Date: 2020
Author: Ricardo Escarduça
A conversation about art with Martim Brion naturally involves an investigation into the fundamentals of form and a work process that, through this search, conveys the intersection of knowledge, questions, and passions. From these exchanges, a reference to E. H. Gombrich emerges: “The sculptor usually abstracts the three-dimensional form and abstracts from colour…” This gesture, circumscribed to the field of art as well as extended to life in general, appeals to the abstraction of form as much as to that of the idea. In his own words, Brion searches “for the materialisation of ideas, concepts, feelings, problems, and arguments by the artist, for the artist and the public”.
Within this series, the specificities of its various appearances echo the abstract minimalism of the three-dimensional object as a response to essential questions in painting and sculpture. An echo accentuated through the institution of a general three-dimensional form as a hypothesis, suggested only by the title of the series. In certain faces of the objects, planes are already absent, while painting remains – the colour composition and the illusion of depth are freed from the constraints of an even surface by the carving and adding of sculptural elements to the plane. In others, there are planes where painting continues to be the reductionist element on the surface in charge of the composition of contours, shapes, and colours, distinguishing a sensitivity to monochromatism and thus contemplating an additional dimension of colour.
Challenging the indivisibility of the geometric archetype, the objects, each one of them, emerge from the concomitance between this decomposition and a (re)composition as a particular appearance of the primal form and of the relationships between its constituent parts and the whole. From such a particular and nuclear web of relations of composite elements, which is formal concerning internal and relative elements, and which invites the observer to privacy and stillness – a necessary and metaphoric passivity – the intrinsic detail of shapes, proportions, colours, depth, incidental light, and adjacent shade conceded by the object, stands out. Such detail unbinds the object’s particular three-dimensionality from the resistance of the primordial form, therefore upholding the autonomy of its singularity, at once painted and sculpted. Simultaneously, these particular three-dimensional demands an extensobject standswaken a kinetic demand and effective action from the viewer in a common sphere. With each step – between progress and regress – the evolution of the experience with the object and the relations between different objects fortifies their indivisible cohesion before extrinsic factors such as the variability of the visual field, of light, and of the human presence.
The Perspectives series pre-dates the Column series in the exhibition space and thus traces a correspondence with the respective years of creation. Perspectives dispense with contextual externalities. The small scale of the objects and their placement on the wall favour an intimacy in the visual field, the objects’ detail, and the internal relations between the constituent elements. Although not included in the exhibition, the large-scale installation Rubicon (2017), shown in the exhibition “Vanishing Points” in the National Museum of Natural History and Science and composed by three objects, is nevertheless worth mentioning due to its similarities and disparities with the Perspectives series. In it, each object is individualised through an accumulation of compositional actions of colour on the plane, without altering the primal form in order to arrive at the final composition.
Both series are now followed by Columns, the latter evincing its contiguity to the human scale, a median between the domains of monumentality and exiguity, and by the indentations on the plane from which other forms derive. All three series manifest an auto-reflexive mode of interrogation and search for the primal form, which is displayed in the specific object in a unique and original way, located in an undetermined intersection between painting and sculpture. These works by Brion show other dimensions beyond the qualities and relationships established between form, matter, colour, light, scale and the reception and perception by the viewer. In this artistic search, one discerns a ubiquitous idea of the work of art and of artistic practice, which anticipates the work itself. These objects contain and reveal a conceptualism of practice, an idea of art that coexists with the formalism between painting and sculpture, accentuating the nature of Brion’s art as a methodological operational system of seriality, repetition and variation.
This conceptual methodology establishes a mutual dialogue with an experimental approach, its processes, and antagonistic means. The wall linking Perspectives and Columns maps a porous border with the photographic work and turns the space itself into an intersection point. As a complementary sediment in the apprehension of three-dimensionality, photography establishes a different connection with the object, whose condition, as well as itself, is altered. Before the intrinsic properties of the object created by the artist, stable in the face of the viewer’s experience and the dynamism of the context, are the extrinsic circumstances of the existing object. The casual and fleeting encounter, which immobilises a spectral fragment of the object and its irreversible extinction imposed by the shutter’s occlusion. In other words, the adherence of a composition of form, colour, and light to the material’s surface captures the evanescence of the object, and hence it imposes the impossibility of apprehending its appearance in its entirety. The illusiveness of the object in the photograph goes beyond this Barthesian plane. On the one hand, the light and shadow combinations and point of view in Inclinações – the only work that focuses on the curve – impose different perceptions of the same object and of its relation with the space, but without clarifying its scale and materiality. On the other hand, in the Repetitions and Read series, the abstract and minimalist compositions express a progressive suppression of the found object’s notoriety. In the former, as in A.C.R. #1 and Kontrasquare #2, it is indistinctly noticeable; in the latter, it is eclipsed by the privilege of colour’s compositional purity and its form emancipated from the found object, thus creating a new object.
This artistic anchoring in the late avant-garde problematisations of modernism does not proclaim, however, the exclusion of abstract art from its domain. Avoiding the hierarchisation of processes and means, Martim Brion’s work transitions between the repetition of discrete variations of objects which appear and become apparent and a search for the essential and universal origin of form, summoning a metaphysical character constituted by fraction and unit, analysis and synthesis, specificity and essentialism. In fact, it allows for the insubordination of the object as a self-sufficient work before the viewer and of art’s purity as an independent domain of the world and of life, and triggers a discursive catalysation of problems and an exploration of possibilities that intersect other contexts. Narrowing the boundary between art, knowledge and reality, the artistic discourse expands to domains that transcend it as a latent, intuited and communicated meaning which, once recognised, clarifies and amplifies the expressive force of formal composition. Through form, the idea. Through the idea, man. Before the liminal and unintelligible condition, between expansion and compression, uniformisation and fragmentation, and repetition and variation of phenomena and manifestations, which appear, become apparent in the contemporary cultural context, such a metaphysical character associated to artistic creation, to the idea of work of art and its experience, indicates a discursive intention and the representation of the human impulse for the original truth in oneself and in the world.
Martim Brion 