Galeria Millan has the pleasure of announcing Living Metonymy, a project that participates in ArtRio 2021. With a selection of 15 artists, the displayed work’s central operation is based on different structures of experience. By creating meaning through the contiguity of elements, these artworks metonymic relation arises from the displacement of specific semantic fields.
Anna Maria Maiolino Indícios series, as well as Tunga’s Estojos series offer fragments or residues of a previous reality that the objects refer to. Maiolino’s intertangled sewing implies a key to an absent place, and yet it represents an area perfectly, as if it was a map. The same thing happens with Tunga’s rock crystals and magnets, items also present in gardens or landscapes and that reveal an entrance to other environments, resembling a portal.
Jaider Esbell’s Makunaimî cria o espelho universal, the metonymy transfers itself to figuration, shaping another history as it brushes history against the grain. Esbell portraits a scene he knows, but to those seeing it for the first time, it reveals itself through striking elements, such as the chromatic composition of contrasts and the layout that invokes specific patterns.
The chromatic index is also noted in Maya Weishof, Emmanuel Nassar and Paulo Pasta. They construct, in the outcome of peculiar colors, an internal argument. In their works, the references to emptiness and fullness, light and dark, as well as to chromatic sensation, point out the discussion about color in Art History. Tulio Pinto’s Cumplicidade #20 goes in the same direction, but it brings out sculpture and the debate on space and matter.
Alongside, Rodrigo Andrade’s landscapes and Miguel do Rio Branco’s photographic compositions are fragments of things already experienced, of a common reality. However, even if the fragments refer to a totality, they can modify it, existing independently – shifting between metonymy and metaphor.
The metonymy resource can be heavily found in Brazilian 70’s artist generation, considered hermetic, because of the silence imposed on them. Art was a last resistance when nothing else seemed possible and found an ally in the metonymic resource. Artur Barrio and Ivens Machado expose this incommunicability, and the doctrinaire threat, as well as the failed system that believes it is in a perfect and efficient functioning. Barrio’s transportáveis uses fragile materials, refusing perpetuity and stating a disbelief in the survival of objects and its deification. Likewise, Machado’s work appropriates of the flaws and the scraps, the “deviations of the rule” in a competent world based on industrial precision.
In José Damasceno’s work, the unity refers to a transubstantiation of the initial object: the colored crayons are fragments of a distant object, a television monitor. The connection between two distinct objects becomes clear and derives a comprehension of the relation the spectator has with the sign game – the grouping of crayons – as being capable of finding an alternative path.
Hélio Oiticica’s meta-esquemas, in the end, appear to put at stake the metonymy discussion in a single support, as they construct itself as a series of multiple and diverse dissections of space. In his work we can visualize the central question: to what extend can painting organize itself as evidence of tridimensional – or vice-versa? It is, somehow, the natural trajectory of metonymy moving through art, living metonymy.