Artist: Renata De Bonis
Exhibition title: , to fill the interlude without breaking it,
Venue: BFA, São Paulo, Brazil
Date: November 13 – December 12, 2015
Photography: images copyright and courtesy of the artist and BFA, São Paulo
in.ter.lude n.
1 An intervening episode, feature, or period of time: “Kerensky has a place in history, of a brief interlude between despotisms” (William Safire)
2 a. A short farcical entertainment performed between the acts of a medieval mystery or morality play. b. A 16th-century genre of comedy derived from this. c. An entertainment between the acts of a play.
3 Music A short piece inserted between the parts of a longer composition.¹
A figure of a common tree twig lays in its process of decomposition, juxtaposed by a new one with the same form, yet sculpted in bronze – in the fashion of classic busts and monuments. It’s the apparition of its own double, and while it approaches and mirrors the other, it also reveals the incommensurable distance between both, the very nothingness, which tempts us to, paradoxically, occupy its content without letting it escape or collapse.
Upon our fluctuating and fragile notions of temporality – and its pile-up of hours, days and years – we locate ourselves outside the present moment: plunged into the emptiness. We catch a glimpse of the raw matter of time and its unforgiving flow, continuously dragging everything with and within it. Adrift in this void, we perceive the weight of an absolute finitude embracing anything and everything, from our conceptions of the undisrupted and immutable, to what easily vanishes away.
The works gathered here inhabit the possibility of grasping and recognizing these intervals. Through strategies that cut open gaps upon the interior of our daily efforts, the artist inflects, reproduces, transposes, and fills forms examining attempts to arrest and document ordinary objects and phenomena.
And so we face unlikely combinations bounded by elements collected from the organic natural world or stumbled upon mundanely in urban scenarios, with materials commonly used for constructive and sculptural purposes. Each act, however, is only completed in consequence of the identification of what is not to be seen: the space in between, the vacant space.
¹The Free Dictionary
Germano Dushá
Renata De Bonis, How do I know you are who you say you are?, 2015
Renata De Bonis, Big bang bang baang bang bang-bang, 2015
Renata De Bonis, Naufrágio, 2015
Renata De Bonis, Estrado, 2015
Renata De Bonis, Dormente V, 2015
Renata De Bonis, duas noites, 2015
Renata De Bonis, Ressaca, 2015