Section
Since the beginning of the 2000s, Marcius Galan has been building a strong and diversified body of works that includes installations, sculptures, objects, drawings, videos, photos and conceptual projects. His austere and precise language is both intriguing and open to multiple interpretations, and it can be associated with several reference points from 20th century art history – from mid-century Brazilian neo-constructivism to the North American art of the 1960s. However, his most direct inspirations are found in the anonymous experience of large cities; in the depersonalized spaces that often seem to multiply indefinitely, muddling our perception, leading to a sense that we are living in a kind of anesthetized state in which all places look the same. Thus, a maze is an appropriate metaphor for Galan’s work. Imprisoned within these spaces and losing all sense of external time or life, the apparition of his works provokes us, temporarily interrupting and challenging our certainties. The artist uses visual communication and architecture as codes for these operations. His very subject matter is the concept of space, lato sensu.
Section is the first monogaph on Galan’s work, and its starting point is the idea of fragmentation, taken from the artist’s own work. Rather than offering a general theory on his work as a whole, my intention is to take a more divided approach, made up of specific aspects of his practice, with sections that are almost arbitrarily extracted, but that link different groups of works according to specific themes.
My essay has been sectioned off and distributed throughout the book, creating different chapters and blocks of themed images. This idea was inspired by Galan’s work itself, which unfolds in topologies, slices, sections, lines, planes, vectors, and voids. In addition to this main text, the book also includes an interview by Kiki Mazzucchelli, a longstanding collaborator of the artist, which contemplates key aspects of his work and early career, and draws attention to themes found throughout his works, such as functionality and the subversion of representational systems. There is also a text by Manuel Cirauqui, “The area of Marcius”, which uses the artist’s studio and his tools as a model to understand his language.
Essentially, the chapters in my text are divided into four of Galan’s areas of interest – design, architecture, sculpture, and drawing –, although these subjects do eventually overlap and penetrate his work as a whole and the critical texts written on it. Some of these use the titles of the works themselves, which are examined more closely in the respective texts, although the themes covered may serve equally to reflect on other works that have not necessarily been cited.
“Common Area”, the first of these, looks at the use of elements found in industrial design, particularly markings and signs used in semi-private spaces of cohabitation. By appropriating these elements, Galan creates sculptures that often stem from the meeting of two and three-dimensional elements. In this text, I will look closely at a specific group of works, Insulators, which follows this principle. I will also take on the artist’s relationship with the absurd.
Scrutinizing the mise-en-scène of these objects, in “Plans for Escape”, I revisit the exhibition of the same title, which I invited Galan to participate in, and for which he created a series of interventions in the circulation spaces. The logic behind site-specific art articulates this block of work, and leads us to think less about the intrinsic construction of an object and more about the way in which it is presented.
In “Diagonal Section”, the focus is on the work of the same title, dating from 2008, and which is to date the artists’ most reproduced piece. The focus is on understanding the role of emptiness in his work, a sculptural emptiness.
And lastly, “Drawings…” looks at the aspect that plays such an important part in the artist’s practice. The idea of “the drawing in an expanded field” is set in motion, and places Galan as the heir to artists who revitalized the field in the 1960s such as Mylan Grigar, Ivens Machado and Channa Horwitz, to name but a few.
In the interview, Kiki and Galan pour over a particular work, Bell (1998), in which we can observe a thought process that runs through all of the artist’s later work. What is at stake here is the failure of functionality, expressed by the potential radical shock between two materials that, if they fulfill the object’s supposed function, will destroy it. Beyond the specific nature of this particular object, this principle is expanded on and is found in much of his following work. One can find it in the failed mathematical demonstrations that simultaneously inhabit the canon of geometric abstraction and the patched up sidewalks of São Paulo; in the non-existent pane of glass in Diagonal Section, which is more present the more absent it is; and in the disorienting quality of the phantom signs in Plans for Escape, which are somewhere between the clandestine and a hallucination.
The silent ring of this bell echoes throughout all these sections.
