Mano Penalva is an artist who travels the streets. His studio, in the central region of São Paulo, is the laboratory that allows him to merge and rearrange things and statements that have never before been put into dialogue, and it is precisely in the space between the studio and the world that the heart of his production lies. A cab ride can be the trigger for a new series, just like a trip to the popular market, a conversation with a street vendor, or a more attentive look at packages or garbage cans. Walking is his way of producing a listening ear to what things say. Returning to the studio is his way of making them talk.
In Cama de Gato, his first solo exhibition in LLANO, Penalva presents the freshest developments of his research, play, work, and political imagination take on varied accords, interspersed with a myriad of symbolic meanings and material mediations. The artist dialogues above all with the wooden beads that cover, in different compositions, the seats of the cars driven by professional drivers in Brazil and in various parts of the world. Besides the explicit aesthetic appeal, wooden bead backrests help maintain good posture, activate blood circulation through a certain massaging competence, and provide ventilation between the body and the seat in search of well-being. It is, in short, a technology of popular knowledge that responds to the precariousness of these professionals, who have no legal regulation, and are subjected to exhaustive work shifts that condition their bodies to vicious choreographies. Ironically, by alleviating the damage of this excess, these supports ensure that their productivity is further maximized, becoming at the same time a help and a hindrance.
If in previous productions, such as the series Ventana, Alpendre, and Tudo Passa, the material was treated in a more direct dialogue with the lexicons of the house and architecture, now the beads take on new configurations, in interaction with fabrics used to upholster cars of different styles, marking a new moment in the artist’s work. In addition to the first contrast between the handmade and hard aspect of wood and the synthetic and soft character of fabrics, Penalva explores compositions of graphic outline and accentuated lyrical geometry, which dialogue with a series of signs from different cultural imaginaries. In front of them, we are able to identify symbols of Afro diasporic nature linked to the candomblé orixás, Greek eyes, yin-yangs and spirals, arrows and vectors, sometimes reminiscent of pendants and amulets that provide not only protection and ritual dimension, but also identity for these cars and their owners. The presence of eyelets and hoops (which allow the audience to intervene and reconfigure these compositions, reminiscent of the dance of lines present in the cat’s cradle game), affirms the ornamental trait of these works, the interest in adornment as a resource for producing singularity. Its strings are like rosaries and necklaces, webs between the sacred and the profane, while its cosmological titles seek to suspend and overcome the everydayness of work, the banality of the upholstery, to project us upwards — the very sphere of dreams and utopias, the territory of the future.
However, as usual in the artist’s production, such discussions insinuate themselves in a dialectic, or rather, polyphonic way. Penalva dismisses totalitarian and univocal enunciations that may aim at moral conclusion effects, but instead addresses the problem producing a prismatic intervention; a weave of relations of different scales, from macro to micro, and it is in this context that the wooden beads gain distinct connotations. In A Caça [The Hunt], the substitution of the hunting skin for the polka-dot backrest sets up a praise of toil, placing it as a trophy (as in the Weberian maxim, “labor dignifies man”) or, in a more perverse perspective, figuring the worker himself as prey. In Camas [Beds], on the contrary, the little balls that would serve to maximize the production of a body skilled in repeating gestures, take the place of an invitation for the spectator to decondition his or her posture in the exhibition space, changing the vertical position for a horizontal one and experimenting, himself or herself, a ludic cat’s cradle. The imperative of vision gives way to the desire to explore the world with the whole body, affirming values averse to measurable productivity. I believe these works are timely to reflect on the way art has been consumed as cognitive capital, swallowed by a rapid and excessive consumption of data and narratives and, simultaneously, crossed by the difficulty in projecting more collective symbolic meanings for the present (after all, why is our time, marked by the profusion and technical efficiency of images, also a time of crisis of imagination?). The beds do not dichotomize the relationship between experience and information, because their episteme is epidermal. If they are constituted by the socio-cultural discussions punctuated above, they also summon us to conjugate the symbolic dimension with the real dimension; representation with experience, something linked to a certain tradition of Brazilian art, interested, especially since its constructive programs of the 1940s and 1950s, in exploring the political potential of more open and experimental propositions, aimed at producing a body consciousness capable of negotiating between the individual and the social.
There are also the Cama de Gatos, which reinforce the artist’s interest in play as a way of testing social relations, the ludic as an operation that is both political and poetic, a resource for experimentation and oxygenation of language. In the specific case of the game known as “cat’s cradle”, two people manipulate a string to explore sequential shapes and frames, each one building on the previous one, increasing their level of complexity. It is a dynamic that involves cooperation and competition at the same time, a sort of metaphor of the social game. At each stage, the weaved line suggests figureability principles that receive varied names, depending on their cultural context (cradle, sail, road, among so many others…), and function as provisional spatial drawings, exercises of imagination about to be reconfigured. What Penalva does, in turn, is to recompose, with wooden beads, some of these figures on an oversized scale, substituting the domestic dimension of the hand with the confrontation of the body with space. For those who know the game, these compositions tend to trigger childhood and affective memories, making reference to the physical act itself. To some extent, we speak here of a praise of the hand that speculates and forges realities, measures space, and fills nature with propositional forces. The act of playing, like artistic practice, is capable of transforming simple things into experiences endowed with symbolic potentiality, by proposing new perspectives on the world and its tensions.
Taken together, Cama de Gato explores the symbolic disputes contained in everyday materials and aesthetic exercises, and the construction of formal knowledge in non-erudite contexts. Between the technical dimension and the socio-cultural discussion, it is worth saying that Mano Penalva bets on the airing of the senses to allow us to stretch, who knows, the negotiable horizons of the possible.
Text: Pollyana Quintella
