Ordem Casual
FuturDome presents the most complete monographic survey of Andrè Komatsu. As un-finished house and independent museum, FuturDome turns its spaces into a constructive cradle for the Brazilian artist. The exhibition includes his most representative endurance narratives and it’ll become a paradoxical, extreme domestic stage for site-specific and unpublished installations. A project inspired by the residency Komatsu developed in FuturDome in 2011.
FuturDome is glad to announce the most complete monographic survey of Andrè Komatsu (1978, São Paulo). As un-finished house and independent museum, FuturDome turns its spaces into a deconstructive cradle for the Brazilian artist. The exhibition includes his most representative endurance narratives and it’ll become a paradoxical, extreme domestic stage for site-specific and unpublished installations. An in-depth connection conceived in parallel with its brand new solo show at Vermelho Gallery (Sao Paulo 3rd of September – 3rd of November 2018) and completely assembled in FuturDome.
With its title enshrining the unpredictable reaction to an emergency, a physical state, Ordem Casual brings together a series of new and recent works, which like most of Komatsu’s compositional process, revolve around the politics of his negational attitude in creating consumptive art. A process developed as determinate practice identifying the constructed nature of our knowledge. Although, as a subject of (non)representation, his abstracted concreteness has occupied a central position within the practice of the artist, the strategies of its scrutiny and politicisation have undergone a gradual transformation throughout the past sixteen years.
In FuturDome, Ordem Casual, stepping aside from performance (Encouraçado, 2002; Afrontamento 2003; Mato sem cachorro não tem dono, 2005; and Ou até onde o sol pode alcançar, 2006) as a medium and the performative act of production, best characterised by Komatsu’s studio-based compositions, his exhibition at FuturDome marks the major transiency transfers in the practice of the artist, materialising a new form of sculptural animism and a new subversive processing in domestic spaces, while underlining the instrumentalization of the sculpture into a series of coincidental and strictly conceptual acts (Construção de Valores, 2012).
In Ordem Casual each architectural body has not vanished but has been dematerialised and reborn into a new materiality of anthropic prosthesis. The form of their surfaces, their volumes, their context, palpable physicality and suspended function, operates as a continuous reminder of artificial limbs (Movimento invisìvel, 2015), which in fact, in many ways, affirms the presence of the sculpture, through its obvious decommissioning (Tres Vidros, 2012). On the one hand the display has been choreographed to unbound the categorical limits of medium specificity, while on the other, to construct an arena for it to perform its labor in terms of territorial repossessions (Sem Titulo (tumor), 2010). Through the final installation and the build-up of relations between individual sculptures and their parts (Estados das Coisas I, 2011), Komatsu addresses our present-day understanding of dematerialised expanded fields, where its physicality, through the possibility of its interchangeability has been rendered secondary, feeding thus our understanding of memories as a (virtual) container, which accommodates the brain (Sem Tìtulo #7 [Soma Neutra], 2009).
The obvious prioritization of collapsing laws as a re-occurring motive in the exhibition, despite its assumed hierarchy (Kamikaze Ou Para Todos A Queles Que Acreditaram…, 2006), is levelled with other elements through strategies of display, inversions and through repetition that suggests an interchangeable identity (Volàtil 2, 2016).
In Ordem Casual, each work proved to be an image of double foreboding, a subversive man attacking a condemned building (Sem Titulo #2 [Soma Neutra], 2009). The documentation of ephemeral art has produced a legacy of recent work in which Andrè elaborated modelled grid are constructed to be framed, then filmed or photographed, (Ordem Casual, 2011) Komatsu’s interventions also seem to have been structured in anticipation of the images that would be their only residual trace. Shaped incisions were cut into a succession of walls, running through the length and depth of building components (Um Dia de Gloria 3, [Refluxo Sazonal], 2005), so our eyes’ view through the foreground aperture reveals planes of receding depth that are then sandwiched into a single shape by the video-radiography’s flattening of space (Desgovernado, 2012). It is a superimposition of layers into what Michael Fried called ‘the medium of shape’, which Komatsu considers to be the essence of Modernist abstract painting’s structuralism (Sem Tìtulo 4, da Sèrie Campos Imaginarios, 2011). In this sense, Andrè Komatsu’s practice is transitional, with as much old Modernism as new Minimalism in its bloodstream.
Works such as Campo Aberto 1 (2013) and Coperativa Antagonica (2013) conforms to an anti-art aesthetic that is synonymous with the presentation of early Conceptualism as a form of didactic research that is careless of niceties. Paradoxically, it calls attention to itself more than a standard wooden frame would (Anexo 1, 2014). The air of scientific, architectural objectivity is evident in the artist’s narration on repetition of differences increasing our capacity for judgement, which makes (Assombraçao, 2014) somewhere between an archaeological dig and an engineering equation to be solved through great ingenuity.
