ALEJANDRA VON HARTZ GALLERY 2630 NW 2 nd. Ave., Miami, Fl USA alejandravonhartz.net

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1 ALEJANDRA VON HARTZ GALLERY 2630 NW 2 nd. Ave., Miami, Fl USA alejandravonhartz.net info@alejandravonhartz.net ARTUR LESCHER Lagoas, Granite. Edition of 5. Granite, 44 x 26 in (112 x 66 cm) ea. The São Paulo artist stands out in the current panorama of contemporary Brazilian art for his three dimensional works. These transcend the characteristics of sculpture, mixing the languages of the installation and the object to modify the understanding of these and the space that surrounds them. Constructivism and Suprematism (Malevich, Tatlin...) are important references in Lecher s work, as well as Brazilian Neo Concrete artists (Sergio Camargo, Willis de Castro, Mira Schendel, Helio Oiticica...) whose work proposes a new approach towards the object and its relationship to the viewer and space.

2 Aerolitos, Sao Paulo Biennial, Brasil. Installation View. Aluminum and helium gas, variable dimensions. Indoor landscape, th Sao Paulo Biennial, Brasil. Wood and parquet, vinyl and water.

3 O rio, Monotipia of off set and wood. Unique edition. Variable dimensions. Eliptica, Installation View. Galeria Nara Roesler, Brasil.

4 Elipses, Museo de Arte Latinoamericano (MALBA), Buenos Aires, Argentina. Polyester Resin and automotive paint, 67 x 118 in (170 x 300cm). Installation View. Inquietude Agnaldo Farias 2006 Certain sculptures seem to be permanently bathed in silence. Such as the referential works by Constantin Brancusi, Alberto Giacometti and Henry Moore, as well as the white marble sculptures by Sergio de Camargo or the crinkled figures by Maria Martins. One could say they belong to another world. When placed in any environment, but particularly in one of these museological architectures created by the moderns, whose lack of furniture, white walls and controlled illumination are fallaciously defended as a guarantee of neutrality, even there, although they are splendorous, they are so solitarily, without establishing relationships to these spaces. Even when made in monumental scale, installed in public spaces, squares and patios in corporate buildings or in buildings with government or palatial attributions, such as those in Brasilia, they are still aloof, irreducibly mute, as if concealing the keys to their enigmas. We walk about them appreciating their details form and matter, process and finish, until we recognize the subject matter they deal with: an oval head a sign of purity of a woman at rest; an impossibly long and squalid man, whose corroded gaze looks into the void; a section of a cylinder that has had its integrity apparently broken by a diagonal fissure; but even then, with magnetized eyes, we still perceive them as being distant from us, even if they are just there. Large or small, they open clearings of silence. Pushing us away so as to make them fit into our field of vision or, on the contrary, making us come close to them, forcing us to curve our bodies, to approach our gaze in order to persecute their most hidden peculiarities, it does not matter: indifferent to our pleas, they maintain themselves as quiet and aliens things. It will not be necessary at this point to allude to the large number of artists that turned against the notion of sculpture producing works that do not even fit into this conception. Retractable works, which dilated or shrank to the point of creating obstacles, confusing or disappearing in the environment that was defined to house them. Works that have abandoned the pedestal with the intention of reducing their distance to the spectator: that demanded an active behavior from the spectator in order to begin existing. Sculpture? No, definitely the term shows itself incapable of naming a large part of the work of contemporary artists, an immense ensemble that encompasses people such as Richard Long and Robert Gober and, in the Brazilian case, comprises from Willys de Castro to, among so many others, Daniel Acosta, Marepe and Arthur Lescher. Speculating initially about the volumetrics and the structure of architectural constructions besides machines and apparatuses produced by engineering bridges, airplanes, zeppelins,, Arthur Lescher maintained this interest at the same time in which he opened new perspectives for himself, methodically studying the intricate aspects related to the physical chemical behavior of materials seen in isolation or related to other materials. It must be highlighted that material is the same as matter transformed and molded into a determined form and that the structure of an architectural volume or of a machine is an ordered set of relationships established between materials with distinct

5 characteristics; an amalgam of times, dynamics, and concepts that are different from each other. Concerned with the material, when Lescher incorporates and thinks of wood, it is not because of itself but, for example, transformed into a large elliptical plane (a shape that can be obtained it worth remembering among other possibilities, by making a diagonal cut into a cone or a cylinder), or in the shape of a pendulum suspended by an steel cable and whose sharp end wounds the superficial tension of a sheet of olive oil confined in a shallow indent dug into the upper side of a cube that is also made of wood. The artist thinks of the material as resolved into a simple geometric figure or as an element that is component of a more complex structure, a molecule that, with its characteristics, chains itself to materials with equally differentiated behaviors. The artist explores pure geometrical figures that are isolated or combined a point, a line, a circle, an ellipse, a cone, a cylinder, a pyramid, etc. at the same in which he would invent and research materials: iron, aluminum, zinc, stainless steel, wood, porcelain, copper, porcelain, copper, plastic, olive oil and salt, which have been used until now in their liquid and disaggregated states, Lescher makes an effort in reflecting on what happens with geometry at the moment in which it abandons the ideal plan in order to embody and give form to materials that, as such, for as much as they appear to have been appeased by the annihilating treatment of industrial processes, are corruptible, are subject to the action of time, are sensible to the action that things, including the atmosphere and its erosive power, perpetually exert over each other. The artist, then, is not particularly interested in the cube but rather by the concreteness that it can take on. In this sense, the cube constructed from a thick metallic weave cut into a square section; a kind of drawing that combines what is full with what is empty, that emphatically projects itself out the wall that supports it or that pours itself entangled over it like a shadow with sharp edges. To the artist it also interesting how this same cube, in a version that is fulfilled entirely by the exalted blue of copper salt, modifies itself: because the contact between both materials provokes a cold electrolysis, without electricity, which in practice consists in the salt releasing the copper that migrates over to the iron until it is entirely covered, in an inverse process of erosion. In parallel, the same salt, because of its hygroscopic nature, tied to the humidity of the environment in which the piece is placed, retains more or less water, which makes its blue s brightness increase or decrease. As can be seen, in the same way that the artist deals with a pure form in order to verify its transformation and behavior through the matter of which it is constituted, he can connect it to another and yet another, checking, evaluating, constructing a system founded on the mutual propping up, a restraint that can sometimes approach the instability of a castle made of cards. 0 x 0, a piece made in 2000, consists in a large wooden axis (4 meters) in a square section (20 x 20 cm) placed on one side in the center of a section of a cone that has a diameter of 60 cm and supported on the other end by a small polished, metallic cylinder, with a diameter of about 5 cm and 20 cm long. Aligned with the edge of the wooden beam, supporting a large part of its weight, the spectator s gaze is simultaneously attracted by the possibility that the metal might roll underneath the beam, making it fall to the ground and by the cone that threatens to spin around the room around this center marked by instability. The coming and going of the gaze between the exterior limit and the end that is close to the ground, which finally reveals itself as its virtual center, ends up revealing that the cone beam ensemble makes up a long and sharp cone, made partly by wood and partly by air. Arthur Lescher s contribution resides in the inquietude of his pieces, in how they suggest that an action, discreet and slow or violent and sudden, has just happened, or is in just happening, although unnoticeably, or is about to happen. His pieces, contradicting their exact and clean appearances, transmit a sense of inquietude, as if we, the spectators, were in the imminence of watching the irruption of something, from a subtle pulse to a dislocation in space, which could transform into violence, into the clashing of materials, in the deformation of a body, the traces of an action that is already finished. This inquietude changes tones when its pieces, instead of being closed into themselves as in the quality of a field taken by tensions, pose a problem to the space in which they are installed; they open pores and fissures in a world that we thought cohesive, gently static. The black 2 m tall needle made of plastic resin attached to the wall or the 2 meters and a half wooden version, tied to the ceiling and to the floor, are pieces that belong to this order. Are they sculptures or fissures opened into space? Both progress from a point to a segment of a line that swells until it roams to the second point that serves as an extremity. If the wooden needle brings in its shiny skin the veins of the original tree, the murmur of the time in which it flourished and grew, if it carries the pulse that reverberates in the fissure that today tears the environment from the top to the ground, as if absorbing it, the brilliance of the second needle s black skin is a fissure opened on the wall, a line that annunciates the existence of the other side. The reversibility between the inside and the outside, said in another way, the permeability of the space, the acknowledgment that every space is a porous dimension, is a concern that punctuates the artist s career since the beginning, since his first work, which earned him an invitation to, at a very young age, participate in the Brazilian representation at the 17th São Paulo Biennale in Aerólito [Aerolite] was a piece composed by two identical modules. Two balloons, 11 meter long with a three meter diameter, similar to the zeppelins that today navigate silently and slowly through the city skies. One of them, made of aluminum and iron, was suspended from the ceiling, between 2 and 3 meters from the glass wall at its side. On the outside, placed symmetrically, floating, affixed to the floor, was its simile in canvas and helium. Weight and lightness, open and closed, concrete box and sky, the immense volume of glass and concrete would momentarily anchor itself to the light volume that touched its transparent face. Common sense has not yet realized that space is what results from the walls that serve as limits and not the walls in themselves. Even worst, it fails to realize that anything that inhabits it, starting with light, the most immaterial of presences, ends up altering completely the experience that can be taken from it. In this sense, a simple room, it is worth saying, the air block packed by the white of the walls and ceiling and the gray of the floor, elements that normally make up the architecture, is a territory with infinite possibilities. Darken it completely for its contours to dissolve and its body to face an unimaginable and anguishing extension. Each color applied, the subtle variation in a wall s texture, are properly recorded by the body, in the same way a curtain dances diaphanously celebrating the entrance of wind when a window is opened, the dry sound of a door that is slammed, the creaking of a coarse drawer. Ah! furniture. In her short story Amor [Love], Clarice Lispector tells us of Ana, this palindromic name, and her ambiguous relationships to furniture that, at the end of the afternoon, when the shadows become longer, turn threateningly against her but that early in the morning return from darkness slightly dusty, as if regretful. Empty a room and leave only a chair inside it, it will attract your eyes and invite you to sit down. Anything affects the construction of this malleable dimension that we call space.

6 For Lescher, space and materials, with engraved weight and elegant forms, are palindromes. That is the reason why the fissures, the quadrilateral wooden floor, such as he presented at the 25th São Paulo Biennale, held in 2002, can be an unstable plane, oscillating like a ship that sails on dry and, even if it does not leave its place, by the monumental space of the second floor of the pavilion projected by Oscar Niemeyer. In door landscape is the title of this work composed of two modules, of which the second is a mattress of plastic and water, a malleable, transparent floor, making muted sounds, on which people delighted in stepping on, away from the eyes of the security guards. A bundle with long metallic and black beams erupts from the wall close to the ground and, because of their own weight, they hang and clash into each other according to the air s whim and to the steps of visitors, who, carelessly, do not trip over them rarely. Elípticas [Elliptical] an installation in which ellipses rest placidly, cross space vertiginously in unpredictable trajectories, stick into the walls with their sharp edges, making us alert, waiting for an imminent attack, under the suspicion that a mere gush of wind that strokes our neck is the vacuum left by a fast object, so quick that, because we have not seen it, we decide, imprudently, that it does not exist and that therefore we are under no risks. Artur Lescher s Machine River Paula Braga 2008 Untitled, Nylon and steel cable, 78 ¾ x 4 ¾ in (200 X 12 cm). Edition of 5.

