Exhibition "OUTROPLANO" at Galeria Raquel Arnaud

From the ink drawings made in the mid-1960s, stacked shapes and bodies — those suggesting blocks resting on each other, possible dark and enigmatic visions of walls, buildings, imaginary cities, who knows what they are; these, heads, torsos, sexes, all disjointed -, the work of Tuneu, as is often the case, had many variations. Born and raised in São Paulo, addicted to visiting museums, galleries and successive editions of the São Paulo Biennial, first as a visitor and, from 1967, at the famous Pop Biennial, as a participant — incidentally, the youngest participant , at least until then —, it was natural that he was sensitive to the production of his colleagues, here and abroad, starting with that of his mentor Tarsila do Amaral (yes, she herself, accompanied him from the age of 10 until he was 25); that he felt the impact of Wesley Duke Lee's drawings; who watched in amazement the unpacking of the 39 paintings in the Edward Hopper room, at the same 1967 Biennale, where he saw Robert Rauschenberg hanging his immense Barge, a 980 cm wide painting, the largest of his entire series of 79 silk screen paintings.

The indication of these four references is not free. All of these are figurative artists, while Tuneu would end up leaning towards abstraction, more precisely towards geometric abstraction. But it should not be confused with Concretism. To begin with, one of his aesthetic-affective affinities was Willys de Castro, who, like his companion Hércules Barsotti, joined the Rio neoconcretos. Tuneu had fun with Willys mocking the dogmatism of Waldemar Cordeiro, the leader of the concretists, for whom brown was not a color. The problem is that Tuneu, in addition to his formal concerns, has always worshiped color, never separating one dimension from another.

The variation in Tuneu's work was not so much due to the annexation of territories of languages ​​outside it, but through the systematic, diligent, meditative exploration of the constituent elements of painting, of geometric shapes applied to it, including from the quadrangular field delimited by the frame, to frame itself, to the four lines that make up the limits of the sheet of paper, cardboard, or canvas fabric; Consider also the surfaces of these supports, on which he paints, scratches, cuts, like the series formed by cuts, folds and overlapping planes. And colors, of course, many colors, variations and tonal contrasts typical of his condition as a cultivated musical listener, of those who recognize complex composed rhythms and the nuances of certain glissandos.

For this exhibition, composed of a set of papers and paintings, Tuneu keeps the hexagon as the protagonist. How to respond to this? Perhaps because bees' combs are small hexagons confined with purity, sweetness and their status as vital food; perhaps because the world was made in six days; perhaps because the hexagon is the sum and product of the first three numbers, one, two and three, which characterizes it as the first of the perfect numbers; perhaps because a multitude of crystalline structures, from a snowflake to the carbon atom, are hexagonal; perhaps because the pentatonic scale, as Pythagoras wanted, has six equal intervals. Perhaps, finally, we can find a sense of order and purity in a life lacking meaning, in a world permanently in crisis.

Yes, perhaps all of this is a good coincidence, which I personally doubt, and I invite the reader to be cautious, as I don't know if he is aware of what artists can, consciously or unconsciously, do. In any case, look at each of these works and notice that all of them – open, expanded, unfolded, pointed shapes, whatever – contain, inside, a perfect hexagon. Sometimes, as if due to their versatile nature, they spread out, run to the sides, upwards, like geometric petals of a lily, which open in alternating movements and in unequal but precise positions, as if equipped with hinges. . And it is common that, at the same time that this happens, one of the six lateral lines of one of these hexagons decides to assert its simultaneous condition as the edge of a square that projects into it, in a dynamic that repeats itself and proliferates into triangles, trapezoids , full or hollow, occupied by one or two colors, or reduced to contour lines, in some cases a rectilinear slit of light. Note how the colors correspond to each other, vibrate as they come closer, when they happen to be contrasting, they dissolve into each other, when they are neighbors or when they are superimposed, in more or less discreet veils, with one color inhabiting a plane submerged to the color floating in the surface.

Working with the hexagon, that perfect shape, Tuneu examines it with the precision similar to that of Newton subjecting a prism to light, discovering that the simple solid with a triangular section of glass, with its flat, polished faces, and its transparent body, has the power to transform a beam of white light into the projection of a rainbow-colored spot.

Agnaldo Farias

Service
Exhibition | OUTTHERPLANE
From the 24th of August to the 19th of October
Monday to Friday, 11am to 19pm | Saturday, from 11am to 15pm