In the sculptures presented by Túlio Pinto the brutal H-shaped iron bars, with their tectonic geometries, here look like parts of railway lines. They are, in this sense, almost ready-mades: objects present in everyday life uprooted from their utilitarian context to take on new meaning in a work of art – and then, ultimately, suffering transformations of form. The arrangement of these elements mobilizes tension, the force required to pile them atop one another and the intelligence of counterbalancing their excessive weight within an organized equilibrium so that they stand without falling.

The genealogy is unmistakable here. We immediately think of Richard Serra’s beautiful house of cards made from thick sheets of steel (One Ton Prop: House of Cards, 1969), in their precarious equilibrium, consisting of extremely heavy parts that rely entirely on each other for support. Moreover, stepping back half a century, we recall Corner counter-relief (1914-15), by Vladimir Tátlin, with its pieces of iron tensioned with steel cables, building an environment where walls meet by way of a sculpture, which, in that moment, ceased to be merely an autonomous object. A sculpture-construction, breaking away from the paradigms of modeling and carving, opening up promising paths to the art that would be produced from the 20th century onwards.

We know that art which has origins in construction developed important and long-lasting roots in Brazil. If, at the end of the 1940s, critic Mário Pedrosa still saw the dispute between figurative art and the residue of national identity of our modernism as a difficult “battle for abstraction”, then ten years later, with the development of concretism and the inauguration of Brasília, leading rationalists, such as German semiologist Max Bense, considered Brazil the great heir of the Western Enlightenment, the Cartesian homeland par excellence.^[1] This idea, which today might seem like a bad joke, still provides clear evidence of the force of Brazil's constructive tradition, forged in the interaction between visual art, design, architecture and engineering. A tradition that had not faded away for Franz Weissmann and Amilcar de Castro’s generation, but which stretched productively through the subsequent decades in works such as those by Waltércio Caldas, in Rio de Janeiro, and those by José Resende, in São Paulo, for instance, and, surfacing more recently in, among others, works by Túlio Pinto in Porto Alegre in the 21st century.

So how does a young artist such as Túlio Pinto deal with all of the weight of this tradition? In opening the conversation, it seems to me that opting to work with heavy materials allegorizes this idea in a way. There literally is a “bar” to be picked up and passed on with difficulty. But, evidently, this “bar” does not come invested now with the exemplary morality of concrete and neo-concrete works. Since, when Amilcar de Castro cut and contorted two-inch thick sheets of steel, he was almost, decidedly and voluntarily, opening up space that needed to be won over: by the still incipient industrialization, by greater access to consumer goods, by greater rationality in social relationships. Today, however, more than half a century later, we see that constructivist world turned on its head. Since not only has the modern project appeared to have failed to construct an emancipated future, but Brazilian society itself, forged through the New Republic – whose symbolic mirage is still the architecture and urbanism of Brasília – is crumbling.

So, to my eye, there is the strength of these improbable encounters, in the works of Túlio Pinto in iron and glass, or the clear geometric forms and irregular organicism of fragile structures molded through the brute force of compression. Or, furthermore, between the weight of the iron bar, of industrial origin, and the mutant consistency of the glassy film, which, delicately blown in the hand of a skilled artisan, is sculpted into forms through the movement of masses of air. I say they have strength because these encounters, beyond their improbability, are aggressive. The first impression we have when we look at these sculptural works by Túlio Pinto is that these bubbles of glass will burst, since they apparently won’t resist in support of these brute masses. As such, there is a paradox, in the artist’s works there is a hint of a type of secular miracle, or, in truth, of a materialist explicitation: the volumes of glass are, yes, highly resistant, and even more so when their geometry is contorted, distancing them from the fragility of the planes of metal sheets. As such, while the iron bars create force as they are stacked up, the irregular bubbles of glass become deformed in order to support them. The conflict is resolved provisionally through accomodation.

            Túlio Pinto’s most recent works, presented in this exhibition, engage in a type of synthesis between two parallel paths which he had been developing in his career for more than a decade. One of these paths finds balance through the use of colored balloons, inflated both with breath and helium gas. I refer, for instance, to performative works, such as Unicorn (2015),^[2] a video in which the artist documents a walk through a rocky landscape in Arizona wearing the costume of a mythological animal and, carrying on his back, a web of oblong orange balloons – a color complementary to the blue of the sky – but also to installations, like Time – 31-day cycle (2010), in which a concrete block is balanced on a balloon full of air, gradually compressing it as the days go by. Here we have both the presence of a surrealist thread, in the first instance, and the incorporation of the slow passage of time in life seen in its transformation, the latter engaged in an open dialogue with Italian arte povera. The balloon, in its pop aspect, little by little deflating and giving way to the concrete block compressing it, is an intelligent comment on the relationship of opposition established between the mere physical presence of the inert block and the mutable fragility of the air blown into a latex balloon – a rubber object which, not by chance, carries with it the name of an organ in the human body.^[3]