7 Machine River is an impressive engine like installation that triggers philosophical issues regarding time and matter. The piece is made of a stainless steel mesh that flows down across the floor, streaming through steel cylinders. The flux of this machine river is frozen, it remains still. However, as one passes, as one moves, the mesh causes the optical impression of movement. Is it really moving? The interaction between the work and the viewer bestows a quasi body status to Machine River, a state some Brazilian artists from the late fifties strived to confer to materials. Lygia Clark once said about her most famous sculptural work, Bichos (Animals): When someone asks me how many movements a Bicho can perform, I answer: I don t know, you don t know, but it knows [..] It s a living organism, an essentially active work Artur Lescher reactivates the neoconcrete faith in the expressiveness of materials. He does not submit materials to efforts unsuited to their natures but rather plays with their dimensions time included to expand our knowledge about them: paper becomes fluid, stone is transfigured into a lake, and a stationary heavy mesh of steel flows in graceful movement. His works suggest that under the proper conditions, matter assumes unsuspected new qualities. The special conditions that will release the movement of the steel or the humidity of glass are achieved through the form Lescher gives to the materials: a body ready to interact with other bodies. The interaction alters time, allowing for the animation of matter in unusual ways. Lescher, in fact, works closely to the idea of animation: he associates a character to each kind of material, trying to understand the will of iron, the humor of wood or the way copper interacts with other characters placed in the landscapes he builds. Stone may have will, he says after Nietzsche, but in a time, for a duration we can hardly perceive. Machine River is part of the artist s investigations into fluidity. In Waterfall, from 2006, aluminum plates pour from the wall. River, from 2006, touches the point between object and body. In fact, its organization, like in Machine River, suggests a cycle, possibly going from the object to the body. Like the water from the river that evaporates only to become rain and river again, Machine River suspends steel, elevating it to a status of animated matter through a phenomenological process. A glimpse. Then the cycle closes, it s once again steel to our perception. And we return to bewilderment. Untitled #2, 2008 From Metamericos Series. Wood and metal Inseto, Cupper and wood, x 7.87 x 3.15 in (186 x 20 x 8cm ) Edition of 5 + 1AP. 9 segments of variable dimensions Edition of 5.

8 Metamericos, Galeria Paulo Darze, Salvador, Brasil. Installation View.

9 Artur Lescher s silenced music Adolfo Montejo Navas 2009 In the expanded field of 20th century sculpture, every step is still a challenge, a recovery of a territory, an aesthetical declination of its cultural and linguistic controversy. Other less historical registers and supports don t (yet) have so much of this difficulty because they lack such restless temporal memory and a similar universalizing symbolization. For this reason, Artur Lescher s works call for a special attention. The works carry a retrospective and prospective visuality of sculpture in its quantum leap, of certain memory of language, shapes and operations. At the same time, they carry a latter lenience toward the transition of our regard to an aesthetical experience that goes beyond the knowledge of modern and contemporary sculptural roots (whether neo concrete or post minimalist), subtly metamorphosed by the artist. The strategic nuances employed in building images, as a rigorous and ascetic research, are not aimed toward the rhetorical environs of contemporary mannerism. On the contrary, the produced cautious advancements synthesis shapes as precision tools or poetical machines, secretive steps before an abyss that is always in front of our eyes as part of the landscape. Not in vain, the reached imagetic construction rests not in these strict findings of language. Not carrying the almost sociological or informative contamination of other artistic proposals of our time, Artur Lescher s poetics holds, never in an explicit way, a particular reading of the world, glimpsed through his materials, structures and procedures. The configuration of his sculptures in a regime of installation keeps a strict dialogue with the space and the architecture. This means that a good deal of this last production has been claiming for a greater symbiosis between language and world, always in perspective, never transparent or correlated, as is the precise case of the binomial culture nature, one of our most constitutive and conflictive polarities. Something already present in his previous exhibition, Minimum Landscape (2006), and already outlined in Indoor Landscape (25th São Paulo Biennial, 2002). Thus starts another semantic connotation in the artist s work, one less focused on objectivity, more transversal, and that transfigures his perception, that balances his adjusted presentation with a less pure, more porose imagetic backdrop. In this way, the indicial side of the works establishes a greater connection between materiality and imagetics being more unusual in the realm of the titles, which the artist himself recognizes: I m interested by the displacement of geometry toward the organic.* Precisely, the new pieces align the imaginary representation of distance with natural elements: offering more derivate concepts, such as fluidity, potency, movement and suspension, than a given visuality. The large size work shown at Anita Schwartz gallery, Machine River (2009) and the almost mobile pieces of Metamerics (2009) or Waterfall (2006) relate an extremely elliptic presence of nature not at all analogical or mimetic and never definitive. On the other hand, the contamination of nature is present in its thinking substrate. Here, the register of a frequency: Lygia Clark s folding sculptures are called

10 Animals and, coincidently, base their movement on rotating planar joints, in the same way that Metamerics is a geometry of arthropods, a family of arachnids, crustaceans and insects, whose formal economy synthesizes skeleton and extremities. In the rigor of such dreaming geometry an indissoluble syntony between matters, shapes, procedures and spaces is depurated: a firm articulation that wishes to be symbiotic. In this way, the pieces offer an intensive spatial and physical architectural reading, which is also reflective, since physicality is never absolute because it knows how to keep a margin of autonomy, besides the physical space, suspended as a conquered abstraction. It should not be forgotten, then, that the works are held at high stake, each one in its own space, activated by our accomplice passage and perception. The several and punctual sculptural apparitions of the exhibition Machine River are part of a discourse that punctuates space and any space in favor of itself: stairways, corners, sidewalls, ceiling, elevator, yard. Such spatial appropriation and architectural knowledge a trademark of the artist produce as well an extraordinary synchrony between the ponti luminossi of the space and the pieces (as musical instrument pieces of a score space). In such way that there are many algid accents in the works placed on the stairways, of different natures and discourses, but with the same precedence and precision. As pieces that reached their places: Waterfall (2006), the cone of Untitled (2008) or the versatility of Metamerics. In its turn, Sea Water Mattress (2008) practices a peculiar sculptural situation when it converts itself in the negative of the volume, and the density of the empty inside of a closed container, as its implausible mirrored double. The canonical characteristics of volume, weight, matter, scale are crossed by contingencies of another order, of an appropriated and created space, always based on sculptural modulations. Machine pieces that seem to invent their independent visual and semantic functioning: a whole particular perceptive system to be contemplated. Actually, a great deal of Artur Lescher s works practices a silenced, silent music as Abraham Palatnik or Waltercio Caldas also do, in their own way. In Lescher s case, silence is interpreted, built, scored through modulated works, with diverse segments and interpretations. The consequent formal relations produce their own sounding thought, this almost audible imagining quality (noise, sound, silence as a quintessenced vibration in a modulated visual sequence). This formal and spatial versatility is part of the semantic and instrumental sophistication of the artist s poetics, of his score of images: of certain suspended air of his works, even they are overwhelming heavy or of high presence. Lightness and opacity that, together, allow embracing the double condition of the material and the immaterial, presence and air. The skin of metallic mesh, the moiré of Machine River, its pulleys, heights and weights, show themselves as a chimerical gear, rigorously well drawn and finalized as all works by the artist, exact in their iconographic result, that turns an immateriality or an abstract fluency of things circular and, in its way, a certain irony about positivist and rationalistic beliefs. Machine River presents itself, with its neo constructive and post industrial air, as a totemic image that keeps its last secret, even when we can hear something. Perhaps its noise of silent machine, able of free imagetic resonances, or its visual potency, that, as a silent engine, is at the verge of being activated and functioning inside our minds. The plot of this categorical piece as civil construction gains an unexpected extension, conceptualized in situ, in the midst of the assemblage: a small devised video in the very use of the elevator, fruit of the visual effects produced by the movement, and the metallic mesh of one of the background walls: Elevator (2009). The unexpected work is a small visual summit, of less than a minute, the optical reticulated effect suffers an almost expressionist animation, but also a glossy kinetics, which is reunited with the metallic mesh of Machine River and, by association, with the inner system of the piece s pulleys, cylinders, weights/counter weights, as also demanded by any elevator. The exhibition title alludes to such elements of nature mechanics, but Machine River also is an obscure machinery, it houses a series of works that take on a persistent condition of visual questionings in the so called age of doubt. The artist feeds such reading as a threshold: I recognize certain seduction associated to a danger. A beauty like the one at the beginning of a tempest.* The abyss announced in these first lines is a heavy inheritance put in dialogue. And the speculative constructive regard and the intuitive hearing of vibration frequencies are the two operative confessional axles of the artist, presented to the visitor for a new aesthetical approximation. It s not a coincidence if Artur Lescher s poetics keeps an ironical stance toward the post industrial manufacture, and even toward the seductive visuality that emanates from design, because in his work such functionality is a point, it doesn t work as an applied aesthetics: its final destiny is always another. The suspended gravity of such lean work triggers a gravitation of spatial sensations, a fluctuation of perceptive and conceptual vibrations: the counterpoints of river and machine, water and mechanics, stable and unstable, sequence and interval, movement and immobility. And, above all, an aesthetical meditation about the material support and the balance between that which is seen and that which comes from intuition. The last trap of these sculptures is, therefore, their paradoxical form/nature: retained appearance, resting, but vibrant. The throbbing state that doesn t aim to be definitive, neither for themselves nor for us. *E mail from the artist to the author, 08/15/2009

11 Cachoeira, Aluminum. Variable dimensions

12 Rio Maquina, Stainless steel, 165 x 268 x 96 in (420 x 680 x 243cm). Liquid Metal Paulo Venancio Filho 2010 A fluid, imponderable ridigity dominates the space with the magnificence of the natural phenomenon itself in order to compete with nature, scale is essential. But that which is mobile and time determinant, where things are never what they once were, is also immobile a locked machine, reduced to the expectation of action, held in suspense, waiting to be started up and placed in motion. Artur Lescher s sculptures have always sought spatial, border situations where they intend to be just subtle interventions in space. His preference is for one piece objects; he likes to subject them to the force of gravity by suspending them, to make clear not only their weight but also their limits. And it is at those limits, at the fine, pointed edges that he strives to cause a degree of unforeseen and unusual tension: attaining balance always through the most unlikely point, even at the smallest point possible. The fact that the objects are almost always made of wood or metal is already indicative of a kind of choice: either natural material, or machine material. Between nature and culture, in the

