“What is real is the continuous change of form”¹
The aerial view of the scale model of this exhibition recalls a delirious city-planning design, whose towers, columns overpasses, like the scenographic and fantastic architectures of Piranesi, do not lead anywhere and are inhabitable. Unlike the gloomy and claustrophobic atmosphere of the Italian artist, however, Ana Holck’s constructions are associated with the clearness, the regular grid and transparence of modern architecture, from which they absorb the economy of their lines and design.
Architecture is doubtlessly a permanent reference in her work, beginning with the selection of her materials, but it is always coupled with Brazilian art’s constructive past, especially neoconcretism, an active and stubbornly persistent legacy in all the artistic operations in Brazil which yet today continue to follow in the modernist order.
The lyrical quality of the geometry and affective speculations of the neoconcrete method have persisted in the work of later generations of artists, including that of Ana Holck, with admirable unfoldings and new freshness. The neoconcrete presence distances the artist from the predictable chains of concretist work and from the ascetic actions of North American minimalism, insofar as her challenge is to work with the repetition of gestures in order to bring about an unexpected break of the series. After all, Ana Holck’s obsessive principle seems to be anchored in a question, or a problem: how to counteract the module’s stable and repetitive order? How to infiltrate a defined, formal and rational structure with accidental and involuntary movements?
The video Contramuro [Counter-mure], which Holck produced in 2009, is exemplary in this sense. Meticulously laid one atop the other, the bricks build a set of walls, up to the moment that they topple in imbalance, resulting in the construction’s total collapse. This work, which breathes new life into the postminimalist postulates, with resonances of Robert Smithson and Eva Hesse, already demarcated the artist’s process: to begin with a geometric and programmed form, to then deconstruct it. Actually, Contramuro was presented as a parody of the concrete and minimalist rigor, seeking a flexible and spiritual identification of the sculpture with the world, or of the object with the body and the landscape.
Ana Holck’s materials are, by nature, difficult. Precast, with functions defined in the pragmatic order of civil construction, they bear in themselves the ballast of this functionality, which is in principle not permeable to symbolic foldings. The bricks and the prefabricated concrete forms are objects which, by their use-value and repetition, become invisible. Thus, Ana Holck’s work removes them from this limbo, spiritually requalifying forms that have already lost their value and presence in the everyday world.
From a hexagon-shaped piece of concrete, a module used for paving sidewalks, she raises a column of other hexagons made of colored Plexiglas and consisting only of their outlines, as though to vaporize their weight, inscribing and multiplying their pattern in space and making the shape evolve in forms that resemble dancing, climbing vines. The module leaves itself, leaves from that nowhere in which it was sleeping, to inhabit an unlikely place, symbolically delimited by movements of transport and transformation. This new place then begins to imply previously unthinkable alterations to the original character of the modular object. From its initial bidimensionality, the module springs into real space, takes on tridimensional contours and gains body, even if it is a voluble body permeated by emptiness.
It moreover gives rise to a dynamics of meaning that is subjective and simultaneously historical, closed to any interpretative fabric, outcast from the immediate order of pragmatism.
The undertone of subjectivity here is subtle, but powerful and sufficient to remove the module from its passiveness and recodify it in an unknown sort of rhythmic and playful musical score. The serial character of Ana Holck’s forms, therefore, hangs on a thread, at the ambiguous border between sameness and difference, and just like the brick walls, it breaks apart in midair.
The artist seems to seek the fluency of the materials in space, the reciprocity between opaqueness and transparence, or between the bodies and the emptiness, imbuing these interplays with the interpenetration of the light, the development of cadences of movement and the rhythmic pace of its unfolding, projected into the infinite. Brancusi and his endless columns are likely allusions, not only by the suggestion of perpetual, circular motifs, but mainly through the development of ideal, modular forms perennially evolving over time.
Already outside of pure geometry and installed in the variable world of contingence, Ana Holck’s sculptures are situational products, molded at the mercy of the temporality of the gestures and the fluctuation of the spaces, inscribing the form in terms of experience. The irregular flow of their foldings sets the viewer’s gaze into constant movement, and the apparent precision of the module is dissolved, upon being inserted into a multiple realm, where the fixed thing has the power of metamorphosis. Even though it operates based on regular and static structures, the work is thus permanently seeking to deviate from the norm and to bring about a transformation.
Passarelas [Overpasses] is another set of artworks that follows Holck’s basic principles, this time with curving planes of aluminum. Suspended by steel cables, in fleeting tension and balance, they involve an accentuated immateriality, a dynamics of lines and transparency. As overpasses that intercross in space, which appear to sweep the walls and produce a volume on the basis of emptiness, these sculptures do not occupy the world so much as they stand as depictions of it. Like the first sculptures by Franz Weissmann, especially his “bridges” and “towers” in the late 1950s, the overpasses adhere to the space and blend with it, being instituted as quasi-bodies, floating in the air.
The physical tension of the materials, in themselves incorporeal and nearly intangible, is concentrated in the precarious support of the aluminum sheets by thin cables, instating the artwork’s spatio-temporal fleetingness and the phantasmal character of its volumes. Passarelas is an artwork made by the lines between musical lows and highs, lights and shadows and ephemeral stability – it is nearly an apparition, that lends presence to the invisible.
Ana Holck lays out points and lines that trace the inexorable flow of space and time, punctuating its rhythms with delicate and precise cuts. Her work is striking for volatilizing concrete materials from daily life, causing them to vanish… or to appear for the first time.
[Ligia Canongia]
1. BERGSON, Henri, cited by Friedrich Teja Bach, in Constantin Brancusi: 1876 – 1957, exhibition catalogue, Philadelphia Museum of Art, 1995.
