MARLON DE AZAMBUJA : NUCLEAR

Nuclear and off-center

by José Augusto Ribeiro

Right from the entrance of the room it is possible to observe, at a single glance, several events - with varied appearances, autonomous in their relation to each other -, mostly produced directly in the architecture and that, together, constitute a pending situation, suspended in time and open to significations. What happened? What is happening? What will come? Inside the gallery, wherever the visitor looks, there are marks of destruction, along with hints that, yes, something is about to happen. One example? The fire that licked the walls: which is out, but still present; not in flames, but in the burning of what was consumed to be, since then, other things. What, it is not yet known.

This same trail of fire extends a horizon in place. It crosses a part of the gallery walls horizontally, wraps the visitor in this delimitation, and divides, there, two mirrored elements, above and below the line. To the top, a dense, black stain and sinuous, zigzagging graphics rise up, which are the traces of combustion, of the spreading of flames and the fustigation of surfaces by flames and smoke. The melted paraffin portions of more than a thousand burned candles drip under the cut, spilling from an aluminum shelf onto the floor and, from there, advancing, more or less, to the circulation area, in puddles.

Curious that, in the end, the configuration, the appearance is also fractured and ambiguous: destructive and ethereal at the same time. On the one hand, because of the very burning, the fading and annihilation of the materials. On the other hand, by evoking primordial gestures, some ancestry, or religious symbologies, like the rituals that have the purpose of direct communication with divinities. Or, still, as if these stains would scribble, in their movements, a closed, continuous landscape of cypress trees in the wind, perhaps on fire - which would bring the thought, you see, to contemporary Brazil and the environmental crisis.

Be that as it may, this place is hot. Even with a core, diamond-shaped, bursting out of the floor with one of its ends glowing. That's right: from the floor sprouts a geometric structure made of concrete (the same material as the building where the gallery is located), with a cracked internal area that brings a painting, a mixture of blue, red and yellow, which makes the element almost an ore, a rare stone, maybe something discovered now, that remained underground until recently, rough on the sides and translucent, sparkling, on the upper side.

What is this coloring, the representation of an aurora borealis? Is this a phenomenon of nature not yet described by science? Or a radioactive substance, a process of nuclear reactions? Is it a supernatural vision? A fundamental stone? An alien sign? Or an architectural fragment? A sculpture, an installation? Or this lozenge that rises with momentum from the ground?