André Komatsu
Centro Cultural São Paulo – CCSP – São Paulo – Brazil.
The representation of constructive processes and constructions in the André Komatsu´s work always contains ruins and the desconstruction idea. One of the usual procedures of the artist is to collect rubbish from the streets, dumps-cart and garbage cans, and to attribute a new function for what was dejection, either to use it in three-dimensional and installations production, either to take it as support of architecture drawings.
Generally, the parts incorporate, invert and return as a problem the characteristics of its supports and referentials. Therefore, fragments of masonry receive contours of pencil from an imperfect wall or from a high standard building, and the house model, with the wooden sidewalls on the ground, receives a stack of gravels. In this kind of dialectic of the building site, to construct presume the falling of structures. And what remains of the demolition get back to raw material in works that comment the ways of use and occupation of public spaces and particular terrains in the city.
The artist´s show at the Cultural Center São Paulo transposes to the exhibit area the beginning of constructing to destroy, and vice versa. “Kamikaze” (“or for all those that had believed”) represents the impact of the collision between two tipically brazilian toy cars (called “rolimãs”) by a stack of cardboard, lath, plastic bottles, etc. The “shock” between the cars guided by the feet becomes a purely visual onomatopoeia, not-linguistics: the CRASHHH! from the comics balloons, with the wreckage. Built in the crossing between two ramps of the space, the work restricts the visitors´circulation and insinuates a state of exception, who knows, the war atmosphere as the title suggests.
The belligerence is sufocated also in the voids that cut the clinical luminosity of “Alasca”, installation where Komatsu builts a rough shelter with the asepsis of the “white cube” in its maximum, what, vice versa, confers military meaning to the generic space devoted to the art. In fact, the bunker is a cube as construction, white, of concrete blocks, but it is also the place of protection and attack, with spy-holes on the four lateral faces, installed in an illuminated room until the saturation of the fluorecent light.
Everything excessively white, a comparable whiteness – by the artist induction – to an igloo projected in straight lines, stuck into the snow of the Alaska´s infinite landscape. From inside the shelter, where nobody enters, would only be possible to see the exterior through the openings, made to the positioning and the firearms aiming. Without evidence of conflit, under a deaf noise, the war architecture seems to accomodate well in an art gallery. Or not, it would be the art at risk, under fire-friend target? If yes, the exposition is completely dedicated to those that had believed.
José Augusto Ribeiro, 2006.
José Augusto Ribeiro is a art critic and master´s student in Art History at the School of Communications and Arts of the University of São Paulo. He integrates the Center of Research in Brazilian Art of the Department of Visual Arts of the School and currently he works in the Documents of 20th Century Latin American and Latino Art project, co-ordinated by the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston.