Ensaios Lineares

Let us begin with the corner of the living room. The piece Entroncados Canto VI [Embranchments Corner VI] disturbs the foundations of architecture. When Ana Holck decides to place it two walls at the corner, she refers to a position occupied for millennia by pilasters, which, according to classical architectural vocabulary, are topped by capitals. The Ionian capital, marked by its pair of volutes, is at Western architecture’s origin: such shapes are not ornaments – they arise from centuries of the geometric improvements made by the Hellenics toward the golden proportions of the decrease of a circle’s radius, achieving a more perfect spiral than the one found in nature’s snails. Somewhat empirically, or rather subconsciously, Holck undermines this geometric model. The architectural canon, in search of a perfectly balanced form, is rebuffed by her combination of porcelain and stainless steel. Her Entroncados [Embranchments] are continuous strips, although twisted by the victory of centrifugal over centripetal force. By releasing asymmetrical paraboloids into space, she destabilizes the harmony of these parts – a harmony very much sought from the Classical Era to the Modernity of architecture.

This is silently reaffirmed by the artist in Móbile I [Mobile I], which consists of curves that are unattainable through the use of a compass and are centered by a line that resists the ruler’s linearity.

In Laçados [Ribboned], the exacerbations of spins and ellipses is not a baroque operation, but rather a gestuality in obsessive defiance of rules. Architecture bothers Ana; in turn, Ana challenges architecture.

References to architecture are not fortuitous. It was Ana’s academic major. It is also tangent to the profession of her father, who was a calculating engineer. And this is patent in the lexicon – bridges, footbridges, perimeter roads, grids, towers – used in the works in this retrospective exhibit covering a trajectory of over two and a half decades.

From 2012, the Perimetrais series records an express freeway still remembered by any Carioca past the age of 15. Ana Holck sections the kilometrical and sinuous line that divided the city center and the Guanabara Bay. The engravings evidence the diversity of structural drawings – perimeters – throughout a megalomaniac urban infrastructure. Such as the sections in architectural projects or medical X-rays, the sections of the stretches of Perimetral are delineated by straight lines. The curvature of the length of the highway on the map is suppressed by the representation of the slices. By evoking memory, we distinguish straight lines revealing themselves as curves.

This idea is also present in the Pontes Vinílicas [Vinyl Bridges] series, when, by making a tensioned structure, the artist produces two arches from sections of straight lines – an operation of geometrical decomposition of the curve. It is necessary, however, to pay attention to Ana Holck’s tectonic subversion: there are references to steel bridges made by engineers such as Gustave Eiffel, Benjamin Baker and John Fowler – who, at the turn of the 19th to the 20th century, conquered free spans that were until then unsurmountable –, but the artist revisits the same structural principles with the unpretentious pulling and repulling of vinyl strips involved by acrylic boxes. The magnitude and heroism of the engineers’ technical innovation are deflated by the simplicity of Holck’s materials.

With Pontes Cerâmicas [Ceramic Bridges], we are still outside the field of literality or models. Using delicate porcelain, the artist presents structural balance with a slight imperfection: a shape that is regularly formed by metallic elements is remade with the support of a hand – as in an inversion of the historical march of the evolution of the productive chains, Holck has appropriated an industrial model and converted it into craftsmanship. These Pontes Cerâmicas appear to be suspended in a moment of construction that never ends, remaining in this back and forth alternating between the designed and the accidental. This correspondence with the construction site reappears in the series Torres Armadas [Reinforced Towers], based on works composed by elements made of precast concrete for fences. The functional purpose of this civil construction catalogue material is absolutely disconsidered.  A sculptural dimension is conferred to a pragmatic and banal element. The artistic value resides in formal matters, such as the arrangement in triads and the pieces’ verticality, obtained without the need for foundations in the ground. 

The tenuous balance achieved in the midst of structural tension returns in Ana Holck’s Passarelas [Footbridges]. It is also a composition of curved and straight lines such as Pontes. 2011’s Passarelas are mainly a foreshadowing of Entroncados [Embranchments], Enroscados [Tangles] and Estirados [Stretches], from 2023 and 2024, regarding the refusal of flatness and the ambition to throw itself into space without detaching itself from the wall from which it irrupts.

Emerging from the vertical plane is also an assumption for the Grades [Grids] series. These works stand out for fraying the rigor of modulation typical of minimal art. The grid’s logic lasts in its regular order, in the correlation of the axes, in the repetition of the lines and in the equal distance between the parts, but every metrical severity is subtly softened by Ana Holck. 

Frequently, the first thing an architect does when in front of a white piece of paper is to draw a grid to establish the proportions of the building; in turn, with her Grades composed of straight lines that are not rectilinear, the artist violates the foundational act of architectural design.

[Francesco Perrotta-Bosch]