VIVID [RADICAL] MEMORY

Artur Alipio Barrio de Sousa Lopes was born February 1, 1945 in Porto, Portugal. In 1955 he moved to Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, city in which he lives and works.

Wouldn't it be better, at this moment, instead of asking ourselves about the results of our struggle with the world, or about the products we obtain through our debatable skills in submitting all materials we find in it to our purposes, wouldn't it be interesting just this once to question briefly about the scraps, the shreds, that which remains in the end? The recurrence of this question is an essential element in Artur Barrio's poetry. Even when linked to other equally basic features, even when it is placed on a secondary level, it is always present in his journey. It is this question which can be found throughout along his work, shaping it in such a way that separates the artist from the others that belong to his generation; which marks him with the sign of uniqueness.

Since the early 60's Barrio has been concerned with the fragments, by the remnants we leave behind. It is important to stress that this concern has nothing to do with an ecological discourse, with the old denunciation of the implacability of the instrumental reason, of the destruction of nature, of the hole in the ozone layer, of the death of whales and several other contemporary terrors. It is true that the bloody bundles spread in Rio de Janeiro and Belo Horizonte in 1970 were partly explained as comments on the terrible underground life generated by the military dictatorship. But they reached beyond this fact. The 500 plastic bags filled with blood, pieces of nails, saliva, shit, catarrh, bones, etc. also spread in Rio de Janeiro reached as well beyond the denunciation level. Likewise with the bundles, the bags were left by their author to be manipulated by curious anonymous passersby, who sometimes became co-authors of the work. Remains whose journey was recorded - although not interfered with - by the artist who, posing as a passerby, paid attention to the psycho-organic reactions.

As we can already conclude from the description of these works, or situations, as the artist himself described them, it was very difficult to characterize them as artworks, even if we take into consideration the high level of experimentation that existed at the time. A more-detailed analysis shows their detachment both from the object as they were approached by pop art as regarding the choice of new materials as in the Arte Povera and even more in the formalist approach of the minimalists.

Going beyond the purpose of creating a work that would call the spectator's attention to its inner logic, as was modern art's purpose; beyond the critic of the canonic forms of production and display of artworks and the phenomenological interaction between spectator and work, the driving force of the neoconcrete, a movement to which he participated closely - and which meant a significant alteration in the terms of the former debate -, Barrio was concerned not only with what remained from experience - as I have already mentioned - but even with that which is not experienced, that which happens far from our awareness.

The idea of dispersion, of disaggregation of work in the urban fabric, corresponds to the loss of focus; to choose it as a strategy is a useless attempt to attain the totality of life. The dimension of the subject, the work producer, deliberately sinks in the fluctuation undergone by the lacerated work interspersed all over town. The passersby, in his turn - with his acute unconcern towards everything that doesn't belong to the list of his daily actions -, often doesn't pay attention to that energetic mass - the plastic bag full of instigation objects.

Free from the usual meanings we give things, each bag, although full of matter and heteroclite energy, undergoes a metamorphosis and becomes a simple container of dregs. Garbage among garbage. This is the destiny of the things we place outside our experience. They are the fragments, the matter that our presumption labels as corrupted, degraded, that we condemn to nonexistence, as if we were able to decide this.

It is exactly in this gap that Barrio works. It is as if he asked himself what things tell each other whenever they meet. He promotes events that can happen in a quiet room or in the dazzling intensity of a crossroads of a metropolis. The small scythe and knife stuck in the ground with only a short distance between them and linked by a thin cord that is knotted at the handle of the scythe and at the blade of the knife - what kind of dialogue do they establish with each other? How does the wall react to the dried fish that the artist sticks on it as if it were a graft? And how does the same wall react to the marks and drawings made on it? And who, outside - walking or passing by car -, will be able to distinguish among all the sounds, the sound produced by the artist blowing inside a shell in a closed room? These are only examples of the fact that now, as always before and afterwards, everything is happening.

Facing this huge and decentralized universe, surprisingly enormous, how is it possible to create a project that is able to structure an action, since that same action will never coincide with what we thought of it before? Also there is no possibility of recording things that, due to their own nature, establish their own time and space. That is why Barrio is always recording events in notebooks describing how everything happens in life: ideas, daily events, whims, the movements of a chess game, they unravel themselves sometimes together, sometimes in an independent way, in a spatio-temporal sequence.

Although it is impossible to achieve totality, nothing prevents us from aiming at it. This is better than to give way to the exclusion drive. According to this principle Barrio brought to this Bienal his Uma Extensâo no Tempo. Two nearly empty and darkened rooms, because "too much light flattens external and internal details", and white salt spread all over them. In the first room - o dep?sito ca?tico -, former works by the artist are scattered on the floor, at different heights on the walls. Memories, accumulation, disorder, personal life. In the other, a bigger room, some pale light bulbs reflect light from the crystals of salt. A bag of salt by the wall is available to the spectator so that he can, while walking and producing sounds of crashed crystals, as a creator, throw the salt onto the floor and cultivate it. On the wall that faces the entrance are hung a guide rope and a metal frame to allow him to walk as if he were a child on the subtly starred landscape, making his slight happiness rotate.