While creating his intervention at Fundação Eva Klabin, the artist José Bechara remembered his daughter putting on makeup when she was younger whenever she missed her mother, imitating her while she didn’t return home.
“She looked beautifully blurred”, says Bechara.
The artist is also blurring the house-museum located in the Lagoa neighborhood in Rio de Janeiro, as if it missed its owner, Eva, and will show the result starting tomorrow. Meanwhile, he experiments with his own makeup in totally new projects in his career, which will be exhibited to the public starting Wednesday of the following week at the Lurixs gallery, in Botafogo, also in Rio.
“Saudade” is the ninth show of the Projeto Respiração – the Respiration Project - curated by Marcio Doctors, which brings contemporary art interventions to the classic collection of the foundation, organized by the collector Eva Klabin and kept in exhibition to visitors. Upon hearing Mr. Doctors say that the house seemed not to know that Eva had died and that she could return at any moment, the artist imagined how the house would look missing its owner, “I imagined a space very well-kept by a zealous old lady, but this space doesn’t know that this very organized woman has died. She is only taking a long time to return. This causes the house to miss her deeply, it creates a disturbance. The house begins to spontaneously reproduce itself while it waits for Eva, perhaps mad with nostalgia, with love,” explains Bechara.
The tale of the house that is multiplied is translated by the artist in pieces of furniture that are reproduced out of their place. The “new” parts of the house, such as the shoe closet that keeps clothes instead of shoes and the disordered stairs in the middle of the dining room, are rebuilt in brick and wood, a true architectural work in conjunction with the space.
“I didn’t want the viewer to have to look for the works with a magnifying glass, or do something too discrepant with the house. Maybe with some pieces the visitor might have to look a little more, but it is not a game with traps, that would be very boring”, says the artist.
Oxidation is the common point of the works in the gallery
For those who know Bechara´s artistic trail, it is inevitable to associate this work with the sculpture-installation “The house”, which marked the Museum of Modern Art of Rio de Janeiro in 2004 and influenced his later works. However, while there the two wooden cubes in monumental scale expelled the furniture to the outside, here Bechara turns to the inside of the house. Although formally distinct, the two works relate to one another with the memory of the objects.
The artist says, “When I did “The house”, people asked me what was inside the house and I said it was an abysm. My formal interest was on the outside of the house, its geometrical elements combined. From a symbolic point of view, the house expelled furniture that was impregnated with a presence. Now there is also a movement of these objects, which replicate themselves on their own, impregnated with memory.
In the exhibition “Sobremirada”, at Lurixs, Bechara has strayed from this path and exhibits completely different works, united by the process of oxidation of the materials. The shades of green and blue of “Copper in two” emerges from the oxidation of an emulsion of copper on canvas. On wood, the emulsion of metal in its raw state obtains earthly tones that, together with oil paint, make up the paintings “Fat with me” and “Fat with you”. And “Gelosia” combines three layers of glass with bands formed by oxidation of an emulsion of iron – a union linked to the space of the gallery, which determined the result of the work.
Bechara says that he began his experiments with the new materials by the end, the exhibition, and explains, “The combination of several layers of glass creates an almost sculptural volume, it implies an almost architectural relation with the space. In general, the artist, including myself, exhibits after a period of investigation, when he controls the procedures and the materials. “Sobremirada” offers the opposite path, the exhibition is an idea of the work that is still to come. They are works with which I start to deal with now. And that implies a greater risk.
The artist also exhibits a series of new drawings entitled “The air” at Lurixs´ annex, across the street from the main gallery. There he exhibits also another offspring of “The house”, the sculpture “Blind” from the “Open House” series, which was previously worked on wood and now comes in cast aluminum.
The exhibitions crown a year in which the artist had six individual shows and participated in eight group exhibits, in Brazil and abroad, and also launched the book “José Bechara – Blefuscu”, published by the Spanish publishing house Dardo. Exhausted, impatient, and anxious, Bechara is dying to go back to his studio in Santa Teresa and immerse in the creative process with the new materials and procedures that he is discovering. But he has nothing to complain about. He says, “I am very concerned and in a bad mood, but I wouldn’t change this state for anything.”
An artist from the 90s
Born in Rio de Janeiro, José Bechara, 51, began his lessons in painting in 1987 at the place that perspired art in Rio in the eighties, the Escola de Artes Visuais do Parque Lage. The artist is part of the group that was formed after the one that shook the city with the exhibition, “Where are you, Generation 80?” He abandoned the canvas to explore the process of oxidation of metals, especially on canvases of trucks, work that made him known as one of the main names of the Generation 90. For a few years he has been exploring the theme of the house, in sculptures and installations of great inventiveness and geometric formality.
Suzana Velasco is an arts journalist for Jornal O Globo.