13 transfiguration of one into the other, lies this work: Machine River. Indeed, if machine implies motion, then rivers are surely among the greatest machines of nature. Nature hides its mechanism and its components: a river is indivisible, unique, seamless. Rivers are also somewhat hypnotic, compelling one into a state of contemplation, to resign oneself to that which simply passes by passes by and never returns. A river can absorb us for hours, it is the place where one perceives the passing of time, the perfect interaction between matter, space and time. Every work of art aspires to command such power, to lead one into complete and total absorption. While the monumental size seeks to embody the natural phenomenon, the moiré effect of the wire mesh reflects the ripples of the water. We could say that the minimal degree of ascesis here is not entirely accounted for in the industrial appearance, and the suggestions of nature also reflect another physical, natural, and even metaphorical, presence, and that, between you and me, is not exclusive to Artur Lescher s work. All that is sensitive, of nature and of culture, can also be manipulated in the vast domain of abstraction. The rigid but flexible wire mesh, with joints few and far between, resembles a continuous, uniform and seamless conveyor belt, which once in motion will remain so forever. In a way, the mesh represents a continuation of the drawings in space that Lescher had been producing. Drawings that were sculptures that could be folded and form a linear sequence of joints. As if the joints sought to make up for the rigidity of the materials (metal or wood) and transformed them into lines that could be folded, shaped and potentially manipulated. The balance of the plates by their edges, at the point of smallest contact, the risky stability and repose of the pointed objects while suspended or scarcely touching the ground by the point of a needle, demonstrate a process in which the sculpture wants to contradict or suspend its properties of weight, stability, self sustainment etc. while not abdicating from its weight, stability, self sustainment etc., which often leads one to think that that the sculpture is upside down. As far as I know, never has a Lescher sculpture attained the dimensions of Machine River. Lescher calls Machine River a drawing. If so, it must be the heaviest drawing in the world. And never before in his work has the suggestion of mobility been associated to such a heavy structure. Doubtless these two facts are related. By its appearance, Machine River is as fascinating as it is frightening, one is not entirely sure what forces it may produce. Before our own eyes everything seems to move on the glittering, metallic surface, and at the same time we feel its powerful, crushing presence. Two dimensions, nature and culture, that seem to have reached the limit. If so, then this is a faithful portrait of the world: increasingly more mobile and also increasingly more immobile. Rio Maquina, Stainless steel, 165 x 268 x 96 in (420 x 680 x 243cm).

14 The meaningful geometry Cecilia Fajardo Hill 2010 Minimum Landscapes, The exhibition by Sao Paulo artist Artur Lescher, at Alejandra von Hartz Gallery, is the first solo show by the artist in the USA. It proposes some new ideas while at the same time summarizing some of Lescher s constants: the research into materials and the multiple and challenging use of materials; the dialogue between the works in a single space almost invariably treated as installation even though dealing primarily with single objects; the investigation of and dialogue with architectural space often transgressing it; the creation of contradictions and oppositions between physical qualities and characteristics scale, shapes, materials, conditions (such as function versus abstraction; monumental versus intimate; highly polished versus rough, etc.); the use of design; and the pushing of limits and creation of special dynamics of tension and balance. Lescher emerged on the Brazilian art scene in the mid 1980s, particularly with Aerolitos, two surprising and utopian monumental zeppelins for the XIX Sao Paulo Biennale in 1987 and his monumental architectural installation at the Museum of Modern Art in Sao Paulo, These early works point to his production to come and to some of the unique and strong characteristics of his oeuvre. Primarily, they disclose the utopian and investigative nature of Lescher s work, an art where objects conceptually and formally coexist in a dialogical space not so much of contradiction and opposition but of tension and extension. Often in Lescher s work there is an interesting interplay between domestic objects or referents such as shovels, houses, furniture, zeppelin, etc., which are then deconstructed towards a sense of abstraction, contradiction or neutralization of the promised or suggested functionality of the form. For example, the installation of 1989 recognizably alluded to a house, a bridge, structures, architectural volumes; nevertheless the functionality of the installation as inhabitable and meaningful architecture was denied. The installation existed as the representation and simultaneously the deconstruction of an architectural structure and concept and this Lescher continues to explore in his later work. He is not interested in narrative and/or figuration; therefore this work is an indirect exercise in abstraction. It draws the viewer into a recognizable arena, to then experience an unknown space, beautiful but charged with tension and contradiction. Lescher trained with Carlos Fajardo, and belongs to the generation of Ernesto Neto, Edgar de Souza, Ana Tavares, among others. Lescher studied the works of Neo concrete artists such as Lygia Clark, Lygia Pape and Helio Oiticica and observed the ways in which their work evolved towards performance and working with the body. He was also interested in artists such as Kosuth, and philosophers such as Merleau Ponty and Bergson. Of special interest to him was Minimalism. Lescher describes how in his work he has made an effort to reconcile his formal grammar learned with Fajardo, and the search for a personal poetics. As for Lescher s particular exercise in abstraction, its forms and materials have a special resonance within human existence and the natural world. His geometry could be described as meaningful geometry, a geometry that is connected to the world. It is inevitable to relate his abstraction to the Neo concrete tradition, because the Neo concrete particular abstract geometry was not conceived as pure abstraction but as an exercise that was part of a complex reality that made it unique. For example, his important Elipses, exhibited in 2001 in the Nara Roesler Gallery, originate in the shape of the cone as the internal structure that allows the projection of light to the eye. The cone is the link between the geometric form and the gaze of the viewer. The Elipses are the result of cutting the cone. These sculptures were installed themselves cutting into the floor of the gallery, on the one hand perfect, smooth, volumetric, wholesome, and on the other hand sharp, thin, tense, precarious and in menacing balance. Lescher is particularly interested in proposing an archaeology of signifiers, for the spectator to reconstruct and reinterpret meanings from fragments and combinations that are somehow recognizable. For example, the installation In Door Landscape, for the 25th Sao Paulo Biennale 2002, was constituted by two large and interactive unstable structures; one rocking platform made of wood alluding to a boat, and the other, an enormous plastic container filled with water alluding to the sea. But a sea trapped in a transparent plastic geometric volume, and placed in a building is not the sea, the same way that the platform cannot be a boat. Real allusions are presented and simultaneously negated. Reality and fiction coexist in a tense interplay. A new strategy is proposed in Minimum Landscapes at the Alejandra Von Hartz Gallery. Whereas in the 1980s and 90s Lescher employed recognizable forms to create abstractions; in the recent work, the artist exhibits works which are totally abstract but that allude metonymically to the real world. In this case, they allude to lakes, columns, comets, rivers, and so forth. The title of the show refers directly to an idea of landscape which contradictorily is associated to minimalism, synthesis, rigueur. For example The River, 2006, represents an idea of a river. It is a monotype of hundreds of meters of offset paper and wood which unites a series of characteristics of a river: circularity, extension, fluidity, etc. Lakes, 2006 is a diptych of two pools of black granite which hover delicately over the floor. Linha d Agua (Water Line), 2005, returns to the elliptical shape, in this case cutting into the wall only one third outside the wall and referring to the water line in boats. Here color is employed to mark a frontier, in contrast with wood. A central component in Lescher s work is architecture, both as syntax and as context. The tension found in the large scale works described above becomes much more subtle though still equally strong in this show. White column Untitled, 2007 produces an unexpected sense of vertigo or unbalance, because of the tension created between the form almost needle thin on top with at the bottom a deceptive conical base and the way it hovers subtly above the floor. Lescher s constant experimentation with materials is also on view here. He has commented that he perceives in each material a type of personality, that materials carry their own information, that the visual possibilities already reside inside the material. His role is to find ways/forms to make visible the internal phenomena of the materials.1 Two new pieces from 2007 illustrate this, in the form of articulated and transformable configuration beams, which integrate wood and red acrylic. These stem from the idea of constructing lines that mark the encounter of different architectural planes. The difference in the materials and colors mark the transitions, and create an artificial contrast which stresses a limit.

