Luiz Hermano

The reverse’s inverse

“Only in language, as well as constructive art, takes place human elevation from the level of sensitive ‘perception’ to the level of the essentially ideal ‘view’. Both are the organs that, in their use, mutually own each other and operate together for the acquisition of an intuitive depiction of the world ” Ernst Cassirer stated.

Since its emergence, the Concrete Movement claims that art should be “entirely conceived by the spirit before its execution and built up with plastic elements in search of purity and formal rigor”1. The meaning of the work is the work itself. In the early 50s, under the impact of the 1st Biennial of São Paulo, Grupo Ruptura (Rupture Group) declares in its concrete manifesto: “art is a means of knowledge deductible from concepts.”
Without attachment to definitions and with Concrete Art influence, the works of the Geometria Invertida (Inverted Geometry) exhibition display a mutable world that never stays the same, but depends on the interaction and intuition of the viewer for its constitution. Squares, triangles, rhombus, and rectangles, white or black, aluminum welded, appear in different forms and harmonically destabilize each of the pieces that emerge in gestaltian graphic forms. The reality of the works are themselves, they do not express a meaning present there, previously known, but give a new physiognomy and significance to space as a whole.
Despite the mathematical reasoning, the creations of Luiz Hermano occur from the disarray of geometric shapes that, in his ideas, seem to become malleable and intuitive. The sculptures undress from its rigidity to inhabit the imagination and the dreamworld.

The exhibition Geometria Invertida opens itself to multiple approach possibilities and frees us to our own daydreams, displaying each piece as a “world instant”2.
Curatorship | Paulo Kassab Jr.

1. Theo van Doesburg – Concrete Art Manifesto, Art Concret magazine– Paris 1930.
2. Gaston Bachelard – The Right to Dream (prefaces, articles and studies from 1939 to 1962).

It is six in the morning. The clock on the street announces it. Sixteenth of May, two thousand twenty-one, fifteen degrees. The news shouts that the country accounts for 435,823 deaths and 15,625,218 cases of COVID 19, according to the assessment of the press vehicle consortium – a partnership established between the main media groups in the country, which arose due to delays and data manipulation by the Ministry of Health in Brazil.

If three years ago the word “Fake” was among the most written and replicated, today it is used as a government strategy in news that are the envy of the most inventive screenwriters and that intend to draw attention away from the daily extermination of Brazilians; however, the fable is not a dilemma now. The photographs of the universe are fake or collages of thousands of invented color images. The calendar is a convention for counting time, just like the forms of representation of a territory on a relief map, a photograph or a globe.

Chloroquine, penis-shaped baby bottle, flat earth, Portuguese explorer, Treaty of Tordesillas, Princess Isabel. “History is fiction.” The “First Mass in Brazil” is fiction, both in the letter by Pero Vaz de Caminha and on the canvas by Victor Meirelles. The one who holds the power tells, writes, discloses, even dictates some mythical facts as historical. The faces on the money bills denounce: reality is socially constructed.

Abuse and manipulation of the truth in a despicable, reckless and sordid way omits, rejects and distorts the value of deception. Not of this politician’s hoax, but of reverie, illusion, poetry. Nonetheless, it insists, leaks through the cracks, crosses borders, folds, and makes the everyday object useless to give it new uses, other perspectives. To the photographs that are born with a documentary aura, the artist denies, exposes the verse, the negative, this ghost that is not the image but its passage.

“Amarelinha” no longer promises heaven, a paradise sold in installments in government slogans or entrances to neo-Pentecostal churches. First of all, character comes, or there is the risk of losing the turn.

Real FAKE does not intend to deceive the viewer, but, against all news lies, to honor poetic fantasy and show that, in fact, we can find in imagination and art a stimulus “to think of a more sensible world, to cultivate the chimera of being able to relieve -if not to destroy- the injustices that spread and the inequalities that weigh (or should weigh) like a stone in our conscience.”1

Paulo Kassab Jr.

1. Nuccio Ordine, “The Usefulness of the Useless.”