forget, explode, signalize – Bernardo Mosqueira, 2010

I was going to sleep. Pedro was waking up. Or the opposite. We crossed with each other, in this early morning, at the kitchen of a hostel in the Big Pinheiros which is São Paulo. After five minutes of conversation, the following question came: “Would art be war taken to the last consequences?”. The works of Pedro Victor Brandão presented at the exhibition “entre-vistas”, realized after the conclusion of the Programa Aprofundamento [Advanced Studies Program] of the School of Visual Arts of Parque Lage, can be considerate (if we stay aware of the radicalization of the (re)action about what is much believed) time-bombs that use artistic poetic as explosive.

One of the works showed, a continuation of the Alicerce Infiltrado [Infiltrated Foundation] series, is a set of ten photographs that shows liquen colonies growing on the infiltrated walls of the same school. They are symbiotic processes of fungus and bacteria that, enjoying the instability of a certain medium, create, collectively, the necessary stability for their living and reproduction. The sharp, accurate and precise technique results in registries of chaotic, colourful and numerous melanomas that can hide bone or brain metastasis.

Being part of a group that particularly discussed the very same institution where he studied, Brandão knows his creation of new short circuits from gazes as a form of action that holds a great transformative force.

Another work exhibited at this show, Sem Título #2 (Tempos Autorais) [Untitled #2 (Authorial Times)], from the Curta [Short] series; is an unfixed gelatin silver print that comments the “celebration” for the 300 years of the first copyright law (the Statute of Anne Reginæ, in UK), placed side by side with the present brazilian copyright law: one of the most restrictive of the world. The comparison announces the enormous and strange resemblance. Without being fixed, in 40 days, the image exposed to the sunlight disappears.

On the top of the image, a gray scale acts as a time-scale: it is the counter of the poetic time bomb which holds the vectorized traces in the conception. When the difference between what was black and what was white ends, the wick burns out. Pedro creates his works as aesthetical studies, transformative criptoparanoigraphed messages, powerfully effective and affective pieces, that, maybe, pretended the nonexistent immateriality, but, indeed, reach the physical impermanence.

Brandão makes explicit a frustrated struggle by the fossilization of time. It is, yet, the old fight of the man against his inevitable end. But the transformation strengthens! The institutional monument with all its conservative forces does not wins the life that runs. It is the liquens that tint the monumental gray created to eternize its ideological intentions of origin. It is the images that are “finite, much more than beautiful, will stay”.

Someday later, I was going to beach and Pedro was coming back. Or the opposite. In this encounter, in a carioca breath of sea air, we were discussing, silly, about the artist and the contemporary. He once believed that the artistic activity was a lonely work. I did not. In the end, we agreed that the artist with a real contemporary activity would not be only an assimilator of his time (“anthem of the race”). The contemporary artist should be a signalizer of actual obscurities.

With the works showed in this exhibition, Pedro signalizes forgetfulness as an ontological entity, as a necessary practice and as inevitable process. Brandão blends the endogenous image of fading to the exogenous image of the erasure. By officering the fading, but without framing it, he makes clear that the process happens in the hole space. He still evinces the parallel between memory and image, the fading and the forgetting and he does that by stitching universal questions of mankind to the local and temporal questions that he lives.

I reclaimed, yet at the seashore, and he assumed: “Yes, this sense of permanence is quite critical and tolerant. We were talking about a possible time, past or future. The lonely activity was that one where the artist creates imageries, perceives obscurities and assimilate them historically. It was. Now, we condivide our ethics and aesthetics”. Oh good! At least, that’s what “I remember now. Before I remembered of another. One day will come when none will be remembered. Then in the same forgetfulness they will fuse”.