images | text

Renata Lucas
Born in 1971 in Ribeirão Preto, Brazil / Lives in São Paulo, Brazil

Adriano Pedrosa (AP): What is the origin of Falha (Failure, 2010), which you are exhibiting in Istanbul?

Renata Lucas (RL): Falha is an articulated, portable, foldable floor that can be opened and extended onto another area—a monument that does not stand still or upright. It is flexible, adaptable, and unstable, like a moving ground. The material that was used in the work’s first version, in 2003, came from Cruzamento, made the same year in Rio de Janeiro, where I applied sheets of plywood to the intersection of two streets. The works take up the challenge of transposing one terrain into another, without losing the quality of the movement it had served as a base for. Also, the experience of every Brazilian artist is to necessarily remake the ground where he or she steps with each new work, a feeling that I have always associated with an institutional fragility that does not offer us stable conditions of production and reception. At each new proposal the environment itself has to be rebuilt so that the work can exist, for it seems as if it is crumbling at each moment.

AP: How did you define the size of each sheet?

RL: I thought of a sheet as large as I could move it, taking into consideration the monumental (and heavy) character that the action of “moving a terrain” implies. The size varies around 1.03 x 1.45 meters, therefore the sheet allows an articulated movement (with a certain difficulty) in which you extend the sheet toward where you will take each  new step, in a gesture of creation  of the ground on which you step,  a landscape that is constructed as it  is unfolded.

AP: The work has a strong relation with Lygia Clark. It’s a Bicho (Beast) expanded to an architectural scale.

RL: A Bicho is a surface that has sprung from the plane and creates its own spiral, but in fact I was thinking a lot about Clark’s Caminhando (Walking), where she gradually produces a space as she cuts the surfaces—creating a space based on the action.

AP: What is your interest in geometric abstraction?

RL: More than geometry, I am interested in mathematics in a broader sense, and the way in which it represents the world through abstract systems of multiple meanings. I like very much the discrete elements that may generate a wider symbolic charge.

AP: Is there a political dimension in the work?

RL: What do you think?

AP: Yes, in terms of how it transgresses the traditional economy of the art object, asking people to interact with it, reshaping its final configuration each time it is presented, like the Bicho.

RL: “Failure” evokes geological movements, the failures that may suddenly change the organizational sense of space, but it is also defeat. After all, the work is a monument that cannot sustain itself.