Brasil | Escultura | Barrão

The structural levels of objects

Polymorphic ensembles upside down the object’s function from decoration to the exaltation of fragility and fantasy.

Brazilian Jorge Velloso Borges Leão Teixira (Rio de Janeiro, 1959), better known as Barrão, is a multidisciplinary artist. He started his artistic career in the Seis Manos group, where he participated with the artists Ricardo Basbaum and Alexandre Dascosta. In this collective, they followed the work of Helio Oiticica and his Parangoles (capes, flags, banners and tents made from layers of painted fabric, plastics, mats, screens, ropes and other materials), while working with performance art and different actions in order to question art’s standing after political repression ended in Brazil.

In this context, his first exhibitions stands out: a collective exhibition with the artists from the Seis Manos Group in Circo volador (1983), the individual show Televisions (1984) in Galería Contemporánea, and his participation in the famous collective show Como Vai Você, Geração 80?, made at the Visual Arts School of Parque Lage in Rio de Janeiro. We should also point out that Barrão’s visual work has been awarded by the Brazilian Museum of Art in 1990, thus strengthening his interdisciplinary career in Brazil.

During the eighties and nineties, his artistic work was characterized by the gathering and assembly of objects. He created kitsch-style sculptures with household appliances. Regarding this, noteworthy pieces include Papa Noel (1988), a sculpture composed of a metallic vacuum cleaner and a plaster cast decorative figure of Santa Claus, La Batalla de San Jorge (1989), a sculpture made of blenders and TVs displayed vertically, and Escalera I (1992), a rusted metal ladder whose legs sit atop little toy cars. Also, at this time, Barrão’s proposal directly referenced the work of Marcel Duchamp, Piero Manzoni and the Fluxus group, who, according to art theorist Hal Foster, go against the bourgeois principles of art and the idea of an expressive artist, based on working with everyday objects and industrial materials.

Based on ready-made art, Barrão creates glazed ceramic sculptures. Each piece is an ensemble of animals, a kind of polymorphic zoo that is born and dies out based on the limits of its own objectuality. The colors, arrangement and hybridity of his sculptures seem to be related to the tradition linked to religious rites and pop culture. For example, the piece Pastores (2009), a ceramic and resin sculpture, has figures of sheepdogs attached to ceramic vessels, reminding us of the myth of Cerberus, the three-headed guard dog at the gates of hell.

Also along these lines, the piece Animales (2007) stands out, which is a ceramic and resin sculpture of different animal figures and vessels joined together. Following the decorative tradition, linked to household utensils and ornamental figures of animals, the artist merges the fragmentary imagery of his sculptures with order, repetition and overlapping.

In the 20th century, the use of ceramics is set aside for the world of applied arts, trades and industry, for example, to cover buildings, sanitary facilities and kitchens. However, practically as an anecdote, through ready-mades –like Marcel Duchamp’s piece Fountain (1917)– the use of ceramics will live on forever within the milestones of art history. In the eighties, Jeff Koons, with his series of decorative figures, Banality, which is known for the piece Michael Jackson and Bubbles (1988), uses ceramics in order to illustrate its validity through kitschiness and mass culture.

In Barrão’s case, the use of ceramics is implemented to reverse the role of the object: decorative figures and kitchen utensils turn into polymorphic, fragile and imaginative ensembles. As Violette Morin says regarding the materials surge in contemporary art: “instead of receptacles and stamped shapes, there are only structural levels,” since what matters is how the object is reused. This Brazilian artist’s hybridizations do not consolidate their aesthetic power based on the materiality of the glazed ceramic or based on the assembly of the decorative figures, but rather based on the act of reversing the implicit codes on the objects. Through this, each sculpture independently shows a certain representation of the world in opposition to the alienating idea of completeness. Following Omar Calbrese, in Barrão’s case, the vision of the whole piece is replaced by a fragment, thus opposing the particularities of the total context.

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