Storm skies
“It creates from our ecosystem a new world, whose processes and objects are so absolutely foreign to us - a world that works through radical mirroring actions, and remains hidden in so many other ways, without delivering the foundations of its otherness when it becomes what it faces. (...) Imagine that this communication sometimes gives a sense of strangeness to the landscape due to the narcissism of our human gaze, but that this is only part of the natural world here. (...) Our instruments are useless; our methodology is defective; our motivations, selfish ”. Jeff Vandermeer
Against the demolition concrete sky a mountain looms. When looking closely, however, the silhouette resembles and is human. The delicate tracing subverts both the genre of the portrait - of images of or with the human being (s) - and the genre of the landscape - of images of nature, untouched or not by humanity. Cliff walls, intermediate plateaus or plains rising to the heights within human figures, constructed b parallel lines through small spaces on the hard material of concrete: allegories for the act of observing or the habit of breathing itself?
Lines do not always need to shape words to participate in communication. In Evandro Angerami's human Landscapes, the lines of the drawing make individuals made of flesh, bone and dreams in hard mountain seen against what is supposed to be the heavens. Where are the mountains, anyway? In the eye you observe or in the construction from the figures? Working with concrete stones with drawings and subtle interventions in gold, the artist reconstructs a kind of ancestral memory attached to his experiences. A memory, like any other, built by a set of trials and errors, pains and joys, irreconcilable powers and acceptances.
Treating the living as a small particle capable of containing the force that raised the mountains to the edge of the clouds, Angerami reminds the public that, because we are human - small and insignificant -; in view of the immeasurable immensity of the universe, we are still able to aspire to a balance between our desires and comforts and a communal well-being divided among all creatures living below the sky.
The artist transmutes his / her models into an undeniable part of nature, a philosophical line long abandoned in the western world. As if trying to remind those who question him that cities and roads can be unnatural; the bodies of the people, however, are inescapably part of nature. Perhaps that is why, even, drawings on concrete and stone are not enough for the installation as a whole. That no matter how artificial the contemporary ways of life are, human beings never escape the matter that makes up nature. Because, after all, human beings are their bodies and not what inhabits them. Thus, this project denies the use of an individual's possessive pronoun towards his body, almost stating: “I am the body, this body is not mine to be inhabited”.
In order to fully present his argument, the artist's drawings, on test tests, are also added. Pen on paper reconstructing animals with line and dream. After all, who can deny that “we are made of the stuff that dreams are made of; our little life is surrounded by sleep ” ? Animals that could very well be the personification of people in archetypes or self-images printed in matter. As if it were possible, a being metamorphose into what he imagines to be his mirror, Evandro breeds birds and all sorts of sea animals.
Finally, in the whole of the installation, the video Human Landscapes (2019), with its four or five dry cuts separating common scenes from a work shot in sequence shots. Allegorical representations of the trivial metropolitan urban landscape built by inventive human action applied by skill, taken for banal, in the hands of bricklayers. Finally, ending with a look at the storm skies of a particularly turbulent day of 2019 when the inhabitants of the “wild Paulicéia” , on any given afternoon, saw the day turn into night, supposedly, due to the sum of storm clouds with the black clouds of the Amazon fires.