Entre Tanto
Isobel Whitelegg - 2011
Putting artwork into words answers to attraction experienced as something inexplicable - why should this work, amongst others, call me to attention? At times it begins by working through the reasons why the pull of attraction should be refused. As Rodrigo Naves has commented, the fact that Sérgio Sister is (amongst other things) a painter presents cause for hesitation. He commits to a practice whose persistence within contemporary art is fraught. Yet, while being painting, some indiscernible contemporaneity must surely be holding attention to these works. One rhetorical description of the contemporary in art might define it as practices whose tendency is to break limits distinguishing its products and activities from all other objects or situations. But there is nothing so modernist as the art-life distinction upon which that definition rests, and its implicit granting of a project for artistic labour. Were it so simple, the contemporaneity of Sister’s Caixas, Ripas, and Pontaletes could be quickly explained. They are each supports derived from found structures, from systems designed to serve other needs. Each takes its shape from the standardised product from which it also steals a name.
The Crates? (Caixas) are, and are not, small open crates; the Battens? (Ripas) are, and are not, wooden battens, and the Posts? (Pontaletes) are, and are not, posts. Amongst three families of work, the Caixas retain more memory of their origin. An association sticks between the Caixa, and the other uses to which that same structure is put. Each resembles an object so familiar that it is difficult to see it without being reminded of situations where something similar is found - the same structure in use, containing and carrying fruits; heaped up and discarded by the roadside, or re-used to contain something else. The use of found structure here, however, is anything but a validation of these associations, as superficial signs of the proximity of artwork to thing of everyday life. The way in which Sister engages them fails to reinforce their more immediate connotations with street, marketplace or home.
A stripping away of specific association is emphasised in the relation Caixa to Ripa to Pontalete. Writing about the Caixas, Sister has outlined their emergence and relationship to the two other series. He took notice of some empty crates piled in his communal garage - seeing these structures because they suggested a solution to a problem encountered within the practice of painting. The Caixas existed at first as studio-works, as found-and-painted crates. Painting their vertical slats was an experiment that supported the development of a different series, the Battens (Ripas), works that re-configured open slats as wooden battens, nailed to the wall in pairs placed apart, painted in colours akin to the white light and grey shadow they create. Later he noticed another structure within the surroundings of his apartment block, wooden posts that were employed in the construction of a building, holding up molds for concrete slabs. Sister painted similar posts, propping them up, grouped, against walls - arranging them as “interconnections of colour maintaining large empty spaces”. More recently he has returned to the Caixas, substituting painting their slatted surfaces with re-commissioning their found structure as two modular parts, to be produced within a carpenter’s workshop and returned to his studio primed to be painted and assembled.
The initial movement from Caixa to Ripa is akin to breaking a familiar object into ever more general parts, or the relative fixity of a familiar phrase into the individual words that hold together meaning. If the crate is a product that, while put to various uses, is specific; the Batten (Ripa) begins by returning that structure to the generic vocabulary of the woodyard. Battens, posts, slats, and beams are products with a non- proprietary poetics – “intermediary goods” - incomplete products absorbed, almost disappearing, into the production of others. A wooden post serves no predetermined end; it exists in order to allow construction to take place, raw material adapted as tool for the organization of empty space, used to hold up, mark out, separate, attach. The post’s reason for being has an abstract quality, akin to the unplaceable purpose of painting, drawing, and architecture.
The everyday post or batten may be put into service for the construction of boundaries, to bear the weight of gravity, or to fulfil the need for shelter. In the course of Sister’s practice too these are structures seized upon as solutions to architectural problems: how to adjoin areas of colour while also maintaining a separation that allows a singularly potent pigment to persist, how to place bodies of colour into contact with space. While Sister, as painter, maintains allegiance to the demands of colour, the questions for which the Caixinha, Ripa and Pontalete provide answers recall the primordial task of architecture – the human work of employing physical materials to organise empty space, the art of making something appear in the place of nothing. For Lacan, the emptiness at the heart of architectural endeavour was homologous to the beyond that is relative to every law of human utility, a gap also rehearsed in the tradition of ceasing work on the seventh day of every week - dividing our time into productiveness and its suspension according to a divine commandment, a given project for living. The contemporary, however, is a time devoid of inherited regulations, it is constituted by doubt, hesitation and indecision, ungoverned by the certain and directed movement of any one projection. Ours is a time with a future ever newly planned, a past permanently re-written.
The Caixas exist now as a multitude, offering us various potential configurations: choices. They can be re-positioned into distinct pairs, groups and assemblages. Their restless lack of rules of arrangement might be experienced as freedom - but perhaps more so as anxiety, as confronting a disconcerting inability to focus on one in favour of another, to settle, choose or commit. The attempt to fix our gaze on one, or to confirm the integrity of one pair or grouping, forces an endless rehearsal, responding to the heightened demand for decision that their multiplicity provokes. It is an experience akin to choosing direction, finding bearings, when faced with the groundlessness of present day duration. Sister understands his work as, “behind everything”, “a search for solidarity marked by differentiation and complexity”. This speaks too of a search for agreement, the shelter of a certain commitment, the reward of risking irreversable decision.
