tries to rescue the useless from the technocracy of everyday life (which doesn't make sense, the duration of the unpredictable). It is the sovereignty of dead and anonymous labor but a nomadic sovereignty, which complicates and decontextualizes its slang, its loyalties and which flees, almost always failed, from the souvenir, the decorative, the kitsch.

This exhibition at the CAPC explores the immersion of these two spaces, that of the form used and that of nostalgia for the useless.

In the first room drawings by Jorge Colombo. A recurrence. The tireless narrator (or descriptor?) from New York All the World, from the slowest and most advanced city in the world, landed in Paris Je t'aime/impression soleil/ minute maid. It is Paris isolated in thermo-digital moments (of color and light) and reassembled in the theoretical image of universal cities; it is the effort of individuation expressed in the recording of the aesthetic condition of anonymity (of people who pass by and are, of photogenic or unsaved buildings); Paris by Atget, by Bresson, of two or three things I know about her (Parisienne region par J.L-Godard), of Versailles-Vichy, of the lion of Denfert, of Pére-lachaise where the international cosmopolitan conspiracy sleeps, as well as The Blanquist grandparents of Bolshevism lie glorious; the inconsequential Paris of RER, from black mec hip-hop from the cités; the Paris that will never reveal itself and where you also “can't get away with it without some wheels”. Paris Systéme D. Give it as a drawing.

In the corridor, graphic essays by Pedro Pousada intersect about the non-historic but intensely constructed landscape of the Portuguese suburbs. On one side, the suburb acts as a visual analogy of the Portugal of the little ones. The myth is metabolized into the uncontrollable nature of the human experience. The reverse aspect of these works is that the world is made up of migrations and fragmented existences that convulse it while accentuating its condition as a social readymade. Space is not isotropic, it is not deposited intact in the hands of its users, but it is the superimposition of a non-image on a place. The second series of works, on the other side of the room, combines in an anagrammatic sense content and materiality that can be associated with architectural culture. Aesthetic disarrangement, accumulation with no narrative connection, without path or end, all refer to post-Fordist spatiality where functional clarity disappears from the building, or submissive solidarity from form to function, from object to context. The building is deformed but never ceases to exist, continuing to live as archaism, ruin, and uselessness.

In the next room a photograph of José Maçãs de Carvalho. An uncharacteristic bathroom. The scale of photography dematerializes it as a medium and intensifies the realism of the space it feeds on. Like the Casseurs de Pierre (1849) by Courbet, José Maçãs' photograph reveals the space in action, as a thing, as laconicism, as a category of the repressed, of the formless; this image freezes a place of use intermittently; a domestic exile extends beyond its limits, of its function. Thus, a bathroom gains physicality, living in another space, in the composite space, framed by an image to be able to separate itself from the routines, movements and objects that identify it; and through this strangeness it is not only our idea of modesty, of self-control, of inhibition that dissipates from the image, but the prescriptive force of the believable. We no longer see a bathroom, with its humidity and its noises, but an antagonism between reality and the off-field.

Organized in a regular mosaic of 10 × 13 photographs, we observe the documentary collection work of Valdemar Santos subjecting informality to the boring, aphasic continuity of the shelter. Isolation and contingency acts gain factographic value. Valdemar Santos confronts us with the non-image of free will: amateurism specialized in a non-historical constructive act. Gratification and the uprooting of human fabrication fill, deform, and disconnect space. In this series, an impressive reflection of the entropy that defines the kingdom of freedom, repetition and difference become reciprocal and exist without narrative force, they exist only in their expectant condition. To the mechanical work is added the autographic action, corrective of the authorial and pictorial mark, superimposing and attenuating this informed world. The ego that builds reveals itself to be an impure object (an incomplete property).

CAPC
December 2013