Common area
Common area. These two words serve as an introduction to the work of Marcius Galan. The expression is taken from the real estate market, and refers to the shared spaces in condominiums and apartment buildings: external access points, patios, corridors, celebration rooms, playgrounds, and gatehouses. It implies a hyper-codified sociability that is mediated through architecture and communication, and that denotes a kind of ersatz public space within a private space. The objects that one finds in them are marked, and the spaces are often delimitated by painted lines. Empty, idle, melancholic, these circulation areas are decorated with furniture and plants that we barely notice, and so they hardly seem to serve any purpose. Doormats, abrupt changes of flooring and wall coverings, passages shut off by glass doors that are permanently locked, useless metal handles, mysterious security cameras, boxes full of electric artifacts, dozens of switches, movement and smoke detectors. There are fences everywhere, plaques and mirrors, handrails and baseboards, valances and pelmets, moldings and signs: a long list of etceteras.
What underpins Galan’s art is the experience of these spaces, and the contact with these materials, components and objects. His language is influenced by the supposedly inexpressive aesthetics of this experience, and borrows from these visual and conceptual aspects. His works are often simulacra of these same objects, and they are almost identical to the originals. However, their appearance in site-specific projects is a conceptual distortion that sets them apart. At other times, his works repeat constructive techniques, formal aspects and materials, and use them to employ small cognitive deceptions that corrupt their function while at the same time preserving their character. In both cases, the point of departure is the sense of certainty that these spaces inspire. This means that spectators have to negotiate between mimesis and epiphany. The root of the latter is the Greek wordphaíno¯, which is also the root of a more familiar word: “phantom”. Galan’s works make us first believe, and then disbelieve – only then to believe again – in the veracity of these objects, initially as things in themselves, and then as works of art.
A group of his works (Insulators, since 2006) is characterized by the use of a common element: a yellow delineating line. This motif, taken from street markings and security areas, has at least two different guises: it may be applied directly onto solid concrete blocks, such as the pre-molded road barriers used in Brazil, or it can be found as cut and folded thin steel strips, rigid enough to be used to create three-dimensional forms in space. They are mainly used to delineate the space around particular objects and to signal certain functions, and they are found in the urban environment as well as in “common areas” in private spaces, and this highlights something ambiguous in Galan’s work. While it shows an interest, or almost empathy, with the vernacular language of signs and markings, Galan implodes the principle through which this same language operates. The works seem more inspired by the failure, rather than the success of this principle. For example, when we see these metal strips, we are increasingly reminded of those strips left behind after the object they were demarcating has been removed – like the infamous yellow tape that serves no purpose, but even so draws our attention to the absurdity of the situation. By delineating such disparate objects as a set of Scandinavian designed chairs, a crate of soft drinks, concrete building blocks, and of course, emptiness, in various geometrical configurations on the floor, on walls, or on both, these works seem to navigate easily between certainty and the absurd. It is the artist himself who points to this paradox, and who manages to inhabit it while not tearing it apart. The tapes are articulated in the space like a formal display of the lack of certainty that the situations described by these objects persist in transmitting. This means that the banal in these sculptures is steeped in an essence of the absurd. They operate on a banal level, but the banal also operates on them – there is a communion with, for example, Kafkaesque mazes, and this aesthetic is never far from the codes of bureaucracy and convention. In addition, the choice of yellow is no coincidence. A quick Google search will show that our peripheral vision detects yellow up to 1.24 times more than other strong colors such as red. (As I am writing, in my new apartment in a middle-class condominium in the southern part of Belo Horizonte, from over five hundred meters away I can see a group of workers on the top of a building, wearing yellow raincoats.)
Galan’s interest in large cities and forms of material culture and coexistence is not exclusive to only his work. There are at least three other artists of his generation who are working within the same geographical context – the city of São Paulo –, and who can expand our understanding of this kind of work: André Komatsu, Cinthia Marcelle and Marcelo Cidade. What draws most attention in Marcelle’s work are the things that appear in the context of work: the buckets, paint rolls and tools that temporarily populate our living spaces are transformed into studies, showing a compassion for their transitory nature and a refinement of composition that seems to lift them from their original fleeting condition, and placing them in a deliberately artificial state; a state of art. Cidade has an almost documentary fascination with the marginalized forms of life in large cities, his main area of interest. The idea of exclusion and the forms of resistance to it are materialized in gestures and remnants such as burned walls, shattered windows and graffitied spaces, all of which are the mark of his sculptures. In turn, Komatsu transforms the state of “under construction” into a kind of artistic technique, creating areas of raw brick, unfinished walls, built directly in the space itself, collapsing buildings surrounded by protection screens, wire and fences. Claude Lévi-Strauss’ famous phrase at the beginning of Tristes Tropiques, in which he wrote that everything in Brazil that seems to be under construction is already in ruins, immediately comes to mind.