Isobel Whitelegg - 2011
Putting artwork into words answers to attraction experienced as something inexplicable - why should this work, amongst others, call me to attention? At times it begins by working through the reasons why the pull of attraction should be refused. As Rodrigo Naves has commented, the fact that Sérgio Sister is (amongst other things) a painter presents cause for hesitation. He commits to a practice whose persistence within contemporary art is fraught. Yet, while being painting, some indiscernible contemporaneity must surely be holding attention to these works. One rhetorical description of the contemporary in art might define it as practices whose tendency is to break limits distinguishing its products and activities from all other objects or situations. But there is nothing so modernist as the art-life distinction upon which that definition rests, and its implicit granting of a project for artistic labour. Were it so simple, the contemporaneity of Sister’s Caixas, Ripas, and Pontaletes could be quickly explained. They are each supports derived from found structures, from systems designed to serve other needs. Each takes its shape from the standardised product from which it also steals a name.
The Crates? (Caixas) are, and are not, small open crates; the Battens? (Ripas) are, and are not, wooden battens, and the Posts? (Pontaletes) are, and are not, posts. Amongst three families of work, the Caixas retain more memory of their origin. An association sticks between the Caixa, and the other uses to which that same structure is put. Each resembles an object so familiar that it is difficult to see it without being reminded of situations where something similar is found - the same structure in use, containing and carrying fruits; heaped up and discarded by the roadside, or re-used to contain something else. The use of found structure here, however, is anything but a validation of these associations, as superficial signs of the proximity of artwork to thing of everyday life. The way in which Sister engages them fails to reinforce their more immediate connotations with street, marketplace or home.
A stripping away of specific association is emphasised in the relation Caixa to Ripa to Pontalete. Writing about the Caixas, Sister has outlined their emergence and relationship to the two other series. He took notice of some empty crates piled in his communal garage - seeing these structures because they suggested a solution to a problem encountered within the practice of painting. The Caixas existed at first as studio-works, as found-and-painted crates. Painting their vertical slats was an experiment that supported the development of a different series, the Battens (Ripas), works that re-configured open slats as wooden battens, nailed to the wall in pairs placed apart, painted in colours akin to the white light and grey shadow they create. Later he noticed another structure within the surroundings of his apartment block, wooden posts that were employed in the construction of a building, holding up molds for concrete slabs. Sister painted similar posts, propping them up, grouped, against walls - arranging them as “interconnections of colour maintaining large empty spaces”. More recently he has returned to the Caixas, substituting painting their slatted surfaces with re-commissioning their found structure as two modular parts, to be produced within a carpenter’s workshop and returned to his studio primed to be painted and assembled.
The initial movement from Caixa to Ripa is akin to breaking a familiar object into ever more general parts, or the relative fixity of a familiar phrase into the individual words that hold together meaning. If the crate is a product that, while put to various uses, is specific; the Batten (Ripa) begins by returning that structure to the generic vocabulary of the woodyard. Battens, posts, slats, and beams are products with a non- proprietary poetics – “intermediary goods” - incomplete products absorbed, almost disappearing, into the production of others. A wooden post serves no predetermined end; it exists in order to allow construction to take place, raw material adapted as tool for the organization of empty space, used to hold up, mark out, separate, attach. The post’s reason for being has an abstract quality, akin to the unplaceable purpose of painting, drawing, and architecture.
The everyday post or batten may be put into service for the construction of boundaries, to bear the weight of gravity, or to fulfil the need for shelter. In the course of Sister’s practice too these are structures seized upon as solutions to architectural problems: how to adjoin areas of colour while also maintaining a separation that allows a singularly potent pigment to persist, how to place bodies of colour into contact with space. While Sister, as painter, maintains allegiance to the demands of colour, the questions for which the Caixinha, Ripa and Pontalete provide answers recall the primordial task of architecture – the human work of employing physical materials to organise empty space, the art of making something appear in the place of nothing. For Lacan, the emptiness at the heart of architectural endeavour was homologous to the beyond that is relative to every law of human utility, a gap also rehearsed in the tradition of ceasing work on the seventh day of every week - dividing our time into productiveness and its suspension according to a divine commandment, a given project for living. The contemporary, however, is a time devoid of inherited regulations, it is constituted by doubt, hesitation and indecision, ungoverned by the certain and directed movement of any one projection. Ours is a time with a future ever newly planned, a past permanently re-written.
The Caixas exist now as a multitude, offering us various potential configurations: choices. They can be re-positioned into distinct pairs, groups and assemblages. Their restless lack of rules of arrangement might be experienced as freedom - but perhaps more so as anxiety, as confronting a disconcerting inability to focus on one in favour of another, to settle, choose or commit. The attempt to fix our gaze on one, or to confirm the integrity of one pair or grouping, forces an endless rehearsal, responding to the heightened demand for decision that their multiplicity provokes. It is an experience akin to choosing direction, finding bearings, when faced with the groundlessness of present day duration. Sister understands his work as, “behind everything”, “a search for solidarity marked by differentiation and complexity”. This speaks too of a search for agreement, the shelter of a certain commitment, the reward of risking irreversable decision.
