ESCAPE ENTRÓPICO / ENTROPIC ESCAPE

With Manuela Costa Lima

On view at Quadra gallery, 175 rua Dias Ferreira, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, from August 13th until September 13th 2019

The streets, their corners, houses, stones and through them, the mirror of the flux of passersby, workers and inhabitants are at the core of Manuela Costa Lima´s artwork.

Walking in the city, the artists pays a close attention to the small things that go unnoticed to the heedless observer. Simple objects, thrown ones, objects found in containers, on the ground or in the shops of the neighborhoods that Manuela Costa Lima crosses on her path, turn into erected sculptures or sculptural objects that the artist reveals through an intuitive process on the brink of performance in its dimension of exchange, collection and association.

Whether using connection points from google maps to get closer to unfamiliar places and create interactions with inhabitants of distant areas or appropriating raw and silent or colorful and gritty materials that reflect a popular vernacular, Manuela Costa Lima reveals a singular perception of the urban spaces and its details. In it, a peculiar delicateness contrasts with the immediate hardness of her surroundings and proposes a poetic interpretation of the objects and shapes that fill the everyday life.

In her research the artist borrows part of the arte povera and of the minimalist vocabulary, to enhance the human experience and the necessary link between the subjects and the space between them. By using this affective lens, Manuela Costa Lima gives another signification to the elements that she encounters during her wanderings, reinventing a city that would be more human.

This personal reading, as well as the way the artist chose to deal with the exhibition space permeates the artworks of Entropic Escape. In the gallery a column made of Portuguese mosaics floats. The weight of the stones that usually pave the streets strikingly differs from the subtle way they are tied together, their structure remembering the fragility and the unstable balance of all human and material relationships. “Vertebrae” (“Vertebras”) dialogues with the anthropomorphic series “dancing bodies” (“Corpo de Baile”) in which stone paralepidids closely sealed in an embrace, seem to dance slowly. In this body of work, the imperfect purity of stones reminding of collected souvenirs repeats itself, along with the magic that happens when staring with a different outlook in front of the unknown, giving life to unanimated objects.

Imperfection permeates the same way the “Erratas” series, in which Manuela Costa Lima questions the fictitious precision of industrial stones cut according an always identical pattern, by evidencing the singularities of their superficies and possible geographies.

Eventually, with “Links” (“Vinculos”), sculptures made of wood tied by colored fabrics punctuate the silence that otherwise occupies the exhibition space, bringing with their colors, a bit of the grit of Brás, a popular neighborhood of São Paulo where the artist installed her studio.

In her work, Manuela Costa Lima talks about the subtlety of the human gesture, of its presence in the city, of life’s fragility, precariousness and chaos. Escaping the logical rationality of modernist architecture and of standardized industrialism, the artist looks for the subjective and the freedom of the detours, in the wanderings that take her from one side of the city to the other, deconstructing and  giving new signification to the banal, the space and its elements, in an entropic escape.

MANUELA COSTA LIMA (São Paulo, 1983, vive e trabalha em São Paulo

Graduated in architecture and urbanism at FAU-USP, the artist works with installations, objects and wanderings. She showed in Brazil, in the USA and Europe and published her first artists book, PROJETO CORRESPONDÊNCIA, awarded by the PROAC in 2015.