Associação Cultural Videobrasil

The poetics of the loop

1. Plain, clean, concise images. Possessing undeniable formal and technical accuracy, the images created by Leandro Lima and Gisela Motta delude the viewer: their ambiguity is not easily apprehended, for they are protected by an apparent transparency. But there is something there, a remaining discomfort: back rumour, subtle trembling.

2. The girl swings (sem título #4 - untitled #4, 1999). A banal image, repetitive in its naivety. Image-cliché: countless comings and goings. However, there is something strange about this so familiar scene, something produced by minimal displacements: saturated colours, artificial landscape, abstracted girl. The oblique framing, the convex look. And there, between what has been minimally displaced, the world intensely becomes another. The swing, the landscape, the movement, the camera, the look: from cliché to vertigo, everything seems loose.

3. If the green colour is the greenest in the world (Leminski), what to say about this impossible green? (verde.dxf - green.dxf, Lima, 2004) When it is artificially stamped on the grass, the paradox establishes itself: this colour is so green that this world cannot be the one we know! And how about this blue, bluer than the blue colour itself? Geometrically divided into two: the sea, the sky, the white line. Horizontal blue. If Klein Blue - Yves Klein's hallmark - is the material blue of paint, the body and the performance, and if the blue of Magritte's skies was purposely rarefied, stylised and oneiric, this blue.dxf (azul.dxf, Lima, 1998/2002) is pure synthesis: it seems to exist only as a result of a combination of digits. The colours blue, green, red and yellow form a synthetic landscape in Leandro and Gisela's photographs, videos and installations. An ambiguous landscape: so similar and, at the same time, so distant from the natural world.

4. Water is a constant (analógico #2 - analogical #2, 1998; sem título #5 - untitled #5, 2002). It flows and re-flows, sounds and resounds. But its fluidity is imprisoned in an endless loop. Again, there is a synthetic environment, as the water of the laboratories (that was fiction in the old days, but now is often in the daily news), where all kinds of raw materials are synthesized, and organic matters are created and duplicated.

5. In analógico #3 (analogical #3, Lima, 1998), the electronic water of a swimming pool made of pixels. Isn't that our situation between the images? Drift, immersion, dive, drowning (Motta, 2003). Sensory experience, more than a merely visual one.

6. In Leandro and Gisela's work, the loop becomes a poetical strategy: it is economical, automatic, circular; it impedes the image to refer to a possible past or to succeed in constructing a future image. In loop mode, the image cannot narrate or foresee. It only displays itself, it exhibits its automatism. As if the world machine had stopped working, unable to produce new experiences. But if the loop is repetition, the difference is produced by the encounter between the thought and the work. The repetition does not stop, but the viewer's thought flows continuously. And the circle becomes an ellipse, for, during the repetition, the image is being constantly altered by different thoughts. As the well-known Heraclitus' river: always the same and always another.

7. The landscape is a natural one; the scene is simple, transparent: some people taking a walk between the trees of a wood (que é de? - that is of?, 2003). But, as in Magritte's Carte Blanche (1965), this between becomes an interstice where the beings disappear. Between: interface, space for passing. As if the reality was full of cuts through which the beings could cross to other invisible, unknown, fantastic domains. But if Magritte's landscape is intense and intentionally oneiric and surreal, Leandro and Gisela's wood is between banality and fantasy, ordinary reality and imagination. The installation becomes more ambiguous with the device created for this work: the image appears only when it is projected on the viewer's shadow. A complex game of appearing and disappearing, of visible and invisible worlds.

8. The wood is removed, but there are still people passing by. In this work (marrom - brown, 2002), as simple as disconcerting, the visitors are filmed while they go through the exposition (“now the objects perceive me”, Paul Klee would say). In the projection, people are passing by from one place to another, but there is no scenery. That can be any place: an exposition? A shopping centre? A studio where a TV commercial is being filmed? The scene becomes even faker with the use of chroma key. It is not necessary to cut the landscape, for it has already been removed: from the image as a place of transit to the image as a non-place. Or a nowhere place.

9. What is expected from a body? That it lives. What is expected from a performance? That it happens. In the (almost or anti-) performances by Leandro and Gisela (sem título # 1, 2, 3 - untitled #1, 2, 3), the body simply does not respond. Or, when it does respond, it is taken over by a disturbing automatism (or autism). Automaton-body, strange body. Body in loop mode.

10. Or a body upside-down (interlúdio - interlude, 2003), lying on its own carapace, unable to turn over to its natural position (impossible not to think about Gregor Samsa).

11. How strange is this world created by Gisela and Leandro: disconcerting, fantastic, paradoxical. Echos of a revisited surrealism? I don't think so. After all, the real world surpassed the surreal one a long time ago. What these works suggest goes beyond it: strange is this world, our world. Transformed into an artifice, a synthesis, a simulation, it seems to be definitely in loop mode. It is the artist's role (and not only the artist's) to tear, to cut, to open ways: to make hybrid, permeable universes of the natural and the artificial, the organic and the synthetic, the alive and the non-alive.

12. As a lotus flower (made of digits) being born and re-born on the skin.