MC LDN #7

Maria do Carmo Pontes, a correspondente avançada do b®og em Londres (com foto e micro-perfil aí na barra lateral), mandou a sétima coluna MC LDN. Lá vai:

In 2007, Brazilian artist, Erika Verzutti, created a sculpture called “Seven Headed Monster”, for her homonymous exhibition at the extinct gallery Blow de la Barra, in London. It consisted on a cold porcelain structure from where seven necks of the same material hanged unfamiliar fruits and vegetables made of bronze, forming a 1.6 m tall sculpture. Three years later, Verzutti decided to curate her own work and invited other artists (whom she admired, rather than had affinity) to each conceive a head for her monster, now presented in even larger dimensions. The only condition was that, as a garden artwork, the heads had to be resistant to weather adversities.

Some of them took the challenge as an opportunity to do a sculpture without any direct connexion to the rest of their practices, taking the collective character of the work as a chance to experiment different materials and forms, or maybe to establish a mimesis relation with Verzutti’s visual identity, attempting to fulfill her expectations. Such was the case of Efrain Almeida’s piece – whose beautiful own sculptures often presents wood animals – who developed a long-neck swan made of plaster and enamel; or Ortega’s head, a formless block made of bread dough which the public was welcome to deform and reform, drawing new shapes.

Other artists printed their marks with a taste of their solo works, not necessarily taking the literality of a head-shape instruction to their designated necks: Alexandre da Cunha and Adriana Varejão responded like that, da Cunha presenting a yellow concrete mixer and Varejão with a cube made of light blue tiles with disconnected eyes. Nuno Ramos made a loudspeaker where a half-drunk man recites a text of his authorship; Ernesto Neto and Carlos Bevilacqua, in another collaboration, thought of a little wood sphere with a white feather on the top – from an albino peacock, they say. Jac Leirner’s contribution was what she believed to be an outdoors work: the head of a classic marble sculpture depicting a woman with a bird’s hat from her own private garden. To this part was added a body of a pregnant woman, an intervention by Erika Verzutti. Besides making the structure and concept of the piece, she also conceived a head of her own: a bronze jackfruit which provided an eighth part to the Seven Headed Monster.

Beyond the specificities and carefully constructed aspects of the individual heads, what is impressive about the piece is the power of the collection. None of the artists knew what the others were going to conceive, or even who they were going to be. Even the monster’s mother didn’t knew how it would look like until the moment that all the pieces were installed. The sculpture has a narrative, resembles a gouache, it is performative, a collage, tests the limits of collaboration as well as attempts a universal art. It is a “ultimate fight”, gathering in itself relevant issues of an exhibition, being the most important of them the ability to negotiate. Certainly not beautiful, but strange, and extremely attractive.