Geraldo Souza Dias

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Tower of Babel

Geraldo Souza Dias’ work is characterized by a research around painting and word, image and concept, placing in jeopardy objects, names, meanings and by doing so, questioning the notions of imaginary, representation and language. Phrases, words in several languages, drawn or printed letters, calligraphic lines, writings, associate themselves to images of their fragments and are organized in geometric structures and patterns of abstraction.

Word and image are placed in a dialectical relationship in the picture surface, where, as the artist says, “the text dilutes the bidimensional character of the image, trying to interpret it in a single dimension”. This project seems to evolve in the always unstable space between perceiving and naming what is perceived. It is a sort of reflection on Art, its Nature and the artist’s work, as well as about the codes that organize representation, perception and the systems of signifiers.

Tower of Babel is a construction made of small painted canvases and wood stretchers, precariously arranged in a spiral that, although a recurrent theme of a certain period of Art History (from the end of the Middle Age to the beginning of the Baroque) brings immediately to memory the Monument to the 3rd International (1920) by the constructivist Russian artist V.Tatlin (1885-1953).

The ensemble is part of the author’s personal archive, a sort of a diary from his working studio, with notes on thoughts, facts of his personal life, project sketches. The images show landscapes, collages, human figures, objects, quoted texts, wordplays, abstractions, references to painting tradition and to Art History, with some ironic manipulations of other artists’ works.

The open spaces allow a sight of the interior of the tower and its building’s process while at the same time confer it strategic transparency to its pertaining to the exhibition’s space, a building also burden of historical meanings. The ascending spiral seems to describe a narrative, to indicate a way to be followed by the beholder. 

The basis of the tower display an accumulation of things that seem to want to say, that announce without a logical formulation and that order themselves in the funneling that lead to the canvases with the inscription “once upon a time” (in Portuguese and in English), the beginning of a open story, thrown in time and space, like a red moon against a darken sky.

Beyond the metaphor about the origin of the races and the different languages, setting up the notion of otherness among the human beings (the I and the other, in former works by Geraldo) says the legend, that the king order the construction of the Tower of Babel in ancient Babylon wanted to make him a name.

Exactly here is the primordial finality of language, to name, what is here at play: what moves from the basis of the tower is what is still searching form, meaning, a murmuring language, but a powerful matter, which keeps being molded by the will, the demiurgic gesture of the artist. What comes from that is placed in the world, we call it art, its History is in the museum. Once upon a time… 

Ivo Mesquita

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