Essay Marcos Moraes, 06/2006
essay_ Cao Guimarães_ "Sensitive Landscape" - by Marcos Moraes
Sensitive Landscape
“All that we see, all within the reach of our eyes, is the landscape. It can be defined as the realm of the visible, that which the sight can grasp. It is made not only of volumes, but also of colors, motions, smells, sounds, etc.”
Milton Santos
Pieces of landscape born out of the confluence of a sensory and perceptive experience, defined by the investigation of the gaze into the space of nature, might be an entrance point for asking questions or reflecting upon Concerto para clorofila, a work that garnered Cao Guimarães the award for the State of the Art section of the 15th Videobrasil Festival.
To say of Cao Guimarães that he is a multimedia artist might sound cliché to those accustomed to the contemporary artistic vocabulary; for the uninitiated and those unfamiliar with the languages of video or visual arts, it might seem like an attempt to include his work into one of the categories most in tune with the new era of hybridizations, appropriations, displacements, or undoings.
This attempt to find an entrance point to the artist's universe presents, from the start, one of the key features of his work, ever since his first incursions into the fields of photography, video, and cinema. In a scene linked to audiovisual production, reflection, and critic such as the Belo Horizonte scene, the artist's relationship with the Minas Gerais output can be felt in his connections to different generations of artists in those media-from Eder Santos to Marcellvs L.-, as well as in more wide-ranging features, which he manifests using other languages such as time, memory, and landscapes.
As in a dive, the idea of a motion that turns over its own axis and into the past, beginning with the work Concerto para clorofila, is aimed at widening the relationship with languages, techniques, media, supports, and materials. Is this a minor issue in art? Has this issue been overcome, or minimized, through theoretical and conceptual discussion? Is this issue inadequate for discussing contemporary artistic practices? Despite all this, it seems like, at the very least, a starting point for something a little Beckettian, as in the end of a game, a limit situation with no way out, such as the current state of discomfort and ill-being we seem to be in. As the question remains unanswered, the present discussion, more and more provocative and destabilizing, becomes one of the strong mechanisms that are sought after and approached by the discussions and curatorial proposals in the latest editions of the Videobrasil Festival.
Looking back along the line of thought of these questionings, some of the most significant and often present elements, such as music, image in motion, color, photography, lines, as well as time, memory, and intimism, among others, are part of Concerto para clorofila, making it more of an experience in the sensory realm than in the video, photograph, painting, or even cinema realms; a type of aesthetic experience, rather than just language research.
One of the first sensations one has upon relating to the work is that of the nature of time, which dilates itself, extends like a note hanging in the air, and is maintained by the soft touch of the musician on the instrument. The image, with its plans (re)created by Guimarães, deepens our relationship with the landscape, with nature, reminding us of its principles, when in fact this procedure could have had a distancing effect, by introducing monochromatic planes over and into the images.
It does not seem like there is any concern over representation issues, but rather over affirming the meaning and the potentiality of perception. The monochromatic style, of course, proposes an approach that would seemingly lead to a distancing through image, but which, on the contrary, takes us down a path on a literal trip, not to the reality of the landscape, but rather to the sensory experience that is proposed, despite the former one.
Thus, Concerto para clorofila can be interpreted in a way which highlights, but does not define its formal features, or else as if the artist had chosen to allow us to see through those features, which can also be detected in his work from the late 1990s onwards: light, color, transparency, rhythm, and musicality are some of these constant, present, and active elements of his poetics. The work investigates notions of temporality and beauty, intertwined with a sense of ephemerality.
In works such as The Eye Land (1999), Between - Inventário de pequenas mortes (1999), Sopro (2000, with Rivane Neuenschwander), or Nanofania (2003), the focus on natural landscapes can be identified as a common element; just as one can interpret the choice of these images as being a discussion about the statute of image in the contemporary world, and therefore about contemporary aesthetics.
This singular way of seeing things unfolds into issues related to the documentary, biographical, and autobiographical aspects of works such as A alma do osso or Da janela do meu quarto, allowing us to understand another side of the artist's intentions.
The changes in state (images), the delicacy and softness in presenting a nature that is felt and perceived; for it is a nature over which memory is an active element, not in the sense of erasing or diluting its materiality, but rather potentializing it as a poetic element. As we think of landscapes as a way of perceiving a certain part of nature, we are working with the diversity of capturing and selecting fragments of nature, therefore making a choice that is necessarily diverse. These passages do not stray from other works by the artist, but rather point to ever-present issues in his body of work, such as “the inside and the outside,” “the idea of filmed diaries,” “the autobiographical,” “drawings, colors, lights,” and so, within his body of work, Concerto para clorofila seems to indicate a process of answering questions. His orchestration of values includes music notes, pauses, and all of the musical accidents that enable us to listen to this feeling of the landscape, as he proposes a sound landscape and, at the same time, erases the materiality of the object, denying the notion of a representation of nature.
With Concerto para clorofila, Cao Guimarães simply invites us to take a trip down the memory of his landscape, and even though we might know the limits of image construction, it is very hard not to stand in front of the images and let ourselves be taken away by them, which sound to our eyes with the density of a musical play that takes us away from our reality for a few moments, wrapping us up like a magic piper who has found the musical note everyone is looking for.
Marcos Moraes
June 2006
Associação Cultural Videobrasil. "FF>>Dossier 019>>Cao Guimarães". Available at: