“Place is where the personal references and the system of value that drives the different ways of perceiving and constructing the landscape are.” PCN (National Curriculum Parameters) of Geography.

LANDSCAPE: STATUS AND DISPLACEMENT “Place is where the personal references and the system of value that drives the different ways of perceiving and constructing the landscape are.” PCN (National Curriculum Parameters) of Geography. There is, in the process of Brazilian culture, a curious calling for syncretism, a permanent search for a synthesis between certain situations seemingly conflicting and even antagonistic. The Brazilian anthropophagic process operates in the sense of assimilation and construction of a thought and of anaesthetic action to be a blend of various information that communicate on the same scale of values and references, without a clear predominance of one idea or another. This is undoubtedly the case of Túlio Pinto, an artist who can, with sensibility and talent, establish a provocative dialogue with the Brazilian modernist sculptural tradition, by inserting its aspects and behaviours that resonates in present-day artistic action.

The sculpture originates with the construction of totems, identifying elements of social groups who share common cultural values. Its presence in a designated central place aims to add individuals and characterize the territory and its ownership thought a distinctive feature which operates in the natural landscape. With the subsequent development of some human communities and the expansion of their domains, the boundary marks are created with the purpose of characterizing the limits, concrete and mysterious spaces between what identifies us and what we have power and possession, with other spaces belonging to the land of the unknown and uncertainty.

In classical sculpture, the work seemed to be contained within the stone, leaving the artist the task of chopping it, revealing through the action of craft, the essence – and voice – the contained art of the lifeless silence of the mineral block. And it structures itself though allegories and metaphors of power, whether military or imperial, sacred or divide. Their presence is outstanding in identifying and valuing places in urban settlements, and such three dimensional allegories work as the ancient totems, embodying more complex values determined by societies marked by clearly identifiable social class divisions. With the industrial revolution and the subsequent advent of technical reproducibility, modernity eventually gives the sculptural object some new truths, new concepts, new goals.

The autonomy of the artistic speech – the premise of modernity – is the starting point of research for Túlio Pinto. Sculpture is the result of actions and materials from industrial processes and the shape is determined by establishing values structuring concepts such as weight, balance, volume, modulation, creating an object alien to the natural landscape. Conceived and created by human action, this form falls within the world as a paradoxical element, defining itself by the constructive truth and clarity, conceptual tension and restlessness. Thus, the works of the artist are intelligent and emotional dialogues with modernity, understanding it as a permanent exercise of trial and refusing some contemporary theoretical statements. Such statements tend to reduce the objectivity of the theoretical reflection and the pursuit of beauty determined by truth to any point in the history of the last century.

Túlio Pinto, at certain point, refuses or denies his own past. There is, in every object, an explicit tension that dialogues with the aesthetic concepts established by Brancusian essence of form and by the movement of Calder mobiles, the same time as incorporating values conceptually and references coming from Constructivist movement, a strong presence in Brazil. The artist is the direct heir of large sculptural Brazilian trajectories of thought that begins with Franz Weissmann and continues with José Resende and Waltércio Caldas. To these initial references he adds experimentation and boldness of other artists who, since the 50’s put into question the traditional sculptural concepts. Sculpture was a precursor of artistic techniques whose limits and definitions were eventually sprayed by contemporary reality. The idea of a place – precise and defining – still evident in the modern world, will give way to broader concepts where geography cannot be explained by the dichotomy centre vs. periphery. Thus the object, the installation and performance unite in order to produce a work more engaged to life and with the speed of contemporary cities. The traditional sculptural object, direct heir of the ancient totemic elements of the first human settlements, keeps the same spirit centralizing and organizing the space. In the world we live in, the Deleuzian concept of the rhizome is the main definer of a new geography with new values that introduce the temporal idea in space, recreating a new story, redefining ideas and situations, and provoking the appreciation of the displacement as an essential practice of contemporary human action.

The project Transposição (Displacement) summarizes a number of artistic actions and interferences developed by Túlio Pinto in recent years. According to the project description, two spaces in the city – the Alfândega Square and the Augusto Meyer Gallery at the Casa de Cultura Mário Quintana – creates an axis in which, for twenty days, a cube composed of approximately 6.000 small concrete blocks built on the square will be, every day and gradually, “dismantled” and moved with the help of wheelbarrows into the gallery. This displacement, in line with contemporary concepts, recreates new geographies and suggests intriguing relationships on the actual body of the artwork and its transit – its virtuality and formal uncertainty changed daily by the transportation. Thus what immediately becomes present in a particular public space talking with it thought a strange physicality deprived of function or free aesthetic appeal is enhanced by the action that takes a leading role and for whom the public is invited to participate with other wheelbarrows made available. The presence of a house and the consequent creation of a fully private and intimate space in a public square serves as a shelter and address to the artist during the experimental aesthetic action filed by him. The importance of this element is accentuated by photos that will be incorporated in the exterior walls of the shelter on a daily basis, documenting and reporting on the route (or displacement) of the artwork body and its discursive implications.

Therefore, this is an event of multiple characters, in order to question values and substantive qualities of space and its relationship with art. The concrete blocks transposed from one place to another acquire new concepts and new interpretations. Domesticated in the institutional space through the photographic record, they document the entire course of a plot and its implications that dialogue with the urban design, architecture, performance, happenings, photography, and especially with the exciting relationship between what actually is still in a certain physical space and what is recomposed formally in another, but it has never regain its original concept. In this relationship between reality and virtuality, the work – or rather, the process – turns out to be the record of a script with certain cinematographic characteristics. Inserting this informal speech incorporates precise notions of belonging of the public space understood as common good, and the setting for the action of contemporary art, which no longer understands the institutional limits and marketing typically offered to it. A consistent and bold experience as Túlio Pinto’s Displacement Project causes necessary strangeness and questions the boundaries between art and life.