Iran do Espirito Santo
Pristine Aesthetics Alter Perceptions
by Claire Breukel, New York
Iran do Espírito Santo was born in 1963 in the city of Mococa, Brazil. As a teenager, he worked in a photography lab processing black and white prints, which was to later greatly impact his work.
He moved to the city of São Paulo in 1981, and after studying in London, England for two years, he returned to São Paulo to complete his Bachelor of Arts at the Fundação Armando Alvares Penteado in 1986. Espírito Santo’s first solo exhibition at Sean Kelly Gallery in New York City was in 2002, after which he completed three subsequent solo exhibitions, the most recent of which, entitled SWITCH, opened in March 2012. Over the decade, Espírito Santo’s work has been widely collected by museums, including the Museum of Modern Art, New York, the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, the Museum of Modern Art, San Francisco, as well as the Irish Museum of Modern Art, Dublin which also served as a venue for Espírito Santo’s touring retrospective exhibition. The artist represented Brazil in the 2007 Venice Biennale central international exhibition in Italy, and his work was included in the 2008 São Paulo Biennial in Brazil, as well as in the 2009 Mercosur Biennial in Porto Alegre. He lives and works in São Paulo, Brazil.
Pristine Aesthetics Alter Perceptions: Iran do Espírito Santo
The work of Iran do Espírito Santo is a juxtaposition of precision and play, obsessive detail and the banal. It is these oppositions that create tension, and allow his work to function on multiple practical as well as conceptual levels. For over two decades, Espírito Santo has created artwork that illustrates an eye for detail and a penchant for a reductive aesthetic that together embody a mentality to production of unparalleled exactitude. Working with life-size objects as well as with large sculptural and drawing installations, his choice of industrial and consumer-based materials, ranging from metal and mirror to fine marble and crystal, give his work an otherworldly aura spurred on by a presentation of an almost superhuman perfection. In fact, during the interview the artist twice reorganized his catalogues into a uniform pile on the table before him, suggesting that his need to organize and create symmetry is instinctual and deeply rooted. This need for order comes from a strongly felt ethical concern. Living at the center of a booming emerging economy, Espírito Santo recently gave a talk at an art school in São Paulo, noting that instead of asking existential questions about art, most students want to know about its economics. Indicative of an ingrained consumer-oriented view toward commodity and art, he is determined to make work that suggests an alternative relationship to objects and experiences, in the hope to instigate a renewed understanding of our role in the world. Espírito Santo claims his lifelong fixation with drawing brought him to art, and that his sculpture works stem from a drawing mentality. This explains why his prolific use of line and monotone shading to create perspective in a picture plane—whether this picture plane be an exhibition space or a flat page—is unsurpassed in its ethical convictions as well as in its execution.
A work that best illustrated Espírito Santo’s probing relationship with his audience is an early interventionist installation, Drops, created for the collaborative public art exhibition InSITE in 1997. InSITE was conceived as a bi-national art partnership between the border cities of San Diego, USA and Tijuana, Mexico, and worked with non-profit, public institutions as well as the private sector. For this, Espírito Santo created the only outdoor interventionist public work of the project, comprised of a multi-piece installation of twenty concrete 16-inch square dice placed strategically throughout these cities. Ten in Tijuana and ten in San Diego, Drops became fragmented through its dispersion, with each dice becoming infused with the socio-political context of its placement. Sites ranged from churches and schools to parks and a beach, making each dice an object of play in a larger game of chance discovery. Each enlarged dice appeared ambiguous, solidified, quite literally, in concrete, rendering the inanimate dice useless from its ordinary function as a purveyor of chance—making it instead susceptible to a John Cage-type chance encounter. Unintentionally and amusingly the game expanded, and despite its hefty 260 kg weight, a stolen dice was found a year later by police in the adjacent city of Los Angeles, reinstating the interventionist and playful sensibility of Espírito Santo’s Drops.
However, beneath his playful nature is a deep-seated need to create order and render flawlessly objects that surround us everyday. Through a deep analysis of the object that includes drawings and redesigns, Espírito Santo transforms it to its most essential and therefore ‘truthful’ form. His widely exhibited sculptural object, Bulb, exhibited as part of a six-piece installation at Sean Kelly gallery in 2004, focuses on a household object often overlooked. Transforming it into an exact life-size solid stainless steel replica, Espírito Santo recreates a light bulb that appears more perfect than in reality. Rendering the bulb useless, he places the object in the position, for the first time, to be studied and admired as the archetypal light bulb. In this way, Espírito Santo’s objects capsize the subjectivity of assumptive perception.
