Block

Quarteirão (Block), by Ana Holck, in one of the rooms of the Maria Antonia gallery, carries out a sort of exercise in the negativity of space, in the sense of extracting values from it and confronting these with the ‘matter’ that the same space initially offered. Instead of restricting the work to a summation, to the addition of a new element, even if differential, to the placed occupied, her installation decides to equate reductive deductions within it, syntheses, like a calculation. In this accumulation++, the artist explores what the eye perceives as emptiness; if she assumes the possibility of a ‘degree zero’ of space, this does not occur as absence but as a feasible and permutable value. A fluid and tense materiality is installed therein; the room, which is segmented by the beams formed by broad adhesive tapes, is stripped down. Its spatiality nevertheless differs from that imagined by modernity and its glimpse of an indefinite extension: Mondrian, for example, or Cubist collage in its torsion and compression of the volume. Nor is it close to the distant fixity of perspective. There is an anti-grid here, the determination of a materially present location, which, at the same time, obstructs the room as an exclusive and predominantly architectural volume, denying to the physical presence of the visitor a role that is simply compensatory or ‘complementary’ to the work. There is the articulated proposition of an oscillating, vacillating state: her work turns the eye into a tactile organ and conversely, formulates an optics of the body.

[Guilherme Bueno]