15 Minimum Landscapes is an exhibition that evokes the idea of landscape, marking a frontier between a fictional and a real architecture. The geometry proposed is rigorous but not dogmatic, stable and unstable simultaneously, and it is open for the spectator to approach it by free association with the real world and thus to extend its formalism. Inabsência, Pinacoteca do Estado de São Paulo, Brasil

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17 Elipse #17, mm tempered glass laminated with black serigraphy, 197 x 276 x 7.88 in (500 x 700 x 20 cm).

18 Rio corrente, Running river, Alejandra von Hartz Gallery, Miami. Untitled #4, From Metamericos Series. Wood and metal, 5 segments of in (180cm) ea. Edition of AP

19 Untitled #6 from Metamericos Series2010. Wood and metal, 5 segments of in (35cm) ea. 1 segment of in (200cm). Edition of AP

20 The pantographic principle Isobel Whitelegg 2013 Artur Lescher s exhibition brings together new and existing works under the sign of the pantograph. The origin of this word is the name of a particular form of mechanical linkage an assembly connected in order to manage force and movement. In the 16th century, the pantograph was invented as an early technology of reproduction that allowed for the simultaneous enlargement (or miniaturisation) of an original image. Made from a system of jointed rods (two larger, two smaller) the pantograph linked the gesture of tracing a point over the lines of a diagram with the drawing of an amplified double. In this original purpose it may be considered the ancestor of the retro projector, the xerox machine, the telescopic zoom of the camera or the zoom function represented on our digital screens by the anachronistic icon of a magnifying glass. The large work placed in the window of the gallery [Pantográfica (Para Antonio), 2013] recalls the form of the pantograph in a literal manner, and indicates its more common and recognisable present day function as a system of spatial linkage rather than a drawing tool. In the day to day we are likely to come across pantographic movement in the bathroom (enabling a round mirror to be brought closer or further away from the face) or on a construction site (a scissor lift that raises or lowers a platform), or as the retractable mesh that forms a metal elevator door. Other works, however, share the principles of this invention s mechanism of extension and retraction rather than its literal form. They recall the pantograph as a mechanical body able to advance and retreat, to shift its reach and modulate its density and thus to be perceived as alternately heavier or lighter: stretched out to encompass space within its structure or compacted in to exclude it. Alongside the articulated sculpture Metaméricos (2008) and Meta métricos (2010), Lescher introduces a new body here: the telescope. In Telescópica em si mesma (2013), a stunted telescopic form appears in its alternate states, burrowed into the gallery wall/triggered into spatial extension by touch. The different objects within this exhibition therefore have a shared capacity to embody alternate states of expansion and contraction. For Lescher this is the characteristic that reunites them as pantographic in thought or in principle. In his view, the pantographic or telescopic image is analogous to a contained intensity: the way in which an object is more than its formal or material self; as in language, the way in which a certain word or phrase is a trigger, opening up an unpredictable abyss of signification or sentiment. Or as in history and the social realm, the way in which wider effects seem in retrospect to have shot out from the causal limits of what at first seemed inconsequential. The mechanics of articulated structure have emerged as a recurrent concern of Lescher s work in recent years. The title of an earlier series (Metaméricos, 2008) refers to the articulated bodies of segmented creatures (such as earthworms) whose simple physiognomy allows for finely controlled linear movements propelled by waves of contraction and expansion. Unlike the earthworm however, the structures that Lescher names metaméricos do not have the capacity to move independently. They may move in response to manipulation but at the same time are adjustable only according to the limited range of movement that has been designed into their struts and joints. The movement of the pantograph is similarly governed by the hand but at the same time its own contained internal mechanics force a tense and measured gesture on the part of the draftsman.

