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| Nuno Ramos and Sergio Delgado in conversation at Spiraling Time. |
As Nuno
Ramos, Brazilian sculptor and author stated, “In Sao Paulo, there is an intense
sense of urgency—life wants you, and life asks you to do everything...you are
required every minute...you are necessary.” This sense of urgency and immediacy
is reflected directly in his work, which embodies the very humanistic quality
of the work being dead after its work is done, of being finished at its
conclusion. Despite this, there is a tremendous amount of conversational
vibration that surrounds the ambiguities in his work, a direct reflection of the
ambiguousness of life in Brazil, where social configurations and a colorful
history are intertwined like thread. The capriciousness of “the almost,” the
poetic moment of falling but not having yet fallen, echoes in the way that
Brazil's present history echoes with its past, from cannibalism to colonialism
to anthropophagic dictations and autocratic dictators. Ramos’s work, which
includes monumental sculptures of soap and sand, has recurring themes of
breaking, of earthiness, and of the fleeting moment.
In conversation with Ramos was
Sergio Delgado, who brought attention to deeply driven themes of transversal
materiality and conscious materials in both the work of Nuno Ramos and
Brazilian artist Lygia Clark, known famously for her declassification of objects
and the stripping of meanings from the banal in everyday life. By doing so,
she, in Delgado's words, emphasized that “all consciousness is consciousness of
something,” that there is little separation between the subject and their
environment, the self and the world because of inherited meanings and values.
In her work, such as her bichas,
Clark aimed to give the work its own answers—the bicha had inherent meaning within itself that the viewer had to
explore through direct subjection to movement. In this way, the handler was
forced to surrender to the will of the object—this theme of surrender
reappeared constantly in her therapeutic work, which aimed to give agency to
the senses as theoreticians in themselves. Delgado also brought to attention
the words of Karl Marx, who asserted that in the production of private
property, man becomes the object as an embodiment of his material power, that
man is a social being through his possessions.
The conversation between Ramos and
Delgado brought to my attention the true fragility of objects in a moment.
Sculpture and objects serve as a material connection between the viewer and
art, and sculpture provides in many ways, a breaking of the bonds between the
expectation of the viewer and the object of their view. In Ramos’s work, some
of which are characterized by the fluidity of mediums such as Vaseline and
water, draw attention to the fleeting qualities of our visual experience.
Pieces such as his Ai, They Seemed
Eternal, intentionally shock the viewer out of their expectations in order
to emphasize the moment which looms so presently in his daily life in Brazil.
Clark, in this same way, used her therapeutic techniques of surrender to place
the body beside the object that gave sole proprietorship of the experience to all
of the senses, and not just to the eyes. As many people rely heavily on sight
for their memorial experiences and their collection of daily life, to both
force change and destruction upon the sight of the viewer, as both artists do,
and then to remove sight altogether, as Clark did in some of her therapeutic
work, seeks to provide an alternative measurement of temporal shifts to the
viewer.
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