Memory can be understood as a set of ideas and impressions that start from the experience to reaffirm the lived. It is an epsychic intellectual construction of an event from the past, however, memories are not static, they can be re-signified from a new look at experience. Perhaps a fact that has been recorded in our memory can be reconstructed from new experiences or the emergence of new facts about it. Something very common in history, where discoveries and traces change the way we look at and understand the past. There are many possible stories in memory. Knowing this, she became an important trigger of poetics and frictions in contemporary art. Important and traumatic events marked the experience of different peoples and societies throughout the XX and XXI century, and artists appropriate art to express people's collective and common pains and experiences. Memory is an individual process that clings to the experiences lived in the community. It is this complexity of the webs of memory that we see in the work of Lucas Soares. Which memories inlay the skin and experiences of such a young artist? Which selections are activated, sublimated or momentarily forgotten? The conflict between the past and the present, the said and the unspoken, what must be remembered and forgotten permeate his poetics. The memory for being anchored in the lived experience will always flirt with reality, but time and new experiences often confuse the real and confuse the memory of what happened. Erasing everything that causes us pain, at first seems interesting, , our subjectivity is built from both positive and negative experiences. Overcoming and learning from experiences that were not good is the best way to deal with them. What is remembered or forgotten depends on who tells the story, this allows the same fact or experience to acquire new meaning from those who look at it. The memories that triggered Lucas Soares' creations have a starting point, but the point of arrival will depend on the route traveled, that is, between the works created and the public there is a wide territory to be explored. The images from the Memento (2019) exhibition dialogue with different temporalities, materialities and artistic procedures that confuse the viewer's gaze that seeks simplistic definitions. It is necessary to experience another time, to seek a deep attention that makes it possible to contemplate at rest. The works seen today will not be the same as tomorrow, not only because we change based on the experiences that go through us, but because Lucas Soares deals with living materialities. Oxidation, corrosion and rust, natural and temporal processes of the metal that exposed to contact with the atmosphere transforms colors, textures, creates spots and stains. Memory and rust corrode, but they also create. Dealing with the memory of objects, matter and life (re) lived from art is the invitation that Lucas Soares makes us. Do you have time to accept this invitation?
Prof. Dr. Francione Oliveira Carvalho
Head of the Department of Education at FACED
Text about the exhibition "Memento"
Juiz de Fora, 2019
Lucas Soares and an invitation to
contemplation at rest
There is something extraordinary about thinking of a living room as a room made especially for being, after all, what does it take to be present? Time? I write to make sure I am, but I still don't know if what I bring in this letter has more of me or what I see here. If in crochet, to complete a stitch it is necessary to go back two, before proceeding, I would like to return to the word that gives name to this exhibition. From here, Memento is also a meeting.
I discover in a brief survey that there is an expression, memento mori, which is the whisper that reminds you that one day you will die. But memento is also a prayer that prays, or even, a simple note, reminiscent
I don't know yet which of these senses I like the most, nor if they are all here. I know that this exhibition is about an intimate.
Paul Valéry once said that what is most profound in man is the skin. I like to think that what matters is located precisely in what is superficial. The skin that lines our body is also the place where we meet and start exchanging with others. Without the skin there is no possible subjectivity, not even its fiction.
I think that what Lucas Soares does in his work is a process of investigating that skin itself, its corrosion, or else the way it is woven. It is a kind of archeology of the self, where the gaps between the fragments found are filled, sometimes by materiality, sometimes by the eye of the beholder. The frustration of not controlling rust or missing a point is at the same time the window that opens to the remains of stories that are not known.
The skin is presence and passage. It is under construction. And as in a living room, I think the important thing for this place is to be.
Let the narrative started not end here being woven.
Juiz de Fora, November 2019
Memento
Bia Pena
Curator and Art-Educator
Text for the exhibition "Memento"
Juiz de Fora, 2019
They gave us a thousand words, some rules and instruments. If we are able to externalize thoughts, to bring ideas to the "real", others can access this commonplace. But thinking exists in a thousand pieces and each dialogues with a dimension of being. In that sense, perhaps a good question to ask is: what makes something look like what it is? There is a tragedy inherent in the will to understand and apprehend the feeling of being in the world, the difficulty of understanding and communicating extends between bodies like an abyss.
But there is so much to say when nothing is said.
By dedicating a space to the micropositions of things, the artist Lucas Soares builds small gaps between the simple and the complex, the already known and what has not yet been presented to us; where things happen by crossing ideas, without the need for concrete action. To access this abyss it is necessary to dedicate oneself to uncertainty, to believe that the mystery occurs in the capacity of something to be continuously transforming. Here, a certain delicacy is needed to be absent so that the object becomes more present.
The word, the image and the forms are language. The works here depend on the place where they are fixed; their bodies are just the beginning of a conversation with the environment. Between what I see and what looks at me, I find a world in common and possibility in the impossibilities of what we live.
About micropositions
of things
Mariana Couto Miranda
Art educator
Text for the exhibition "About micropositions of things"
Juiz de Fora, 2019