OTTO958

Double Layers by Tom Burr – One Hélio

I’ve spent a lot of time considering the art of Hélio Oiticica. I’ve looked at his work for years, vaguely modeling certain gestures of my own in relation to specific objects he made, and events he staged. I’ve responded with admiration and affection to the intensely vivid colors juxtaposed with the wobbly, somewhat fugitive nature of his forms and structures, this incongruity becoming increasingly pronounced over the timespan of his work, from the 1950s through the late 1970s.

The precise formal clarity that defined the Neo-concrete movement, which Hélio was a part of from an early age, would give way to his more physically and conceptually fluid project: spatially expanded environments; works that could be physically entered, and works that could be worn; his own body performing throughout; Parangolés; Penetrables; architectures of bodies, of his body specifically, but then emanating out from there, to others, to groups, to audiences. Neo-Concrete, it seems to me, crumbled into a generous rubble of subjectivities, fragmented, incomplete, but performing, often dancing.

I had the desire to get closer, to push my work up against his, to question edges-as limits and instead explore the edges of a self or a body of work, as more nebulous in form, capable of blurring and blending into an other, in this case Hélio. I echoed some of his structures and thought patterns and layered them over mine; I confused the two of us. I wanted to dovetail our perceived identities, morph them somehow, and locate a mutual space where we could both reside. Attraction can lead to acts of mimicry and to the sway of influence, of one over another, where you can lose yourself.

The two exhibitions that I made were the result of this affective and mental grappling. They became a chronicle in a sense, of an amorous encounter between Hélio and myself. My worn t-shirts; his Portuguese language; my methods of pinning material and ideas; his brilliant yellow; his Metaesquemas; my version of his Metaesquemas; his Rio de Janeiro; my own body; and so on. I wanted to see where Hélio ended and I began, or like conversation, with one artist completing the other’s thought and sometimes talking over each other.