FERNANDA FIGUEIREDO
& EDUARDO MATTOS
Single-band artwork*
An essay about the audiovisual work of Fernanda Figueiredo and Eduardo Mattos
Bruno Mendonça, 2012
* single band works are those that require only one monitor or screen for exhibition.
In the excerpt “The mannerist video” from Philippe Dubois’ book “Cinema, Video, Godard” (2004), the researcher gives a pessimistic account of video-art production since the 1980s.
Dubois identifies television, advertising, new technologies and contemporary media in general as the major villains in the mass assimilation of artistic languages created by video in recent years for what the artist sees as having become a pastiche within the mass media.
He points to an a-topy in audiovisual production of the new generations of artists, referring to a certain emptying out of any critical/political character in contemporary videographic production. He specifically criticises a language still in constant use and which, in my opinion, remains strong in terms of artistic, critical and instrumental language - the video clip.
Dubois says: “The video clip has played a terrible role in this sense, wiping out all the work achieved by a part of videographic research. In brief, television, which has the same support, has emptied video much more than it emptied cinema, which remains ontologically heterogeneous to it”.
If we contrast Dubois’ statement against more optimistic studies into the audiovisual issue in contemporary culture, such as theoretician Raymond Bellour’s arguments in his 1997 book “Entre-Imagens”, we can find a perspective more interested in the hybrid forms that audiovisual image has taken in recent decades.
In terms of studies in Brazil, we can cite the extremely important book “Extremidades do Vídeo” by Christine Mello and, especially, the debates generated by the artist Raquel Garbelotti in recent years about what she has been proposing as an “artist’s cinema”.
This overview is highly important for our understanding of the audiovisual production of Fernanda Figueiredo and Eduardo Mattos, examined in this essay. It is my belief that their work contradicts Dubois’ assertion.
Fernanda Figueiredo and Eduardo Mattos find themselves in that “in-between” place where a new type of artist has emerged in contemporary culture, in which a post-media condition permeates the creative and productive processes.
In this regard, we can refer to the fact that there is not only one, but many types of artist, as there are filmmakers who have taken the video clip experience to the big screen, such as Michel Gondry and Sofia Coppola.
There is also production within the field of contemporary art that blurs and complicates the contemporary audiovisual image, with genuine imbrications covering cinema, video art, video clips, music, theatre and all sorts of disciplines, such is the case of artists like Karen Cytter, Mathew Barney, Emily Wardill, Mai Thu Perret, and others.
Furthermore, there are complex productions that really lie between entertainment and mass media, and the specific field of contemporary art, leading to various other settings for contemporary audiovisual work, such as the Fischerspooner and Planningtorock projects, and the work of videomaker Andreas Nilsson, for instance.
The video work of Fernanda Figueiredo and Eduardo Mattos also flirts with different creative fields, like cinema, music, video clips, drawing, illustration and advertising.
In a way, their works reveal a very strong connection to today’s generation; a generation to which they belong and which has experienced the astronomical emergence of new technologies offering increasingly more access and possibilities, including the digitalization and virtualization of pictures.
On the other hand, it is a generation that has in fact witnessed a growing intersection between contents and languages from the mass media with others of a more specific nature from the world of art; such relations being far deeper and more extensive than those that pop art interestingly attempted to provoke and that media art initially made possible.
This generation, more precisely the post-1990s generation, as well as quickly assimilating these hybridisms and this interdisciplinary character in the field of artistic creation while living with an irreversible technological advance, created a movement also of an aesthetic nature and great critical interest, born as a result of this language multiplication, namely, the indie movement, the influence of which is noticeable in the duo’s artwork.
Since their first works, they have displayed an aesthetic closely connected to those languages and questions raised. Fernanda Figueiredo and Eduardo Mattos’ work has always maintained this relation with a look and artistic style created from various symbols of a cultural industry, but always with a hiatus between them, and rather unlike any fashion editorial, advertising material or video clip, their works actually contain a subjectivity, an intimacy and a space that makes their images somewhat disturbing, yet always at the second glance.
This disturbing feeling also comes from the plays on time and narrative inserted into their works, involving “non-narratives”, or fragmented, time-related narratives which do not fit snugly into any film or videographic category or segment. In videos such as “Cul de Sac”, “Weighless” and “Breathless”, this is especially visible; something somewhere between a trailer, a teaser and a video clip.
In their latest videos, these strategies are even more notable. I can liken to some extent Fernanda Figueiredo and Eduardo Mattos’ audiovisual production to an assertion by critic Daniel Birnbaum about Karen Cytter’s artwork published in ARTFORUM magazine in March 2012, which I believe is highly applicable to the duo’s work, Birnbaum says:
“Cytter is not trying to be theoretically subversive, she is dramatizing the new normal.”
I think that Fernanda Figueiredo and Eduardo Mattos share this same issue, and in my opinion fit perfectly into what Christine Mello identifies as “video in thought” inasmuch as the “most diverse sensitive manifestations in the contemporary world speak to the time and space of video”.
Bibliographic References:
BELLOUR, Raymond. Entre-Imagens. Papirus, 1997
BIRNBAUM, Daniel. True Lies. ARTFORUM, 2010.
DUBOIS, Philippe. Cinema, Vídeo, Godard. Cosac Naify, 2004.
GARBELOTTI, Raquel. in(audíveis). USP, 2011.
