Every time a text is read, layers of meaning are added to it. In each era that a text is revisited, it gains nuances from the time that judge whether it is still relevant in the present or part of a past one wishes not to return to. Thus, as much as a book is an attempt to capture the thoughts of one or more authors in a set of ideas organized into chapters or topics, writing and its meanings are elusive.

In Dissemination (“La dissémination”, 1972), Derrida works with the idea that writing does not fix meaning but instead disperses it, dissipates it, leaves traces that are never definitive. He plays with the idea that a text “escapes” the control of its author, and that meanings multiply over time — just as they also fade, get lost, and are transformed.

If we broaden this perspective, more than being an archive of human knowledge, a library would then be a structure in constant motion. The proximity between volumes and the organization of books creates relationships, meanings, and hierarchies. Presences and absences define what we call knowledge.

In this movement, each time a book is chosen, an infinite window opens of synapses, memories, and connections with the meanings circumscribed there in the form of text. And each choice represents a universe of motivations and possibilities.

A scholarly artist, devoted to a method developed through the tireless daily practice of the studio, Lucas Dupin is surrounded by books, plants, symbols, light, sky, and people in his workspace — a bright terrace atop a residential building in Belo Horizonte. I mention the elements that make up his studio because they are present in his work, as all the pieces in the exhibition, in some way, respond to the dimensions of the home: the bookshelf, the window bars, the plants common to so many households. He developed a gaze that recognizes, in everyday life, other forms of books scattered throughout the world — and a gesture that translates a sophisticated mental elaboration into equally sophisticated and meticulous craftsmanship and manual work.

The books that arrive at the studio mostly come from library donations. These are books that have, in some way, become obsolete — such as encyclopedias, medical and legal almanacs, economic theories, grammar, and dictionaries: pillars of Western knowledge which, though constantly revised, still retain an archival structure and a mechanism for validating knowledge.

When Lucas handles and fragments these books, he creates cuts and reconnections. The artist here is also an editor of a library belonging to a story with no beginning or end, where walking among leather, bronze, paper, gilding, gunpowder, and ink becomes a mimicked infinity.

In its own way, things — books, knowledge, and ways of knowing — are rearranged in Lucas Dupin’s work. By editing and connecting alternative paradigms of knowledge, Lucas constructs libraries of possibilities. If the word sum is the central noun in the phrase that gives this exhibition its title and organizes its fundamental principle, there is also something that cuts through, traverses, and destabilizes certainties and structures, reordering what opens itself and renews infinitely.

Aware of this, the artist turns his craft into a vehicle for other forms of knowledge. The delicate technique of gilding, or the equally delicate and unpredictable watercolor, are applied as layers of the present moment, reorienting amalgams of knowledge and allowing other understandings to surface. The espada de São Jorge — both solemn and popular — appears in Lucas Dupin’s work in the same way as the bronze sculpture: as the presence of tradition.

Common in the wrought iron fences of residential neighborhoods in working-class areas, the shape resembling a heart carry within its sinuosity concepts that are part of a set of symbols from Akan culture known as Adinkras. The Adinkras are ideograms that express traditional values, philosophical ideas, codes of conduct, and social norms. Civilizational values from the Ivory Coast that took root in other territories and blended, one way or another, shaping daily life in image and presence.

While bronze evokes the history of Western art, with its monuments and heroes, the espada de São Jorge and the symbol present in the fences represent the beauty and sophistication of what is considered popular, yet carries within it the erudition of secular and invisible libraries. Libraries that are everywhere, opening up as mutable, malleable, and filled with infinite possibilities.

Lorraine Mendes