The other aforementioned path is highly distinct from this, and refers to a more directly constructive paradigm, filtered through minimalism and North American post-minimalism. I think here of his family of sculptures made with stretched material, such as Diagonal (2011), and also those made of distinct materials and volumes that interpenetrate in relationships of weight and counterweight creating unstable balance. I refer, for instance, to works in the Compensation (2013) series in which hollow cubes of steel, leaning on thin edges, are intersected by sheets of glass, helping to provide overall equilibrium in the piece. And also the works in which inclined sheets of glass find balance by means of lines that double back through the space, achieved with metal bars (Rectangle #2 and Rectangle #3, from 2018), or ropes attached to rocks that function as ballast (as in the Nadir series). In one of the pieces from this series, entitled Nadir #8 (2014), an open iron staircase rises diagonally into nothingness, sustained in counterbalance by a rope that connects to a sheet of glass inclined in the opposite direction and held at both ends by stones that float close to the floor. Here, Túlio Pinto blends something of Fred Sandback’s constructivist and surrealist lightness with the empty anodyne volumes of Sol LeWitt, forging his own path between abstraction and figuration, pendulating in the air as if it were a seesaw of stones. These are sculptures that realize, as the artist himself puts it, a type of “performance of the materials”.^[4]

As one can see, the artist’s more recent works presented here, filter elements present in both of these aspects of his previous work, creating a new synthesis. Now, the dynamic tension manifested in the form of ropes and stones has been transferred to critical points represented by the connections between the iron bars created by the bubbles of glass, which in turn substitute, in an altered register, the balloons. In physical terms, these connections have now become more rigid and static, freezing the time of deformation into one given instant. From a formal perspective, however, these squashed bubbles, seemingly squeezed by the iron supports, look like oozing jellies, giving us the impression of a process that is still in motion. This also manages to be a sort of ironic (and a little expressionistic) dramatization of processes that were once purely physical, since the solidified glass, unlike the balloons, cannot go on deforming without breaking.^[5]

In the history of architecture, junctions and joints are fundamental elements, where, with good reason, a great deal of expressive attention has been focused. Let us think, for example, of the capital: the crown of columns that serves to widen the meeting point between columns in contact with critical points of the structure that are subjected to more intense strain and the beam that supports the roof. Such elements, which could just as easily have been exclusively technical, were transformed in the hands of the Greeks into stones adorned with leaves or curves, according to the aesthetic mode chosen (Doric, Ionic or Corinthian, for example). In modern and contemporary times, these bonds have often been replaced with dynamic parts, such as steel rollers, neoprene gaskets and elastomers.

When he constructs joints in glass to articulate his metal bars, Túlio Pinto develops a sculptural dialogue with the history of construction. Yet he substitutes the demarcation of joints – something so deeply codified in the wake of Greco-Roman architecture – for transparent parts, as if subtracting the material (at least visually) at these crucial points in the structure, thus making the arrangement both light and intriguing. That is to say: precisely there, at these junctions, in the knots of greatest structural tension, a sort of void appears, a negative space, reinforcing the sense of paradox referred to previously, and one that we might associate with the aesthetic concept of “grace”.  I think here of Simone Weil’s spiritualist reflections, when she observes that “grace” constitutes the only exception to a direct and logical correspondence between “the soul’s natural movements”, that elevate us, and the “laws of material gravity”, drawing us to the ground. As such, Weil ponders, it is clear that “Gravity makes things come down, wings make them rise”. However, when considering art’s role here, she poses a stimulating question: “what wings raised to the second power can make things come down without weight?”^[6]

            Very recently, at the 13th edition of the Mercosul Biennial, which opened in September of 2022 in Porto Alegre, the artist created a large-scale urban intervention entitled Batimento. Making use of a number of buildings in the center of Porto Alegre as if they were anchors for a great urban mooring, he unifies them with long strips of orange fabric that stretch for almost one kilometer, creating oneiric vectors in the air that seem to activate the cityscape like an immense drawing. Once again working with ballast and tension – as if giantizing his pieces of concrete and stretched fabric – he structures the urban landscape of Rio Grande do Sul’s capital by means of a new visual code, one that ultimately appears to bring sense and unity to what might otherwise have been seen as simply an amorphous array of buildings, of varying heights and colors and with absolutely no order.

Yet again, the work of Túlio Pinto leads us to paradoxical thoughts. In this case, although we know that these buildings are the solid ballast anchoring these light lines of light in space, we feel that the city, bereft of these energizing vectors, is so unstructured, that, by some absurd twist, there lurks a certain fear these buildings will fall when Túlio Pinto’s work is taken down and these strips of material (the dynamic bonds between them) are removed. Since, in this artistic work, they are the true ballasts.

^[1] See Max Bense, Inteligência brasileira: uma reflexão cartesiana. São Paulo: Cosac Naify, 2009. (Brasilianische Intelligenz. Wiesbaden, Limes, 1965.)

^[2] Available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rADnp5hfLOk Accessed 20 Sept. 2022.

^[3] The word bexiga in Portuguese can refer both to a balloon and to a bladder.

^[4] From an interview with the author on the 12th of September, 2022.

^[5] In fact, glass is an amorphous solid given that its molecular structure does not have a fixed symmetrical pattern, as opposed to the structure of crystalline solids.

^[6] See https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/simone-weil-gravity-and-grace. Accessed 22 Sept. 2022.