The selection of work that Túlio Pinto presents on Ground gathers some clear ideas to the artist, developed in his propositions over the past years. These ideas are expressed by the relations of contact and proximity of different material and principles; differences that, when counterposed, reinforce its most fundamental qualities, expressed in the way it refers to the body and its limitations: flexibility, drop, tension, strength and balance.

Túlio states that his focus in on the ground, to the solid impact of its presence as strength capable of reset the action on works. But we notice that in an indirect way, mediated by counterposed strategies and materials that distend and stretch.

Thus, the works are designed as systems – connection of a set of phenomena which draws in scale and intensity and, as a presence, puts us on alert. These phenomena are proper of the physical world, the raw power that operates continuously and reasonless: a stretched out line connecting a weight to a plane of glass produces an unlikely balance between solidity and transparency; the iron shows us the foundations of what the glass that intercepts it, its fragility. The proximity of those differences becomes an opportunity to take distance, to realise how the constant action of a force tests our comprehension of the world.

Gravity attracts all bodies towards the centre of the earth. We can only imagine where that point would concentrate all the tension, the moving weight of our body and the desire to experience it – as inaccessible as the other. All our actions would converge to this infinite zero, if it wasn’t for the effort of projection, extension and flight; that makes mind something different from matter.

Therefore, we know well the forces brought into play in Ground, but we know it within a different context. The systems proposed by Túlio are born from the same conflict of forces in which we are surrounded. They refer to those forces that, at the same time they confine us in the absolute space of a point, generate the possibility of dropout and creating poetry.

We live thrusts, compressions, breaks and vertigo in a speed that drives us to consent without reflecting. Benjamin already told us almost a century ago: disruption and shock are assimilated by the need to move forward and what is left for us is phantasmagoria.

When we approach the work on Ground we are attracted to decrypt the law that organizes each set; rebuild the continuity that allows materials to defy their fate. In the oscillation between proximity and escape, art questions us and proposes a question whose answer is equivalent in our mind to the opening of a sensorial and conceptual dilemma. But the time of interrogation is the time of waiting, of stationary tension which makes the familiar strange. Therefore the expectation of an outcome, like disarming a trap.

The experience of art comes in this gap, when we emerge from sensorial experience aiming a lost sense. The opposite is merely acceptance.