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body than as definitive and, therefore, in some way, necessary profiles. But, who is José Resende? He is doubtless one of the central artists of the generation of Brazilian artists who, born between the late ‘40s and early ‘50s, perpetuated certain essential developments from the late ‘60s (developments especially associated with the names Lygia Clark and Hélio Oiticica). These artists include, for example, Cildo Meireles, Waltercio Caldas, Jac Leirner, and Tunga. Resende himself was born in Sao Paulo in 1945. He graduated with a degree in architecture in the same city and has shown his work primarily in Sao Paulo and Rio de Janeiro since 1964. His work was recently shown a t the Robert Miller Gallery in New York and Documenta 9 in Kassel. Curiously, Resende’s work is easy to describe. The description, however, gives a rather poor idea of his rare way of affecting the viewer. Let us consider a piece from 1994 which is particularly emblematic of his work: an object, whose title in English would be velvet, paraffin, copper, and steel cable. It is a composition made of these materials placed in an unstable equilibrium. The piece is a sort of velvet sleeve spread out on the floor. Paraffin has been poured over the ends of the sleeve. The composition is pierced by a curved steel bar whose tips are joined by a tense metallic cable. The fragility of the construction (of the precipice) is extreme; it is obviously elegant, but at the same time there is something vaguely obscene about it, as if that elegance were to disappear from itself at the last moment; as if, upon presenting itself, instead of maintaining its composure, it were to lose it at the decisive moment. It is quite suggestive that the majority of Resende’s works have for their titles a list of materials used to make them, written in small letters – thus avoiding a title that refers to its contents or form, and avoiding the conventional use of Untitled. Resende’s titles are minimums of denomination, denominations in their minimal form. However, minimal as they are, these titles never cease to indicate something: as far as the labeled objects are concerned, the titles indicate material rather than motive or form.
Few artists adjust themselves better than Resende to what Roland Barthes wrote with respect to Cy Twombly’s paintings (in a text from 1979 titled Wisdom of Art). What is unique in Twombly’s operation, according to Barthes, is that he “imposes material, not as something that is going to serve a purpose, but rather as an absolute material...that pre-exists the division of meaning”. The power of the painter, says Barthes, is that “it makes material exist as material; even if one meaning rises from the canvas, the paintbrush and the color continue to be ‘things’, obstinate substances from which nothing (no subsequent meaning) can undo the obstinacy of ‘being there’ (2)”. The title of this object is a discreet list of his materials, primarily because the program that Resende obeys as he works is that of presenting certain materials in their obstinacy. However, this object, this scene, this unadorned theater not only finds its titles in the materials with which it is made, but its title is also in small letters: I believe that this is an indication of Resende’s desire to avoid the melodrama of materials characteristic of certain art forms of the ‘50s, ‘60s, and ‘70s. The materials in Resende’s works are deliberately exposed, but as something common and uncultivated: the banal materials with which everyone negotiates daily life, presented in their banality,
with nothing especially “original” or “alchemical” (nothing in them, for example, of the felt and grease of a Joseph Beuys). There is nothing telluric or cosmic in the work of this artist (who has been realizing what I would call an art of urbanity, albeit a perturbed urbanity). Resende’s most auspicious pieces show or “impose” certain materials (and, more precisely, the contact between certain materials), but they also possess forms: even suggestive forms. Like the imaginary universe of a Lygia Clark, Resende’s world is fundamentally animal: it is a universe of imaginary animals, of forms and attitudes that evoke imaginary animals that, nevertheless, have the virtue of perturbing the faculty of identification. In the face of those more – shall we say – animal objects, we are not finished telling ourselves “that’s an animal”, when we begin to ask ourselves “what type?” These compositions make me think, in fact, of what the French philosopher Jean-Luc Marion calls, in a recent book, an “incident”. According to Marion, an “incident” is “what arrives in such a way that it consists in nothing more than this first and final arrival, without preexisting in any way and without making itself visible before the incident”. The “incident” consists entirely in the act of its own obstinate appearance, “with no background, no prevision or provision
Front: Copper, lead, steel cable, 1998. 62,9 x 78,7 x 394”. Background: Copper, steel cable, 1998. 66,9 x 75,9 x 0.01”. Courtesy: Centro de Arte Hélio Oiticica.