2024-02-05 23:46:33
In an interview, the artist shares details of his production process and experimentation in different languages
Wagner Malta Tavares’ work encompasses several languages: sculpture, photography, video, performance, urban intervention and drawing. The artist’s career began in 1998 and today he has spent time at major Brazilian institutions such as Instituto Tomie Ohtake, MAM SP, MAM RJ, MAC Niterói, in addition to holding international exhibitions and interventions in Belgium, Portugal, Norway, Romania, the United States and Italy. His works are part of the collections of MAM-RJ, MAR-RJ, Pinacoteca do Estado de São Paulo and Museu Bispo do Rosário – RJ, MAM SP, MAC Niterói, Fundação Figueiredo Ferraz and in several important private collections.
Where is time in art – and where is art in time?
There are countless ways to think about time through art. In fact, every work is witness to a set of actions, which occur in temporal arcs. The production of a work and its public exhibition are markers of new cycles, which are reconfigured as they establish new relationships with spaces, audiences and experiences.
According to the artist, his formal process starts “from the encounter between what is seen and what is intuited. What you feel and what you touch”
The reflection on time and its implications with the most diverse types of materials is present in the work of Wagner Malta Tavares. Materials are, at times, witnesses of a temporality: a finding of physical resistance to the natural or human phenomena that affect them. This is what the artist attests when commenting on his work “Seated Figure – Quartzite”, a sculpture that reflects his own geological formation in materiality.
The “figures” are part of a sculptural series by Malta Tavares, which resonates human gestures by modulating a formal synthesis of the body. The chosen materials, often of a more industrial nature, generate tension by creating a resistant body with smooth gestures.
“The figures have some aspects that interest me, the first is what cannot be stopped: the movement, you can see it, witness it, but not stop it. If you stop it or freeze it, it’s like the analysis of micro particles in modern accelerators, if you know the speed you don’t know the place, if you know the place you don’t know the speed. There is also a dialogue with the sculptural tradition of the human figure in different positions, finding an idea of a chair: something that represents humanity”, comments the artist.
“There is a fluidity to this process: my universe of interest always imposes challenges and enigmas on me, whether material or immaterial”
In addition to stone, the artist explored other materials to compose his figures, such as copper and fabric. In “Kneeling Figure”, for example, the fluidity of movement in the fabric gives a lighter aspect to the figure – breaking its staticity. It is clear, then, that each work by Malta Tavares establishes different relationships with time, space and natural phenomena. By inserting the fabric into the series of figures, as also occurs in “Seated Figure”, “Inclined Figure”, “Green Muse” and “Sileno”, the artist expands the gestural relationship of the works based on the space in which they are inserted. “Sculpture always activates the space. It doesn’t matter where you are,” he says.
“There is a fluidity in this process: my universe of interest always imposes challenges, enigmas on me, whether of a material nature – this is where the means and the way of dealing with them come in – whether of an immaterial nature or the foundations that move me in some direction. I believe that this is also why there are often impalpable or even invisible aspects of my works: wind, light, heat, balance, sound…”, says the artist when asked about the connection between the different languages in his production.
Time is also a factor that adds meaning to works according to new contexts. When commenting on an exhibition in which he participated alongside Lenora de Barros and Guto Lacaz, the artist reflected on the way in which his works – which were produced more than ten years ago – gained new layers in the context of the Covid 19 pandemic. The set of works presented at the AR Exhibition was a good example of the diversity of languages used by the artist.
According to the artist, his formal process starts “the encounter between what is seen and what is intuited. What you feel and what you touch”. In this sense, one can think about how the artist uses mechanical processes to materialize an intuition. The “Thermal Monotype” series, for example, consists of engravings generated through the contact of heat from thermal resistors with the paper.
“When I was a finalist in the PIPA Prize, I presented a sequence of resistances that together had the appearance of alien writing, they were activated with the presence of the public and glowed brightly like neon lights that warmed the environment. On the front wall I printed the same resistances as if the heat had printed the other side. Something that would have taken centuries to happen, a kind of archeology taking place before our eyes. That’s when the idea of making these recordings came about. They are traces”, reveals the artist about the creation of this series.
Evoking time in an artistic production goes beyond just being inscribed in the present. The work of Malta Tavares proves that it is possible to stretch, accelerate, friction and even suspend the temporal relationships of matter. When asked about the direction of his work, the artist responded that he still thinks about “what is common to everyone since the world was a world and human beings looked inside themselves and at the sky”.
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