When my generation arrived, Dudi was already there. In the taste for doing, in a certain love of confusion and loss of direction, in the little hierarchical admiration for almost everything that came before, in the inevitable development of work in independent series. Even more than that – in a physical, mysterious quality that only the accumulation of minutes, the time deposited on a work or a set of them, could exhibit. Because there is a self-sufficiency that this doing and delay offer, and that ends up prevailing over the project. What is very intense in Dudi’s trajectory is precisely this self-sufficiency, this walking sideways, around the edges, visiting the anxiety of his time with an even greater anxiety, but inwardly, a modest and reclusive one.
This does not move away an inverse capacity to respond to the propositions of the world, a huge yes to the one who knocks on the door, in an isolation that all the time (and even now) has allowed itself to be caught. For this to work, perhaps the most important thing is an acute awareness of one’s size and position – of one’s address. Anyone who has visited the Maia Rosas’ home in Santo Amaro neighborhood in São Paulo could soon realize that. It is difficult to imagine the work being done from elsewhere. That is where it has lasted and lasted, and as long as it happens, well, there is not much to complain about. You can request whatever you want from me – I have time. The time my work has given me.
Of course, this path has been designed on sets of independent works, with great stylistic diversity, which were made out there, in the world. Perhaps the most famous is the group of paintings (or non-paintings) on fiberglass. Executed from behind, fast in their making process, they seem to be, in fact, the reverse of the rather endless duration of oil painting, which serves as a counter-model. Even here (although the brevity of the making of each work may confuse my argument), I think there is a labyrinthine response – in this case, to the expressive demands of the 80s and 90s. In the face of them, Dudi struggled to become progressively superficial. The epidermal glee of so many of these works has come from the inverted response to the zeitgeist that surrounded him. They are, in some way, à rebours replicas of the mighty expressive river that knocked at his door. This is how it functions – each work (the recent watercolors, for instance) offers a unique place, folded on itself, but also linked, connected, responsive to whatever happens out there, in an interior time that never loses its chronology.
In fact, a long time went by between the first Lego that Dudi produced and this set that has appeared now. Unpretentious, casual, for me they are little masterpieces, ambitious in their deep and private childhood. The constructive grid, the Broadway Boogie-Woogie in the background, with its brick-brush strokes, seems to have walked through the door and gone out into the world. But not as applied art, but in a place where it has lasted and lasted, made and remade, assembled and disassembled. As with all play, the main prayer here is, Shall we do it again? This again, this inexplicable Freudian drive that all play somehow has appeased and de-pathologized, is the root of the lightness, glee and potency of this set.
Because, without loss to the precision and wealth of each work, they seem ready to be dismantled and started all over again – after all, they are Legos. The time of doing and making, which I mentioned at the beginning, here has turned into the promise of a new assembling, as if the work was now playing with its own duration. The irony is that Dudi has done it in the face of the linguistic core of modernity (Mondrian, Van Doesburg, Russian constructivism). This memory is, so to speak, the in earnest capital, on which this game is fed. The result is a kind of constitutive fragility that they seem to emanate – are they orthogonal? Can they be crooked? Are they ready? Are they really toys? Shall we put them on the floor? Better not? On the wall?
There is real color in them, there is real modulation, but all in a kind of replica, of the second round, and here we find a stylistic feature that is central to the whole work. For this secondary potency, somehow miniaturized, is the deep secret of so many things that Dudi has produced. Note that the industrial world of these Legos (this super-hyper Danish toy-multinational, comparable only to some Disney Characters or the Teddy Bear) has been discreetly remade. Dudi has repainted bricks, glued adhesive tape on them, and even cast into fiberglass with perfection some elements he needed. There is, therefore, a certain personal patina of making that does not erase the neutral, phantasmatic, industrial element by confronting it, but rather reacts subtly to it, modulating it to some extent. A bit like Robinson Crusoe, he has been reinventing on his island.
These in earnest toys, these mixes of Mondrian and Willys de Castro, this homo ludens, this bite that is not bitten, this knowing that it is not for real, but rather being this confusion without confusing, this paradox of Epimenides, this country of Cretans , this whatever, this how nice time has gone by, this constructive refuse, this make it yourself, this every man is an artist, this everyone can make it alone, this children’s party favor, this domain of all the elements of language, this proportion between what they request of me and what I can deliver, this geometric place where being young and old, being huge and small, all coincide – these are the issues of these works, poking at each other in front of us.
At a time when the country seems to have lost all capacity for proportion, relation or rule of three, in a progressive madness that has affected the proper measurement – of values, alliances, symbols, language –, pay attention to these works. A fragile order emanates from them, a desire to assemble the pieces again, and once again. From his corner of the world, from his small castle in Santo Amaro neighbourhood, this is Dudi’s response to our nightmare.
If one day this is all gone, but the land remains so devastated that we may recognize nothing else, perhaps we shall start with them.
