Warm Sun Cold Rain: Brussels Chapter

Where does one belong? The window reflects the last sunrays, it reminds you of past summers, faraway landscapes, the family garden, the voice of a dear one. The thread of the past is floating loosely around you, enveloping you in a warm mist, like the water that is now evaporating from the asphalt. Your identity dissolves and reshapes itself at every step. The sun and the rain remind you that you are safe, you belong here, you belong anywhere.

Night falls, the streets are still busy, silhouettes are like black cutouts under the artificial light of the streetlamps. People look the same, under the dark sky, the streets are full of shadows, nocturnal creatures.

This moment of suspension, this in-between time and space is at the core of Theodore Ereira-Guyer´s work. His etchings resonate as an interstice amid joy and sorrow, here and there. In his landscapes, real and imaginary territories, familiar memories and inner travels melt, conveying a feeling of melancholy. Nocturnal birds, creatures from the desert and hermit crabs abandon their usual hideouts and shelters to wander into the exhibition space, gathering under the same light. As rain falls in faraway mountains, their eyes might be watering with tears, as they feel the same sweet sadness we can experience when lost in a new place. Transmuting and transcending a cauldron of references and feelings, Ereira-Guyer acts as an alchemist that adds organic elements diverted from ancient divination manuscripts to the engraved images that he transfers onto plaster. As he stretches the limits of a rather traditional art technique, the artist merges layers of personal and collective memories, translating and transcending feelings otherwise impossible to convey.

Like Ereira-Guyer, Juan Casemiro´s works are made of tears and raindrops, by the glimpse of the stars shining in the night sky, the diffuse lights of the sun slowly warming up a window frame or the soft light of a sun setting near the ocean. As Casemiro wanders in the city, he collects found objects, silently organizing and assembling them to evoke lost moments, past conversations and recollections. Like this, umbrellas frame a plastic sheet and turn it into an expanded painting, or a white lid evokes a celestial dome, while a crying wooden piece and a soft reflecting light column float in the exhibition space. With a delicate attention, barely altering what exists under our blind eyes, Casemiro rescues elements that are about to disappear and distracts them from their original destination, giving them new identities as he travels between territories and cities, as a wanderer without attachment or identification.

Contrasting with Ereira-Guyer´s and Casemiro´s almost ethereal reading of their environment, Anderson Borba´s wooden anthropomorphic -almost totemic- sculpture gives a body to a search for one´s identity. Intuitively carving and layering colored cut- outs on the raw surface, Borba addresses his subjective experience as a migrant, recreating the idea of oneself, layered by time and moments lived far from Brazil, under the London clouds. Like a snake shedding an old skin to begin anew, Borba´s work follows an organic process. Burning, scrubbing, and pasting, he marks the matter with movement, observing the negative space that is left as he removes the wood in a reverse process – like Ereira-Guyer´s etchings – and as he adds layers, like mental maps of ideas and memories or pixels and sediments that he encrusts onto the wood. The form and an emotional intelligence of the material precedes the discourse in the artist´s work, opening the dense matter to outside sensations. Sensual and permeable, Borba´s sculptural work nonetheless evokes Brazil´s socio-political reality and carries the weight of the exploitation of natural resources, the smell of burnt forests. As he transits between the natural and the artificial, mimicking colored rocks and shells incrusted with plastic, his work might suggest a missing link between the past and the future, the here and there, a long-forgotten language.

This twilight zone, this intermediary space of longing and belonging while creating new layered identities also permeates Darks Miranda´s “Zona Abyssal” (Abyssal Area) video work. Using found footages entangled with historical video documentation and excerpts of her own performances, the artist collides recordings of the fires that devasted Brazil in the past years and older aggressions to the country´s natural resources such as the rubber fever that occurred during the 19th century.

In the opening her dystopian video, she humorously wonders if the disaster she´s about to depict was due to a falling meteorite or the fact of visitors coming from the cosmic abyss. The images that run under our eyes are dense, raw and sensual, like Borba´s sculpture: you can almost feel your lungs burning, the blade cutting the wood, the erupting lava, the elastic touch of the rubber being malaxed or the scent of exotic flowers that strive in this postwar landscape. As she dances around, wrapped in a latex suit and SM attire, wearing a breathing mask, or trying to balance a papaya on the top of her head, her neck crowned with pineapple leaves; she evokes Brazil´s colonial past and the absurd fact that we are the cause of our and nature´s sufferings. Creatures of the abyss cross the screen and an alligator emerges from its shell, eventually reminding us of a primal identity, one that is intertwined with the sun and the stars, something that will remain, long after we are gone.

Accumulating idiosyncratic references and subjective recollections, sociological and historical elements that merge with the collective imaginary, just as the sediments that compose the landscape, Anderson Borba, Darks Miranda, Juan Casemiro and Theodore Ereira- Guyer present, in Warm Sun Cold Rain, a peculiar ballet of references and identities where inner and outer territories melt and whimsical creatures dance with ghosts of the past, bridging cultures in a shapeshifting common memory. Warming up the northern hemisphere´s rainy days under the Brazilian sun, the artists question the sense of longing and belonging that permeates our times and contemporary tragedies. Transcending melancholy – and the Brazilian saudade that no other word can translate – and through an acute gaze watered with tears of sadness, joy and laughter, they remind us of these moments in-between, the void that we carry and allows the outside light to enter, as we wander, strangers under a same sun.