Fundo Infinito / Infinite Background
Exhibition "fundo infinito / infinite Background" (2025) developed in
partnership with Lucas Simões at 25M sala de projetos, São Paulo, Brazil)
A month ago, I visited Lucas Simões' studio at Gabriel Pessoto's invitation to witness the fusion of these two artists' research, which culminated in the creation of a series of works for this exhibition at the 25M project room. We gathered around the work table, where I found two curved metal plates that I immediately associated with Richard Serra's monumental sculpture models. However, the density and weight of the imposing material that Serra projected on a large scale seemed to have been reduced to the size of an open book or something that could be handled by one person. This is mainly because these hard metal plates did not appear to be contorted by the artist's imagination, which supposedly creates autonomous objects. Instead, their form seemed to be tensioned by the embroidery of coloured wool, which highlights their porosity and their relationship with the body and the time spent working on them.
Over the last ten years, Lucas's work has developed into a diverse range of techniques involving cutting, overlapping and distortion, which transform materials, objects and images. These techniques raise sculptural questions about the relationship between form, space and meaning, as well as the utopian legacy of modernist architecture. Gabriel has been exploring the technical dimensions of image creation, integrating digital and manual technologies into his poetics to articulate reflections on memory, desire, intimacy, and gender roles in contemporary visual culture. At the intersection of these two approaches, Gabriel and Lucas started with the weave of the fabric and designed a series of perforation patterns for metal sheets to act as three-dimensional supports for the embroidery they were developing for this installation.
Infinite Background is the first outcome of this exercise in shared creation, in which sculpture and embroidery merge and highlight the ambiguity of the relationship between both languages and the meanings (values) that their materialities and technicalities have acquired in our classificatory cultural context, where the insistence on binary patterns relegates everything to a grid of asymmetries. If textile techniques, even in the face of their industrialization, have remained associated with delicacy, the domestic and bodily sphere, capitulating to the “invention of femininity” [1], modern sculpture has conquered the public space of monumentality, always demanding and presupposing “a male body as a measure” [2] for both those who sculpt and those who observe.
In this work by Gabriel and Lucas, the techniques and materiality of embroidery and metal sheet modelling converge, offering insights and limitations to each other. The results of this convergence are evident in each piece shown here, which are experiments that explore the possibility of one sheltering the other. The hand embroidery created by the two artists through perforated steel — an insurmountable element in Serra's sculptures — emphasises the patient search for creating pores, passageways and flow up to the point where the material's structural rigidity is not compromised. Entwined and concave, and installed at different angles — often leaning or hanging on the wall — these pieces reject the verticality and autonomy of heroic and authoritative public sculptures, proposing an alternative engagement with space and time.
Although their shapes evoke the panels used in photographic studios to create the illusion of a context without a horizon or visible edges, the infinite backgrounds here are neither neutral nor do they induce the suspension of an object. In fact, the opposite effect is achieved: they are dense surfaces on which to focus. The context is also reintroduced through the interplay, negotiation or clash of materials with opposing characteristics that interpenetrate each other. This reintroduces time, the work of the body, manual gestures and failure, which simultaneously configure the creation of the image as both ruin and desire.
Engaging in a dialogue with reflections on the various ways of displaying objects in encyclopedias, shop windows, and social media—the silent theater of desire and the simulacrum that replaces the real [3]—Fundo Infinito has its reverse sides, revealing the procedures of image construction, reconnecting it with the body. In these embroidered sculptures or sculptural embroideries, the meanings of materials and techniques become confused, even due to an apparent irreconcilability of their aspects at first glance, a kind of three-dimensional collage in which some binary definitions are messed up and their limits become suspect: contouring and intertwining, industrial and domestic, technological and artisanal, virtual and real... As are our bodies, neither natural nor artificial, but a dynamic composition of cultural flows and techniques [4].
In each part of this installation, the thickness and weight of the images point to a poetic journey of two artists returning from a rescue dive. And all of this reminds me very much of Jean Genet's handwritten note that served as the epigraph for his last book, Un captif amoureux (1986), which I bring up to close this text without wanting to end the background objects:
« Mettre à l'abri toutes les images du langage et se servir d'elles, car elles sont dans le désert, où il faut aller les chercher. »
[“Put all the images of language in a safe place and make use of them, for they are in the desert, where you must go to find them.”]
Tálisson Melo
1. Rozsika Parker. The Subversive Stitch: Embroidery and the Making of the Feminine (1984).
2. Anne Wagner. Three Artists (Three Women): Modernism and the Art of Hesse, Krasner, and O'Keeffe (1996).
3. For example: Guy Debord. La Société du spectacle (1967). / Jean Baudrillard. Simulacres et Simulation (1981). / Paula Sibilia. O show do eu (2008).
4. Paul B. Preciado. Testo junkie: Sex, Drugs, and Biopolitics in The Pharmacopornographic Era (2008).
