Casa Triângulo is pleased to present Lava-Olhos de Emergência (Emergency Eye Wash), Lucas Simões’s new exhibition at the gallery, featuring texts by Pollyana Quintella and Ciro Miguel. The show brings together sculptures and installations that explore the transformation of forms as they traverse different contexts, timeframes, and cultural repertoires.

A black-and-white photograph of a cross traced onto the landscape is one of the starting points for the  exhibition Emergency Eyewash Station. Deliberately printed out of focus and pinned to the wall of Lucas  Simões’s studio throughout the creative process, the 1957 image is instantly recognizable. 

Two straight lines cut by tractors through the vegetation of Brazil’s Cerrado savanna gave visible form to  urban planner Lucio Costa’s conceptual design for the Pilot Plan, the master plan for Brazil’s new capital,  Brasília. The crossing of the Monumental and Road Axes, a reinterpretation of the cardo and decumanus of  Roman cities, was, in Costa’s words, “the primary gesture of one who marks out a place or takes possession  of it: two axes crossing at right angles, that is, the very sign of the cross.”1Edited to appear as abstract as the  sketch that inspired it, the photograph became the fantastical revelation of a modern civilization inscribed on  the Central Plateau, imagined as an inhospitable, backward wilderness. 

Brasília resurfaces in Aparelhagem. Here, the artist replicates the columns of the Alvorada Palace, Oscar Niemeyer’s surreal invention for one of the first permanent buildings of the new capital. Niemeyer conceived the Alvorada column as an evolution beyond both the Greek column and the modernist pilotis, but it quickly became a pop icon across Brazil. It appeared in logos, furniture, prints, and souvenirs, and also found its way into vernacular architecture as a decorative motif. Simões draws on the column’s capacity for popular circulation, reworking Niemeyer’s erudite designs as an aparelhagem: the enormous, monumental sound-and-light systems used at secular tecnobrega parties, a hybrid musical genre born in Pará. The sensual curves of the column, carefully defined by engineer Joaquim Cardoso using a fourth-degree equation [y = 0.037x⁴ − 0.190x³ + 0.381x² − 0.048x], appear as tongues licking the openings. The pleasure of the party, the pleasure of reinforced concrete, of forms and formwork.

In the Babadeira series, for example, the artist recreates fragments of 1970s brutalist architectural textures using an industrially produced galvanized-steel structure engineered to the millimeter. Concrete is then poured into it by hand, leaving the resulting forms partly to chance. In Post Modern Sleaze, cables and maintenance ducts temporarily adorn geometries replicated from spectacular buildings of contemporary architecture. For all their cutting-edge technology, these structures depend on daily maintenance to preserve both their immaculate appearance and their performance. In mostruário, meanwhile, an uncomposed scattering of rivets evokes the beauty of successive repairs, creating an accidental microarchitecture.

1 Lúcio Costa, “Relatório do Plano Piloto de Brasília,” 1957, in Lúcio Costa: Registro de uma Vivência (São Paulo: Editora 34, 2018), 284.

The relation between what we see and what we know is never settled.
John Berger

For more than ten years, Lucas Simões has been testing the many ways in which matter is never neutral. Looking across his body of work, we begin to see that objects carry habits, materials carry techniques, forms carry ideologies, and spaces carry movements. In other words, things contain an embodied memory that precedes the finished object and exists independently of the maker’s intention. This means that a form reaches us accompanied by the uses it has had and the discourses that justify it. Discourses once thought immaterial are, in fact, embedded in the thickness of concrete and the fold of sheet metal. But matter, of course, is also an agent. Much of the tension in the artist’s work derives from the recognition that material has a will of its own, and that much of what we call form emerges from an intense negotiation between human intention and a substance with its own modes of expression.

Yet his experiments never stop at questions of form alone. In the behavior of the material, the artist finds traces of what was already embedded in it. (...) The material process thus opens onto social and discursive tensions without the need to state them explicitly. The result is a body of work that ranges from miniature to building scale without fixing itself at any one point along that continuum, and raises the suspicion that what appeared solid had all along depended on something unseen. In this exhibition, that suspicion leaves the interior of the works and settles, quite literally, in the air of the room.

In one series of works, the artist begins with reproductions found in art and architecture books, scanning them and printing them at a reduced scale. He then scans those prints and reprints them using a different process, repeating the cycle until the original referent survives only as a trace. From these exhausted images emerge the works gathered under the title Luscofusco. (...) Modern sculpture, which aspired to full volume and organic form, returns here as a cut-out plane, while volume now belongs to the machine that reproduced it. Polke enlarged the dot until it ceased to serve the image and became a subject in its own right; here, however, noise returns not as painting, but as weight.

Simões works with a formal repertoire he has built up over the years, one that at a certain point ceased to solve formal problems and began to function as a language. The references underpinning this vocabulary are deliberately archaic. In Xoanon and Mitológicas, symbolic force depends on something remaining illegible.

In laboratories and workshops where acids and fine dust are handled, one sometimes finds a curious fixture known as an emergency eyewash station. As an exhibition title, the eyewash station may also say something about how these works operate. Lucas Simões works with what has already been seen and absorbed, subjecting familiar forms to operations that unsettle their apparent self-evidence. The eyewash leads us toward a critical dimension of vision – critical, perhaps, in the more unsettling sense: a way of seeing that distrusts what it sees while at the same time recognizing that it has been shaped by it.