Compared to these artists’ works, Galan’s seems less directly critical. It reacts to apparently identical stimuli to those just cited, but the results are very different. His diction has a sort of calm and silence, a kind of muteness that could at first be confused with a lack of communication. It is precisely in these intervals of our perception, when the longing for an ilusion is stronger than the longing for actual comprehension, that his work is most effective. Perhaps as a way to dispel this doubt, we tend immediately to associate it with tradition. Those with less patience may assume that it is influenced by American minimalism, and they would not be entirely incorrect in seeing an affinity for example with Galan’s use of industrial building materials in his work. Others think that he is inspired by the Brazilian constructivist avant-garde movement, which is also not entirely erroneous, as his interest in geometry is a constant (I will later explore his interest in emptiness in light of Franz Weissman’s work). However, we should also not forget there is a level of strangeness in his work that transcends these parameters.
When I asked about decisive experiences in his artistic training, Galan told me he’d been very impressed when he first saw sculptures by the American artist Robert Gober. I initially found this strange, concluding that it was something circumstantial and biographical rather than an actual reverberation in his work. But I then remembered that a recurrent reference in his work is Uri Geller, the Israeli psychic and showman, famous in Brazil in the 1970s for fixing clocks and bending cutlery on the Sunday evening tv show Fantástico, shown on the Globo network. This memory of Geller, whose name was even used as the title of a sculpture by the artist, made me better understand the mention of Gober. Geller’s illusions, like the work of Gober, make us see things as if they are familiar, and yet at the same time deeply strange. His interest in illusion is as strong as his interest in what is transitory, just as his attention to the banal is balanced by his attention to the absurd. Curiously, this association has now reached a phonetic resonance, generated by the repetition of the initial consonant: Galan, Gober, Geller.
As these recent ideas have become more familiar to me, strangely enough, I now understand less what the artist means by “common area”. My initial hunch, related to the condominiums and apartment blocks in large cities, is not completely wrong, but neither is it completely right. There are many other aspects that are related to mathematical operations, to areas of intersection between two sets that exist only in relation to one another; there is the inversion of cartographic order and systems of representation; there is an insistence on doubles in his work that could also explain the meaning of the term. Perhaps the answer is in the common area between the work and the spectator, where meaning is tenuous. Perhaps this text, like Galan’s works, is no more than a mere apparition of something that has already existed somewhere else.
Diagonal Section
The first time I saw Diagonal Section was at its first exhibition. The former premises of the Galeria Luisa Strina, on the corner of Rua Padre João Manuel with Oscar Freire, in the Jardinsneighborhood of São Paulo, had a terrace that was rarely used by artists. To access this terrace, there was a small and even less functional room between the stairs and the outside area, which was more of a passageway than an exhibition space. In his third solo show at the gallery,1 Marcius Galan created a work for this room that would in a way become a paradigm for his language as a whole, both because it synthesized a series of his interests and concerns, and because it became one of his most popular pieces.
