Of Vegetal Memory

Forge a living book

from paper to wood remembers
from the crease barb bark
of summer storms
tree chains
of the trunk that bends high
with the accumulated weight of the birds
a book, paper on paper
Ana Estaregui

Forging a living book – a platform disputed here by organic forms, whose cognition takes place in the field of life cycles. To found a book devoid of utterances, in the search for an object in metamorphosis, a creature both of vegetal reality and emerging from fictional speculation. To desecrate the book: manipulate it, cut it, paste it, burn it, paint it; not to destroy it, but to go beyond and below its Enlightenment project, not to enclose the political possibilities of language in the canon of the word.

In the corridor of Galeria Lume, there are a series of sectioned books, joined one by one. Unable to access your content. We don’t know where they came from, what they say, what program they institute – in reality, none of that matters. Here, they present themselves as softened, flaccid shelf blades. Some, shaped by their own weight and gravity, hang like tongues, subverting the assumptions of permanence and solidity. They evoke susceptibility and mutability, in addition to the direct suggestion to organic processes, of bodily qualities. It is a series that seems to be the unfolding of previous works by the artist, especially the installations with sliced ​​and glued books, previously placed directly on the floor. This time, however, we speak of a radicalization of that procedure, because now they are the remains of books that crumble, spilling out charmingly before us, clamoring for other uses between nuances of white and yellow; old and new pages. Others, made from smaller cuts, constitute circular shapes as hybrid and irregular pulleys. The rigidity of the bookshelf and library gives way to the sinuosity of a body-book that wishes to recall its vegetal origin, to engage with a distant, primeval memory. These Bibliomorphs sprawl along the wall like organisms that chart and negotiate routes that are capable of harboring their growth.

Perhaps it would be possible to imagine them gradually taking over the entire gallery as a great score that claims this architecture for itself in the same measure as it abandons words in half – after all, the babble of its meaning is different, only glimpsed, never fully stated.

Lucas Dupin
Belo Horizonte, 1985. He lives and works in Belo Horizonte, Brazil.

Master (2012) and Bachelor (2008) in Visual Arts from UFMG, Lucas Dupin has participated in exhibitions and artistic residencies in Brazil and abroad.

His artistic research transits through different languages such as photography, drawing, installation and video, always based on an intense dialogue with the context in which the works are situated. He is especially interested in the universe of the book, the written word and the way in which the passage of time is inscribed in things.

Dupin received several awards, such as, in 2015, the FUNARTE Contemporary Art Award, the 6th Pampulha Grant, the FUNDAJ Artist Residency Award and, in previous years, the Olheiro da Arte Contest, the Forest Interactions Award in Terra UNA and the 2nd Energias na Arte Award at Instituto Tomie Ohtake – SP, in which it received first place