Pushing this further, to generate an increasingly optimum platform for observation and experience, the artist created a series using the “real life” original material of the depicted object, in order to foster a direct and uninhibited relationship between viewer and artwork. Water Glass 2 is made of solid crystal and the Can series in solid stainless steel, appearing abstract in their weighted and filled state, infusing each piece with a hyperrealism that situates the object in a position to be re-negotiated with fresh eyes. This quintessential relationship between object and onlooker, outside of its normal hyper-consumer environment, removes the mediation of the chaotic everyday, bringing the present and the ideal closer together.
Growing increasingly tired of the commoditized approach to the art object in the increasingly commercializing art arena, Espírito Santo expanded his desire for an autonomous everyday object in to the realm of the environment/ experience creating the installation En Passant in 2008. He exhibited this reductive wall work seven times, including at the Sao Paulo Biennial, recreating the piece on site to mimic the situation of light within each space. Harkening his experience as a Photolab technician, Espírito Santo viewed each space as a photogram transforming light and shadow into meticulous shaded stripes from white to grey to black in either vertical or horizontal gradations depending on the walls available. In this way, En Passant is a plan to recreate visible light in an ordered description of lines to be digested and perceived easily and clearly, supplemented by an experience of visual illusion that mimics the transient nature of light.
In many ways En Passant pushed further Espírito Santo’s earlier exploration of site-specificity that he had proposed in his 2007 Venice Biennale contribution.
Extension/fade married the interior and exterior of the Giardini exhibition space by reproducing its façade on an interior wall. However, the artist’s recreation comprised of perfect rectangle bricks that dissolved from dark gradations of grey into the transparency of the white space, created the illusion of an idealized structure fading into an eternal void. Whereas this wall began the exploration of re-presenting the ebb and flow of light in space suggestive of time passing, the detailed and ordered lines of En Passant create an illusionistic rhythm that both refract and absorb light, using the present as its source of creation to generate an isolated condition of experience that is existentially timeless.
Not as instigative as the tricks of trompe l’oeil, Espírito Santo uses basic optical devices to prompt gentle participation, viewing the effect of illusion as a byproduct of a more complex, multi-layered experience. His exhibitions are a stage where representations of the banal—monotone line and shade—are minimally altered to create depth perceptions. In this way, Espírito Santo is the screenwriter that uses the non-fiction of real life experience to offer a new reading of an idealized virtual world that is perhaps closer to a sense of truth.
SWITCH, Espírito Santo’s current solo exhibition at Sean Kelly gallery in New York City, takes his play with illusionism to a heightened experiential and poetic level. The exhibition is comprised of three rooms that each entices exploration. The first is a wall mural drawing depicting two large hand-drawn squares that recall a Sol Lewitt-like accumulation of line, using graphic gradations of white, grey and black tones that encapsulate a range of light to dark mood. Titled Switch, these opposing blocks undulate with the same movement of a Mark Rothko painting, yet unlike Rothko’s abstracts, these blocks are representational, transcending simple movement by pulling the viewer into a void of detailed lines. Like a double mind trick one succumbs to the work’s illusionistic forces whilst being cognitive of its pristinely constructed physical form. The second room offers a row of solid marble sculptures called Globes, made of casting of vases and urns collected in stores as well as flea markets. The objects are recognizable in scale and shape, yet an immaculate polished white finish, abstract solidity and appearance of hanging in suspension on a long floating shelf make these objects appear alien. The finale, Mirrors, is an installation of three giant ‘folded’ mirror sheets placed at intersecting angles in the room to not only reflect the presence of space but also absorb and refract the changing light as it pours in from the skylight above. This intervention of light indeterminately alters the shade of its surface from white to black, from day to night. Like a Mies van der Rohe glass façade these static mirrors are receptacles of change reflecting visitors as they traverse the space–ultimately baring witness to time passing.
Iran do Espírito Santo has the ability to not only metaphorically but also physically transport his viewer. His consistent and deep exploration of themes, a style that melds the aesthetics of minimalism with representation and conceptualism to be uniquely intangible and ambiguous, as well as an approach to production that mimics sleek automation, make him a master of the tools of experience. His sculptures and installations propose scrupulously thought-out combinations and juxtapositions, using the present condition of space to gently coerce experiences that are simultaneously timeless, sweetly melancholic and inquisitively existential.
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