Diagonal Section is not a sculptural object in the traditional sense; rather, it constitutes the environment itself fitted into the gallery space. Its relationship with sculpture is therefore something that is redefined by the relationship between the object and the space. Throughout the 20th century, we tended to understand sculpture as less of an imitation of space than actually being space. This means that from the Duchampian ready-mades to the earthworks, and moving onto the neo-concrete non-object phase, a more tense and problematic relationship between real and virtual space, surroundings and work, has contaminated sculptural objects. In Diagonal Section specifically, the artist employs basic elements and materials, the same found in any other exhibition room: walls, ceiling and floor, paint, light and wax. However, he proposes a shift in our perception by suggesting the presence of an element that does not actually exist in the space. The work takes shape in the transformation of the space through the inclusion of a line, originally diagonal, that divides the room and creates a field of color beyond. It blends with the exhibition room – thereby causing our confusion. Where we think there is a sheet of glass, there is actually just an optical illusion caused by a physical phenomenon. After first experiencing it, one is left with only the memory, as it is impossible to repeat. “It is a silence that suddenly shouts out and makes itself heard.”2
At first sight, Diagonal Section suggests a relationship with some of the pieces from the Light and Space movement, a sort of Californian version of minimalism, with its perceptived color fields and refined materialism.3 However, there is another aspect from 1950s and 60s art which I think is more useful in the reading of this work, and that is one of emptiness, seen here from the perspective of the Austro-Brazilian sculptor Franz Weissmann. When he created his Empty Cube, in 1950-51, Weissmann introduced an important concept into Brazilian constructivism, in which virtual relationships play the leading role and lead to the disappearance of the material and to increased ontological and political interpretations. Emptiness is something that isn’t, but it is also something that is yet to come, whether in a developing society or whether in the imagination of an emancipated observer. Emptiness occupies an important space in Galan’s work with his interest in the economy and mathematics, seeing subtraction as an operation and zero as a figure. In some of his other works, also interested in subtractions, Galan adds his voice to a Brazilian lineage that sees art in money.4 From Cildo Meireles’ Zero Dollar [1978-84] and Zero Cruzeiro [1974-78], to Jac Leirner’s collages of banknotes, Galan finds an inflection point in the circle of a coin. Whether throwing coins at the ground (Variable Distance, 2014), grinding them up (Eclipse, 2013), or using them to balance complex assemblies that resemble mobiles (Immobile, 2013), the artist reduces them to geometric circular forms. However, the illusion here is not optical. We are in a maze of the abstraction of economy, equated with that of art. Emptiness is the result of uncertainty, and the sense of walking on money is something threatening. In times of unstable currencies, ever changing exchange rates, huge bank profits with a currency that is nothing more than an illusion, where will our belief (in art and in money) end?
Frederico Morais described Weissmann’s emptiness thus:
His Empty Cube (which in fact should really be called a “virtual cube”) is a seminal work due to the contrast the artist has created between what is real, with matter, weight, shape, and touch, and that which is immaterial, untouchable, purely virtual. This work helps clarify the difference between what is simply empty (transposing material, a mechanical act) and emptiness. This is something more subtle: space is born, it emerges, unfurls, manifests itself virtually, but, once we realize it, it imposes itself in such a way that we can no longer forget it.5
Since it was first shown, Diagonal Section has been exhibited nearly ten times, and on occasion in more than one place at the same time, either with slight adaptations or radically different ones, always embracing the unique information and challenges of each space. Although I have not seen all the installations, I am familiar with many of them through their photographic documentation, and comparison of them offers new insights into their readings. Although carefully studied and precise, the relationship of the materials and the space is relative and can only be fully comprehended once it has been installed; making it impossible to determine in advance if it will work or not. This provisional nature of Galan’s work can be added to his previously mentioned interest in illusionists, virtual objects, and emptiness. In one of its versions, the work was completely transformed, taking up a stretch of wall to form a differently colored triangle (sp-Arte, 2012). In another, it was placed in a diagonal with a much smaller field of depth (Museum of Fine Arts Houston, 2009). The contrast between the effect of the glass and the fluidity of the form of its apparition is significant, and means that Galan’s work has contributed to the history of emptiness in Brazilian art.
These installations have their own anecdotes; in Inhotim, where it has been on permanent exhibition since 2010, it caused panic amongst the maintenance team, who thought they were going to have to constantly clean the glass in order to maintain the effect. In other installations, institutions suggested that the public be prohibited from crossing the “sheet of glass”, so as not to disrupt the experience of those who arrived later. Strongly refuted, the latter reminded me that every illusion has a counter-illusion, and that for every emptiness there is fullness.
Drawings
Drawing because it is made by hand. Drawing because it is in this scale: from the hand to the pencil, the pencil to the page, the page to the table. Drawing because it is part of a project’s creation, and this stage is crucial. Drawing because it establishes a direct dialog with the sculpture, and even more with the space. Because paper can withstand everything, and space – well, we don’t know what it will withstand until it leaves the paper. But neither do we know what we want from the space before we start. Drawing because it is a laboratory for ideas. Drawing because adding matter to paper can become a Sisyphean task, even more so when this addition entails a proportional subtraction in an almost endless process. Drawing because it generates a materiality: the paper, the pencil and the eraser are the raw materials of this work, and they jostle beyond their conventional syntactic function. Drawing because in drawing we see the fundamental elements of a geometric vocabulary: the point, the line, the area – but we also see repetition, serialization, doubling, the full and the empty.