21 Pensamento pantográfico, Galeria Nara Roesler, São Paulo, Brasil The pantograph thus works accurately because it has a fixed number of independent parameters ( degrees of freedom as they are called in the language of mechanical engineering). The objects within Lescher s 2010 series Meta métricos speak explicitly of such control and measure. These sculptures, like the Metaméricos, are constructed from linked segments. They approximate tools for measure or drawing, such as extendable hinged rulers or the arms of a swivelling compass, but incorporate disobedient elements (bends, folds, extraneous parts) that insert additional degrees of freedom and extend towards the unmeasurable dimensions and intensities of the spaces they traverse. Just as the pantograph as a mechanical linkage is designed in order to carefully manage force and movement for the sake of accuracy or correct function, the term metric suggests the productive management of space or time. As unruly sculptural tools, Lescher s Metamétricos are an appealing disavowal of such limits. They speak to a human tendency to rebel against management, to define our existence as beyond measure and in excess of explanation. The desire to exceed human physical restraints however has drawn human history somewhat paradoxically towards the discovery of defined systems, theories, and mechanisms that might extend such limits. Christoph Scheiner, the inventor of the pantograph, not only allowed us to reproduce and amplify images with an inhuman precision, but was also the first person to conquer the physically impossible feat of looking into the sun and examining its surfaces. Scheiner s helioscope allowed an observer to stare indirectly at a body of light too intense for our eyes to see; it projected a detailed image of the sun, through a telescope, onto a piece of white paper that was suspended in a dark room. It is curious that the two mechanisms with which this sixteenth century Jesuit priest, physicist, and astronomer is associated the pantograph and the telescope are exactly those to which Lescher is drawn here; these same two elements are newly folded into his existing sculptural vocabulary. The shared characteristic of each is not only their retractable form and proto photographic function but their capacity for magnification, projection and amplification. Within the discipline of art history the pantograph has also been adopted as an idea or principle. It is used by the North American scholar Donald Preziosi as a metaphor for the encounter with the artwork that takes place in the space of the museum. For Preziosi this is understood as an experience of magnification. The viewer s expectation, when looking at the artwork, is always that they will see more than the physical object of their gaze. The eyes tracing of the contours of an artwork or artefact is also a search for amplified meanings, and a magnified imaginary is thus traced out (invisibly) in the process of looking. For Preziosi, when looking at artworks we expect more than a mere conveying of historical or art historical information. We have a faith in the inherent semiotic density of what we are looking at and we believe that this particular confrontation between subject and an object will generate amplified intensities: greater understandings or deeper appreciations. Could it be that Artur Lescher s pantographic forms speak of this desire? The belief that they are not only mere forms but also

22 and at the same time forms of thought or vehicles of signification and that they will be perceived as such within the space of the gallery, where they are magnified within the imaginary of the viewer? Pensamento pantográfico, Galeria Nara Roesler, São Paulo, Brasil What is striking about Lescher s pantographs and telescopes is what is missing. We are presented with mechanisms for optical amplification in the absence of any object for them to act upon. The telescope points at nothing. The pantograph enlarges nothing. Both stand only for amplification or projection itself. In the work Ou ou (2013) we see proportionally exaggerated or diminished spheres without reference to any original scale. We are encouraged to see the vehicle for magnification in the absence of the object or drawing to be enlarged by it. We do not see the overwhelming intensity of the sun; it is rather that we see Scheiner s overwhelming drive to see the unseeable. As such the principles behind the pantograph and the telescope also bring to mind the title of Lescher s recent large scale work for the Pinacoteca Inabsência a double negative that indicates the absence of complete absence and thus the presence, contained invisibly within the artwork, of what cannot be seen.

23 Canto, Aluminum, x 3.94 x 3.94 in (220 x 10 x 10cm). ARTUR LESCHER 1962 Born in São Paulo, Brazil Lives and works in São Paulo, Brazil

24 Solo Exhibitions 2014 Prática portátil. Galeria Nara Roesler, São Paulo, Brazil 2013 Pensamento pantográfico. Galeria Nara Roesler, São Paulo, Brazil 2012 Inabsência, Pinacoteca do Estado de São Paulo, Brazil Galeria Del Paseo, Punta del Este, Uruguay Rio corrente, Alejandra von Hartz Gallery, Miami Meta métrico, Galeria OMR, Colonia Roma, Mexico 2010 Rio Máquina, Galeria Nara Roesler, São Paulo, Brasil 2009 Rio Máquina, Galeria Anita Schwartz, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil 2008 Metaméricos, Galeria Paulo Darzé, Salvador, Brazil Galeria Mariana Moura, Recife, Brazil Minimal Landscape, Alejandra Von Hartz Gallery, Miami, USA Galeria Blanca Soto, Madrid, Spain 2006 Instituto Tomie Ohtake, São Paulo, Brazil Galeria Ruth Benzacar, Buenos Aires, Argentina Paisagem Mínima, Galeria Nara Roesler, São Paulo, Brazil 2004 Instalação, MALBA, Buenos Aires, Argentina 2003 Espaço Ecco I e II, Brasília, Brazil 2002 Elípticas, Galeria Nara Roesler, São Paulo, Brazil 1998 Programa de Exposições 98 Centro Cultural São Paulo, Brazil Galeria Nara Roesler, São Paulo, Brazil 1993 Galeria André Millan, São Paulo, Brazil 1991 Esculturas, Galeria Millan, São Paulo, Brazil 1990 Instalação, Paço Imperial do Rio de Janeiro, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil 1989 Instalação, MAM, São Paulo, Brazil Projeto Macunaíma, FUNARTE, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil Group Exhibitions

25 2014 Cidade Poética. Sala de Arte Santander, São Paulo, Brasil Prática portátil. Galeria Nara Roesler, São Paulo, Brazil 2013 The circle walked casually. Deutsche Bank KunstHalle, Berlin, Germany Encuentros/tensiones: arte latinoamericano contemporáneo Colección Malba + comodatos. Museu de Arte Latinoamericano de Buenos Aires, Buenos Aires, Argentina Circuitos cruzados, Museu de Arte Moderna de São Paulo, Brazil anos do Programa de Exposições do CCSP, Centro Cultural São Paulo, São Paulo, Brazil Ponto de Equilíbrio, Instituto Tomie Ohtake, São Paulo, Brazil Paisagem Incompleta, Centro Cultural da Usiminas, Minas Gerais, Brazil Optimismo Radical, New York 2009 Metaphysics of Beauty, Galeria Nara Roesler, Sao Paulo, Brazil Experiencing spaces, Museu da Casa Brasileira, Sao Paulo, Brazil Memorial Revisitado, 20 anos, Memorial da América Latina, São Paulo, Brazil 2008 Ano_01, Galeria Anita Schwartz, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil Limite Sud / South Limit, Centro de Exposiciones, Buenos Aires, Argentina Quase Líquido, Itaú Cultural, São Paulo, Brazil 2007 Mono#Cromáticos: Vertentes na Arte Contemporânea Brasileira, Galeria Mário Sequeira, Braga, Portugal Modernos Pós Modernos etc. Instituto Tomie Ohtake, São Paulo, Brazil 2005 Discover Brasil, Ludwig Museum, Koblenz, Germany El Sutil vertigo del imagem, CCPE, Rosario, Argentina Quinta Bienal do Mercosul, Porto Alegre, Brazil Cromofagia, Galeria Nara Roesler, São Paulo, Brazil 10 anos de um novo MAM: Antologia do Acervo, Museu de Arte Moderna, São Paulo, Brazil 2003 Contemporáneo 6, MALBA, Buenos Aires, Argentina 2002 Centro Cultural São Paulo 20 anos, Centro Cultural São Paulo, Brazil Brasília ruína e utopia, Centro Cultural Banco do Brasil, Brasília, Brazil 25ª Bienal Internacional de São Paulo, São Paulo, Brazil Ares e Pensares, SESC Belenzinho, São Paulo, Brazil Matéria Prima, Novo Museu, Curitiba, Brazil 2001 Coletiva Artistas Art Chicago 2001, Galeria Nara Roesler, São Paulo, Brazil Côte à Côte, Art Contemporain du Brésil, capcmusée, Bordeaux, France Rede de Tensão, Paço das Artes, São Paulo, Brazil 2000 Esculturas, Pinacoteca do Estado de São Paulo, São Paulo, Brazil Diálogo, Memorial da América Latina e Centro Cultural da Universidade Católica, Brazil e Ecuador O Lápis e o Papel, Galeria Nara Roesler, São Paulo, Brazil Homem, Natureza,Tecnologia, ICBRA, Berlim, Germany Brasil 500 anos Artes Visuais Fundação Calouste Gulbenkian, Lisboa, Portugal

26 1999 Philips Eletromídia da Arte Belo Horizonte, Belém, Campo Grande, Cuiabá, Manaus, Porto Alegre, Recife, Rio de Janeiro, Salvador, São Paulo,Campinas, Jundiaí, Osasco, Ribeirão Preto, Santos, São Vicente, Santo André, Brazil Alquimias e Processos Bilioteca Miguel Angel Arango, Bogotá, Colombia 1998 Projeto Caminho do Mar, Centro Cultural Itaú, Campinas, Brazil Canibal, Paço das Artes, São Paulo, Brazil 1997 Coro para 14 vozes, Galeria Nara Roesler, São Paulo, Brazil Projetos Bienal, Espaço de Arte, São Paulo, Brazil 1996 Nos Limites da Fotografia, SESC Pompéia, São Paulo, Brazil Metais e suas Liga ações, SESC Pompéia, São Paulo, Brazil 1995 Objeto Gravado, Museu da Gravura, Curitiba, Brazil Entre o Desenho e a Escultura, MAM, São Paulo, Brazil 1994 Artistas de São Paulo, Paço Imperial do Rio de Janeiro, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil Arte Cidade 2, São Paulo, Brazil Brasil Século XX, Fundação Bienal de São Paulo, São Paulo, Brazil Coletiva de Esculturas, Espaço Namour, São Paulo, Brazil 1993 Museu de Arte Contemporânea da universidade de São Paulo, São Paulo, Brazil 1992 Exposição Centro Cultural São Paulo, Pavilhão da Bienal, São Paulo, Brazil Galeria André Millan, São Paulo, Brazil 1991 Panorama do Objeto Tridimensional, MAM, São Paulo, Brazil 2¼ Exposição Internacional de escultura Efêmera, Fortaleza, Brazil 1990 Apropriações, Paço das Artes, São Paulo, Brazil Galeria do Colégio Major Universitário, Madrid, Spain ¼ Salão Nacional de Artes Plásticas, FUNARTE, Rio de Janeiro prêmio Aquisição, Brazil Novos Valores da Arte Latino Americana, Museu de Arte de Brasília, Brasília, Brazil Arte Contemporânea São Paulo, Perspectivas Recentes, Centro Cultural, São Paulo, Brazil Projeto Macunaíma, FUNARTE, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil ¼ Bienal internacional de São Paulo, Pavilhão da Bienal, São Paulo, Brazil 1986 Projeto Espacial Aerólito, Galeria Subdistrito, São Paulo, Brazil 1985 E o Desenho?, Galeria Humberto, São Paulo, Brazil Salão Paulista de Arte Contemporânea, Pavilhão da Bienal, São Paulo, Brazil

27 1984 Salão de Gravura de Curitiba, Solar do Barão, Curitiba, Brazil Projeto Arte na Rua II, MAC, São Paulo, Brazil Public Collections Pinacoteca do Estado de São Paulo, São Paulo, Brasil Instituto Nacional de Belas Artes, Rio de Janeiro, Brasil Museu de Arte Moderna de São Paulo, São Paulo, Brasil Biblioteca Luis Angel Arango Bogotá, Colômbia Museu Nacional de Belas Artes, Rio de Janeiro, Brasil Museu de Arte Contemporânea MAC USP, São Paulo, Brasil Centro Cultural São Paulo, São Paulo, Brasil Instituto Cultural Itaú, São Paulo, Brasil Museu de Arte Latinoamericana de Buenos Aires, MALBA, Buenos Aires, Argentina Museum of Fine Arts, Houston Philadelphia Museum of Art Se movente, Museu de Arte Moderno de Sao Paulo, Brasil (MAM/SP).