The sky is the abyss on it’s head

There is a question that Eduardo Coimbra does not answer—and it is precisely because he does not answer it that it underpins this exhibition: where does the sky begin? Not as an astronomical fact, but as a problem of construction. Because the sky, here, is not a given: it is fabricated, layer upon layer, paint upon iron, until the question of its origin ceases to make sense. We do not need a beginning or an end, even though we only understand the world this way through our own finite experience. We need only to be, for an instant, within the doubt.

Coimbra comes from a background that thinks in terms of structures—beams, floor plans, loads, plumb lines. But what he does with this architectural grammar is to divert it from its own promise of stability. The *Urban Abysses* employ the precise metrics of tiles and the rigor of a technical drawing, only to betray them: perspectives shift, the floor that should hold us up suggests falls, and the “out of plumb” takes hold where we expected straightness. It is an architecture that has learned to doubt itself. And the abyss, here, is not the void; it is precisely the excess of construction, the vertigo of a space that insists on being measured even when it can no longer be safely inhabited. We recognize these falls because we have already experienced them in some elevator, on some staircase, on some urban floor that seemed, for a second, liquid. The most unsettling abyss is not the unknown: it is the familiar that refuses to behave.

The Celestial Plan operates in the opposite direction. If urban abysses clog the space of construction until it collapses into illusion, Coimbra’s clouds take the opposite path: they start from the lightest, most gratuitous, most “tax-free” image—to use the expression Stieglitz applied to his own photographed clouds—and install it upon iron, upon a wall, upon the heavy architecture of the room. The sky we all know by heart, which we traverse with our gaze without ever touching, here gains weight, surface, and body. And with that body comes an insoluble ambiguity: are the walls the sky where the clouds wander, or are the clouds slits through which, at last, we catch a glimpse of the true sky—the one outside, the one that keeps spinning without us? Edu does not decide. He constructs both abysses at the same time and lets us fall.

Gaston Bachelard said that air is the element of freedom, but also the element without support—we dream of it precisely because there is nowhere to set foot in it. The painting uses this same formless element to open holes in perspective—small, organized collapses within the system that is supposed to contain everything. Coimbra seems to operate precisely within this gap: between the system (the metric, the plumb line, the grid, the architecture) and that which the system cannot contain (the cloud, the fall, the vertigo). There is no synthesis between the two, and it is good that there isn’t. What the work proposes is not a reconciliation between sky and ground, but the precise and repeated experience of being suspended between the two.

Perhaps that is why this exhibition does not lend itself to being viewed as a sequence of works, but rather as a territory to be traversed—in the sense that Coimbra has always treated his works: not as objects to be contemplated from a fixed point, but as situations into which the viewer’s body enters and, upon entering, already alters the experience of what is seen. That is also why some phrases in this text have been detached from the pages and returned to the space: so that they may once again become what they were before becoming text—thought in transit, without a page to hold them, without a mandatory order of reading. An exhibition, at its core, is also this: an unfinished protocol, an architecture of questions that refuses to close.

Between the abyss that opens in the floor and the abyss that opens in the ceiling, the visitor remains—the sole vertical element in a space that works, systematically, to throw them off balance.

Paulo Kassab Jr.