For Bergamin & Gomide’s art fairs stands, we always seek to convey a sense of being at home, for the visitor to feel welcomed and at ease, invited to stay a little longer. Given the current situation, staying at home has given us the chance to rediscover who we are and what we can be in our domestic environment – what pleases us? Where do we feel the sun’s warm glow and where is the best spot to lie down? Gaston Bachelard said that we make our dwelling where we feel a sense of comfort in a confined place. If during an art fair, booths are filled with people, crowds form and lines become a problem, here in the virtual environment we have every possibility to be in the presence of artworks and remain there for as long as we wish, having more room for contemplation. Even without the human warmth and the anecdotes we tell each other during physical encounters, our goal here is to make the visitor feel comfortable among artworks that exude an aura of belonging, awakening our collective memory by dialoguing, directly or indirectly, with our ancestors. With utilitarian objects from various indigenous ethnicities of the Brazilian territory, we pay tribute to our Latin American roots. Their presence here raises awareness about these populations who have endured for so long far too many attacks from the outside and have currently become even more vulnerable during the pandemic – being at home is also to make contact with our origins.
Wood, fire, animal skins, canvas, twine – these are some of the materials used in these artworks. They are primordial elements that arouse our instincts and imagination: such as the pattern that appears among the pieces that composeTransportável [Transportable] (2003) by Artur Barrio. This work dialogues closely with Tunga’s sculpture Da Pele [Of the Skin] (1975), where loofah, wire and wood
are shot through by a thermometer that seems to tell us: this has heat. Mira Schendel also warms us with the earth tones of her Bordados [Embroideries] series – while José Leonilson cuts holes in the canvas, opening gaps for the passage of light in Tenso [Uptight] (1986).
The geometric investigations by Celso Renato on the wood’s irregular surface refer to the patterns we find in the featured indigenous pieces, as well as to Manfredo de Souzaneto’s 14/85 (1985) and 11/92 (1992) canvases’ shapes. The light-bathed works by Sérgio Camargo and Sol LeWitt, on the other hand, demand a specific type of attention: the color white asks us to focus on the movement that curves and angles suggest, without distractions. While creating his Open Cubes, LeWitt says that he is investigating ways of not making a cube while doing precisely that, in a beautiful exercise of re-elaborating the shape itself. While Camargo, by combining order and disorder in his wooden stubs, creates tensions starting from the neutrality that the color white brings. Finally, Alexander Calder’s standing-mobile balances all this rigor by making a playful approach to the form’s experimentation process, combining in Petit mobile sur pied (1953) the warm color’s vibrations and the lightness of the lines and metal plates left to the wind – as Mário Pedrosa said, Calder not only suggests movement, he captures it.
This is our imaginary booth, which is, as in André Malraux’s Imaginary Museum, a space we have created to be composed and recomposed by our visitor’s ingenuity, circulating in a space without walls. This place aims to receive you as warmly as possible, bringing inspiration in a time where tenderness, patience and continuity feel so fundamental. Come on in and make yourself at home.
