Tiago Tebet: From here to eternity... But not. - February 1st, 2020

From Here to Eternity...But Not

For his fourth solo exhibition at Luciano Brito Galeria, Tiago Tebet is presenting From Here to Eternity...But Not, a striking series of fifteen canvases, each with its own unique variation of inviting, resonant patterns that cut their way through effusive and delicately overlaid surfaces of colors.

The way these visual arrangements spread beyond their borders makes it seem as though they aim to irradiate their particular patterns through the interplay of sensorial experience and meaningful perception. The resulting configuration of relationships recreates the effect of a sort of emission – one that is simultaneously characterized by unison and dissonance, alluding to the pervasive quality of another primary sensory source of our experience: sound, in all its modalities – musical, audible and inaudible. In these paintings, the pulsating visual motifs allude to both handcrafted ornamentation and decor as well as wavelike depictions of acoustic vibration. The theme of artisanal expression has been persistent in the artist's oeuvre but never has it been so intimately linked with an external correlate.

This confluence leads the spectator to establish a network between the inner logistics we attribute to paintings and the outer logistics of our perceived environment. The combination of strategies in Tebet's paintings dilates the intersection between rendered experience and lived experience. In our Latin American context, the artisanal is rarely an eccentric resource; it is far-reaching in associations and coextensive with the multiple temporal dimensions of our cultural topography and experience. The weaving of color, surfaces and forms in these works present us with the paradox of an immediacy of perceptual impact constructed through the duplication and temporal juxtaposing of motifs or patterns: the junction of the permanent and the ephemeral or transitional dimensions of form and vision as a metaphor for our own condition as creatures of time and meaning, which are simultaneously limited and limitless.

The title of the show is drawn from a phrase inscribed in the evocative painting Spaghettivollmond (1984) by German artist Martin Kippenberger. In the painting, outstretched arms evoke surrender, and mainly atonement, or a desire for transcendence of the mundane, that is, an impossible escape from history as signified in the quote "From here to eternity but not."

The sinuous spaghetti lines in Kippenberger's work, arranged in the nuclear form of a full moon (vollmond), reverberate together with the Brazilian artist's visual patterns of motifs. Beyond their evident formal and contextual differences, the work of the two artists share a common poetical thematics or central concept: the relation between perception and the rendering of the experience of time, that is, of the reasonably explicit and effective overlapping and reverberation of historical time, a condition for the possibility of cultural meanings, and the search for propagation or liberation in time. Tiago Tebet redimensions this relationship and distributes it throughout the exhibition space. Each painting engages us with the components of a potential synesthetic experience, the physical and perceptual coming together of the senses, alluding to the transmission of a desired and impossible freeing of time within time itself.

Gabriel Lima