KRAUSS, Rosalind. Perpetual Inventory. The MIT Press, 2010.
MELLO, Christine. Extremidades do Vídeo. Editora SENAC, 2008.
Bruno Mendonça is a multimedia artist and researcher. He has a Master’s Degree in Communication and Semiotics from PUC-SP and graduated in Social Communication from Mackenzie University. He currently works as a researcher in the field of Communication and Art for CAPES (Coordination for the Improvement of Higher Level Personnel) and is a registered researcher for the CNPq (Brazilian National Research Centre). He collaborates with the groups “Arte e Meios Tecnológicos” (Santa Marcelina University) and “Comunicação e Criação nas Mídias” (PUC-SP). He also coordinates the artistic platform sobrelivros in partnership with artists Rafaela Jemmene and Roberto Fabra at the Casa Contemporânea in São Paulo. He has also worked as a cultural producer for projects in various areas and at public and private-sector instututions.
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The Drama of desire
Margarida Sant’Anna, 2007
If modern photography claims legitimacy and consequently autonomy as an artistic medium, it surpasses its own boundaries and transgresses the frontiers of its standards.
The successful careers of Fernanda Figueiredo and Eduardo Mattos is marked by the coherence in the way in which photography is used as language. Three focal points guide the exploration of these artists: the tension in between the lines, plane and volume, mass culture as a reference and the balance between visual narrative and the independence of parts.
Outline, imprint, photography.
The practice of using the body as a support for corporal painting led them toward silhouettes made of lipstick on skin. Two protocols solidify: a monotype over transparent vinyl, a kind of shroud, in which the memory of the photograph and drawing is kept. Little by little, other solutions are put into practice, such as resorting to the specificity of the positive-negative in photography, the underlining of the volume of the body used as support by the intensely felt light and the perusal of the skin’s appearance arising out of pores, hair and creases. The search for parts of the body that are less smooth and the option for oblique planes de-stabilize and disturbs our perception, such as in the work “Uma tarde eu soube que podia amar voçe” . In “Obra sem Título”, the assemblage of fragments of the surface ( the body) builds a vast discontinued vista. A rhetoric of the body gives life to these images, bestowing a surprising visual vigor.
In other works, Fernanda and Eduardo introduce, side by side, drawing and photography, creating tensions and unusual references. More than ever, color gives warmth and substance to scenes. In “ Obra sem titulo”, painted shadows and photographed shadows conflict. Resorting to painting lipstick brush strokes onto a white surface reminds us of expressionist films in which exaggerated shadows were painted onto floors. Light, which rarely fills out a photographed scene, chooses and exact spot onto which it focuses, leaving the rest in shadow. The design of the geometric interiors (doors, windows and mirrors) correspond to the precise brightness of the architecture. Areas cast in half-light often refer to the feelings of the characters.
In “ Naquele lugar onde ninguém ousa ir”, the juxtaposition of a decorative motif, as even-surfaced as the rug and wall, accentuates the distance of the neighboring scene, in a deeply felt solidarity between what is distant and near, real and imaginary, concrete and abstract, an interesting association of Edward Hopper and Matisse.
Of mass culture: references and praise.
Increasingly, an iconography that indicates still-drama becomes visible in the drawings made with lipstick: men and women in trivial scenes leads us to an enquiry into married life.
The images portrayed make up a diary of coupled life, celebrating intimate values. A curious way in which life gives support to fiction, being that fiction is nothing but another moment of reality.
In this process of dramatization of daily life, mass stereotypes are portrayed. The resource of using succinct drawing together with the titles of the text is a reference to cartoons, in association with a representational model which is iconic and level. Photos explore narrative subjects, using codes from photographic novellas and cinema which condense information into a succinct representation,especially through the use of framing and close planes. In the scrutinized fictional material of “ A primeira noite de um homem” the central photograph relies on cinematographic zooming, accentuating cultural heritage. In the three parts which make up the work, imagery is fed by the way the story is narrated and not by subject matter.
The spectator feels the power which is unleashed by a series of different representations which scrutinize subjectivity. Consequently, opening the doors of our imagination to an erotic universe. Photography thus becomes a vector of the imaginary, a go-between amid the visible and the non visible. Through intimate everyday scenes, the desire to shoot photos is added to our wish to see.
From cinematographic editing to musical links.
Their more recent works seem to lead to an abstract sense of subject matter and to a greater purification of form. The principle that directs the sequence in “ Casal I” and in “ Desculpe por rir” deconstructs narrative. The connection is “ musical” , the point being one or ordering notes/colors,rhythm, progression and less narrative: more composition and less intrigue for each part of the life of these characters, including the sky, work under an intrinsic logic of their own.
“Casal I” measures the passage of time which is inscribed onto the representation, even if unperceivable at first. Each part is always a new moment. The ellipse between a shot and another shows the unity of each moment and on the whole shows the passage of time. It is impossible for us not to think of the skies of Stieglitz (Equivalents) or of Godard and of Gus van Sant.
In “ Desculpe por rir” our perusal tries to search for a probable solution to an enigma. Enigma due to silence and disjointedness. A feeling of displacement permeates the characters although the setting and objects are familiar.
Those representations are no longer of culminating moments, but of indifferent moments that loose instantaneous meaning.
Melancholy permeates these works. It is doubtful if Fernanda and Eduardo, in thinking about the world, are threading thoughts on the surroundings into which an individual’s affections are placed.