Drawings… drawings… drawings… full of ontological power, the less defined the better, drawings permeate Marcius Galan’s work. The images that accompany Galan’s interview with Kiki Mazzucchelli were taken from the artist’s notebooks, and they describe projects for future sculptures and installations. Here, drawings are a kind of workshop or mobile studio for the artist, in the sense that it is a practice that defines his production, but does not always occupy the primary visible plane, where spaces and objects are the main protagonists. In the images gathered here, one can see a series of uses and roles allocated to drawing.
The first is one of annotation. Drawings are primarily an aide-mémoire, a way of registering an idea, but also of understanding its physical dimensions. Thus, studies are an extension of the idea, and they may even include notes and instructions, but they already imply a physical presence in the world and an implementation of the piece that will subsequently no longer be a project and become a thing. A series of technical stages from annotation to the final project are involved, but while drafting the idea there are relatively few changes between one stage and the next.
On this basis, one can find relationships between the drawing and the three-dimensional practice in Galan’s work. Here, the concept is about drawing in the expanded field,1 which refers back to an exhibition I curated and in which the artist took part.2 In (Un)drawing, one of the starting points was to think about how the work of the participating artists though of drawings as something in their own right and not necessarily just a means to an end. Drawing is shown as a concept, a gesture and an attitude.
Inclination to the Left (2010), for example is, in the artist’s own words,
an unstructured, unbalanced structure that tilts to one side, and that contains the drawing of its possible position of balance. The drawing is formed by arcs against the painted wall and makes it possible to (mentally) reconstruct a situation that never existed, that of balance, that of the object as it “should” be.3
The sculpture, if we can call it that, is found in the point of encounter between the two-dimensional and three-dimensional elements, and the imaginary situation of the object in a balanced state is suggested by the traces of movement that would have unbalanced it. The result of this is that without the drawing, the trail, the work would be incomplete.
In the same exhibition, gestures and repetition come up again – just as the idea of traces and residues do –, in drawings that are formed by the obsessive action of repeated drawing and rubbing out. The motifs represented are a circle and a straight line. The paper that is marked by the drawing and the rubbing out is framed with the residues of the used erasers (Drawings[Parallel Lines and Tangent], 2011). The frustrated attempts to build these primary forms tell the story of the drawing, even though it is not really there. Galan continues:
In this case, the drawing is a space between the action and the final work. Both the accumulation of the eraser and the paper that is sculpted by the act of erasing contain the information of this action, which is justified and strengthened through the repetition of error.4
Galan began his work with eraser residues by framing all residues generated by erasers that he had used for successive drawings over a four year period.5 Later on, he became interested in the material itself in its original form, and not just in its residue. This period led to formal experiments with these materials, in which unused or half-used erasers, together with graphite sticks, are arranged in boxes to form geometric compositions (Unstable Abstraction, 2011; Erased Composition, 2013). In the initial drawings, he describes a dematerialization of the act of drawing, reduced to just a trace. In those that followed, he tried to create a materiality with the tools themselves. It is intriguing that the eraser has been used as the main tool in these works, particularly since Galan is an artist for whom emptiness holds such a fascinating role.
Other attempts to give a new form to drawing involve other senses, such as drawings accompanied by sounds of their making (Intersection, 2011). Two almost identical drawings, both containing a circle, are displayed side by side, with a speaker below each one. The soundtracks last for very different lengths of time. At the lower right hand of the drawings is a written indication that gives the precise idea of the difference: while one was made in four seconds, the other took two minutes and twenty-two seconds to be completed. Isn’t a drawing also a question of time?
Between notes, projects, traces, residues, tools, sounds, clocks and maps, lines and points, straight lines and circles, the drawing still manages to retain Galan’s urgency and persistence, which is one of his focal points and principle guidelines. I will conclude with the challenging statement brought by one of his titles: One Line Contains Infinite Points[2011].