Marco Antônio Ramos •

A Digest

Alejandra Muñoz

To give shape to the frustrations or purge resentments through the artistic process would be a therapeutic path. Although, an atelier is not a divan and Marco Antonio doesn’t understand his experience as a pathology. On the contrary, he takes from the thickness of absences, of the omissions and needs, a conceptual ballast for his creations that articulates the most broad imaginaries and common references to most of us. This way, the collective ludic and the testimonial subjective intertwines in the arduous equation of the artist’s memory: a past filled with incompleteness and a future crossed by truncated expectations. A glimpse through the rearview mirror of life gives space to a surreal plot of creation. Thus, as his first individual exhibition, this sample is not retrospective, but digests the recent production of the artist.

The starting point is an ethical contemporary gesture, the reuse, the acknowledgement of the symbolic powers of materials still useful. Wood, metal or paper, most of the time originated from demolitions of old buildings, mining of junkyards or reminiscences of pieces emptied from the once representative values, clarifies a completeness of ignored existencies. Therefore, such materials are, beyond the expression of the physical and mineral resistance, a way of resilience and reinvention that underlies the obsolescence and impermanence of those objects they once belonged to.

The imbuia couple signs a enigmatic presence in the space: two turned figures that evoke the tradition of the Bahian mobiliary, they seem to have jumped out to the other side of the street from the archive of Museum Carlos Costa Pinto. The polished and smooth finish of the pieces enhances the memory of progressive life that each matter carries, at the same time it broadcasts the possibility of a new object. However, the patient artisanal work and the gleaming surfaces are not enough to make the objects work: steel kites don’t fly, marble balls almost don’t roll, imbuia football boots cannot be worn, the yo-yo doesn’t unroll, the cumaru bench isn’t soft, the ipê clackers are distressfully impossible to be played. Therefore, the paradox comes from an instigating metaphor to the artwork.

As it happens in the oneiric unconscious, the memory might flourish generating images of twisted objects. The studies are incomplete, the professional training unattained, the desire to play football not carried out, the absent familiar bonds are facts that also pass by a recycle, a new use, as if those reminiscent materials from other paths were rescued. The result is a significative tension between art and design beyond the artisanal crafting of the carpentry: they’re seductive objects in they cautious form that, dislocated from the scale and known contexts, defies the logic in they functional impossibility and subverts what is expected from them

The great reel of mahogany, allusive to the sewing mother, exposes the tension with half a stainless steel razor blade, that symbolizes the other absences.The enlarged dimensions of the installation resembles the operations of the Oldemburg scale. But also with these reels Marco Antonio used to build car toys. A homage to childhood? Maybe.This ambiguity is also present in the rosewood. The panel seems to evoke the traditional pedagogies and raise concerns about the trajectory of the current schooling. Is the reduced scale a metaphor for today’s education? More than nostalgia about the unfinished school training of the artist, are the persistence on the detail and singularity of each element alerts about otherness? In the proximity of these pieces, the school black board becomes a football field. So, how much learning is there outside school? The kaminagai frame of the black board may resemble the relevance of the experimental and non-formalized in the construction of the artistic journey.

In this thought-provoking context of subversions and ambiguities, the old emptied book might be a tome of open possibilities in the place of the literal stripping of images of a fragmentary past. Therefore, this digest might be appreciated as a promise of new creations. So be it.