And this happenstance is subject to the contingencies of the causal order. Instead, uniformity of applications (Esquadria Disciplinar/ Ordem Marginal, 2013) is learned through a causal association of the appearance of portioned surfaces, and the linguistic token of codes. The patterning of language then, follows the patterns discerned in nature, and thereby through the isomorphy of the sculpturing relation, translates them into normative discourse (Insustentavel Paraiso 1, 2014).
The dismissable criticism of the compositions qualifies this reading. It is a reminder that as much as Komatsu’s art is an act of violence (Sem Tìtulo (Olho Gordo), Da sèerie Territorio Bruto, 2014), it is also a defiance of time and gravity. And also (Flitz Zoom Ou Constituçao para Uma Nova Arquitetura, 2006) suggests a mechanistic metaphor. Like the inside of a clock, by piercing its shell, time is figured in space and thereby circumvented. The images resist the transience that is their ultimate subject by metaphorically comprehending it. In Samuel Beckett’s words: ‘Time has turned into space and there will be no more time, till I get out of here.’
Komatsu’s practice of disassembly and cutting of surveillance architectures (Alaska, 2005-2006) slated for a postponed demolition represents a process of “unbuilding” that leaves nothing but fragments of documentary tracks. By Ordem Casual, the Brazilian artist ultimately denies the art work’s condition of possibility, and that he deconstructs architecture through shifts in scale and vertiginous modes of address that refuse interpretive consolidation. Andrè Komatsu’s work eschews the dominant economy of constructive growth, while celebrating entropy and seeking to create “non-productive use as artistic and social play. The artist constitutes conditions of possibility utilizing a theoretical framework that draws primarily on Henri Lefebvre’s concepts of the production of space and Georges Bataille’s notion of “sacrificial economy”. By Ordem Casual, Andrè Komatsu’s aim is to emphasize materialist concerns and to describe his aesthetic as a continuous attempt to provoke significance inversions. Andrè Komatsu rejects reclamation, accumulation, and progress in favour of workless architectures, that intervene in the collective imperative to waste. Komatsu succeeds in threatening the “ontological security” of the art object, and in destabilizing the very terms of aesthetic experience in concrete de-materialization.
André Komatsu was born in São Paulo in 1978, where he currently lives and works. Komatsu describes his work as the reflection of a series of perceptions he has while going along roads and through urban spaces. The objects and materials that converge to form Komatsu’s artistic universe are, aside from appearances, invitations to social resistance. Starting from fragments, rubble, abandoned objects, the artist carries out a reconstruction in search of new models of existence. The artist also dwells on the relationship between the parts of a structure, on its chances of surviving and on its inevitable transformation over time. The recurrent use by the artist of fragments, scrap pieces, found materials, and their reuse, expresses a desire to subvert the values conventionally attributed to materials, and, in a broad sense, to the elements of everyday life. Komatsu deals with themes of regeneration, focussing particularly on the physical redevelopment of urban space as a wider metaphor for “… man, nature or architecture in a continuous process of change”. His earliest works and performances tend towards a fairly literal interpretation of these interests by, for example, repurposing the “… materials of construction and deconstruction” into platforms for drawing, painting and assemblage. His current production, however, is more complex both spatially and conceptually.
In FuturDome, Andrè Komatsu introduces his first Italian retrospective show, featured by an unpublished performance, especially conceived for FuturDome’s building. The epic and the impossibility of establishing his home represents an apotheosis, an realized utopia in the direction that Andrè Komatsu’s oeuvre has taken up to this point. Building on his training in music as well as topics ranging from archaeology and architecture.
Inside FuturDome’s domestic spaces, Komatsu will show a research about the comprehension that involves the art field, as well as, its insertion on the daily life of the city. Because the artistic work is only a way an instrument to emphasize new forms of perception. As he walks through the city, repeating daily the same streets and ways, the familiar sites awake different perceptions. On literature, this situation is described as “epiphany” (the moment when the perception really comprehends/understands everything that is usual, creating a new vision of it generating new possibilities of questioning what has already been seen). The search for this new reality can be orientated to any fragment, as well as, to a group of facts, that can be trivial, like walking, watching TV and so on. Nothing stands still, only in rhythm and different velocities (reference to the atom movement). Everything moves constantly inside a cycle of transformation affected by time and uses until its complete consummation.And his Manifesto is: