Ícaro

Press release

EX-MACHINAE

rua da LOMBA 153

THE PRACTICE OF THE ARTIST
Rui Mascarenhas (art writer)

Craftsmen, Architects and Designers are all potentially artists. All men are made craftsmen, architects, and designers. Few ones sometime are made artists, even less as so remain. All men are made users, theoretical, ideologues, but few ones are made critics, less even so remain. Artist and critic are a state of passage, not a position, less more an essence. In that they defer of the other characters.

The craftsman, on is side, moulds strength in a tangible form. He finds his public in the user, which uses them and its delights. The architect, on the other side, projects schemes in an intelligible form. He finds his public in the theoretician who learns and speculates on them.

The designer, finally, joins tangible and intelligible forms in practice, which unrolls them in the time, as a process, where ideas face matter, matter faces ideas, in an planning that joins body and world, brain and history, on behalf of an end that receives from exterior. He finds his public in the ideologue that values the forms according to the adaptation to a finality that it assumes and proclaims as morally superior. Tangible and intelligible they are valued there like mere ways, in function of an end, of an objective, which is exterior to them and which they adopt by inherence of functions and positions.

Artist and critic meet in the pleasure of sensitive phenomena but they avoid the dangers of formalism and of decorative commodity, which is pleasing without spirit. Artist and critic appreciate the conceptual speculation but they avoid the dangers of the illustration and of the representative categories, which explain without passion.

Artist and critic tune a common horizon but they avoid the dangers of determining according to a transcendent cause, which is imposed on both like a moral, a law that they serve at the same time that they design themselves like its representatives. Artist and critic face here the danger of the manipulating conduct and pamphlet, which acts without acting.



The craftsmen gives him up to the matter and mould it according to forms, it produces formed substances. He uses the models that someone drew, and repeats them with detail and skill. He perfects techniques and instruments, increasing his capacity of reproducing. He hands over the pieces like commodity. They are pleasant and exemplary. They play with the colour and the drawing, the brilliances and the textures, exploring the quality of the force put in field. It is the whole manual sensibility. He builds simple mechanisms and finds the amusement. A certain inutility of the mechanisms that earn living. The craftsman foresees the artist.

The architect separates geometrical constructions in a transcendental space-time, build an encoded way, plan his parts according to the functions applied by a completely organic one, remove the inherited contradictions from the bad will of matter and makes the processes logical, commanding the craftsman. The architect works with ideas and achieve to a point where he don’t care that his models do not materialize. The projects are idea, and it interest is its intelligible scheme. It is a whole visual wisdom. It plays with ideal tensions more than with sensitive force. The ideal becomes an end in itself and gets divorced of the action. The game according to known rules, awarding a prize to the cunning, substitutes active creation before the demands of practical and material conditions. The architect fails the artist.

Architect and craftsman have a tendency to separate themselves. The social order itself, separating manual and conceptual work, divorces these two approaches. Plato was perhaps the first one staging these two philosophical characters: the craftsman and the architect. Plato was seeing them as the relation of Master and Slave, in a hilemórfic scheme of determined-determined, which by the way crosses all his schemes. The architect determines necessarily the craftsman. The natural order of things is this in the antiquity, where matter determine the idea, the worker of the matter determine the worker of the idea.

The architect, however, only creates when it is confronted, in an inherent plan, with the new matter and new practices. It is not in his imaginary, blind schemes to all his internal contradictions, which the architect is going to be able to create. It is facing the matter, in practice. It is when he is craftsman and as well politician that Le Corbusier looks at concrete and invents new architectural models. It is when the architect places himself body to body with matter, idea and world in dialog, which the new models appear truly adequate to the new conditions of fact.

The craftsman, on his side, only creates when is confronted by the necessity of new model and new projects, which demand the subtlety in the invention of new instruments and the development of new skills. It is not perfecting inherited arts of the tradition, blind to arbitrariness of what it multiplies, that the craftsman will be able to create. It is when he is confronted with new projects, requiring new models, that new skills and instruments are created.

The designer brings together the craftsman and the architect in practice. The designer is a craftsman and an architect. He is pragmatic and it molds the ideas as it molds the matter in simultaneous practice. Do molds and it develops materials. Perfect instruments and models, it adapts both to perfect its reproductiveness and, durability. He couples different materials, according to detailed schemes, in useful machines. The designer instrumentalizes the architect and the craftsman; he brings together a social practice of continuous improvement of the material and intelligible forms. He is the designer of equipment and communication as social actor. Action and speech instrumentalized.

The designer nearly always gets confused always with an architect craftsman or his reverse. He, such as his companions, serves an extern cause that determines he’s ends. Vanishing in the determination of the ends, the designer limits his creative capacity by the ingenious determination of the material and intelligible forms that carry out better an end that is extern to him, even if he makes it his.

The market teaches inevitably that his value, while designer, is to be efficient independently of the ends that are designated to him. His acting is determined from the exterior and for that can be dangerous, as is possible to be said that the technique and the science can be dangerous in the wrong hands.

The banality of the architects, of the designers, of the craftsmen who did body with the adventures totalitarist of the XX century, noticed the danger on being efficiently without questioning the ends that direct the action. The banal excuse of which one was carrying out with rigidity the prescribed functions became clearly insufficient. All the societies have craftsmen, architects and designers, acting according to a common sense, in accordance with a good sense. Therefore the public space needs the artists and his works.

Completely determined by common sense that distributes legible figures and for the common sense that establishes the appropriate relations, the practices would be crystallized in the established relations of force, the stereotype and the cliché would multiply monotonously in decorative commodity, in useful illustrations, in self-seeking acting’s. The established order would be perpetuated uncritically.

The problems, however, are never monotonous and they are not repressed without eruptions. Craftsmen, architects, designers, in his private histories, cross frontiers in the interior of a same individual, or a group, and establish dialogs, raising techniques, formulas, alternative processes. They extend, in the practice, his space of acting and his conditions. It is not the architect who determines the craftsman, not even the craftsman who determines the designer. It is not a question of translation from a field to other, of the matter to the ideas or to the action, but of transduction, where at a place, under determined demanding conditions techniques cross mutually, knowledge and practices, producing new instruments, new model, new processes.

THE ARTIST PRACTICES

The glance of the artist frees himself of common sense conventions where painting is on canvas and sculpture on stone, where collage is on paper and the coupling is random, where mechanism and craftwork, schemes and theory, have not explicit place in a work of art. His practice is freed of the good-sense where the relation between average and codes, the parts and all, the ways and the ends, are institutionally predetermined. He assumes himself as free agent, who acts and speaks in public about doing and saying, seeing and hearing.

The artist makes his way into the technical knowledge, into the conceptual work, into the world and into history, continuing a practical process where one crosses the matter and the signs, the aesthetic and theoretical, affectionate and elucidatory dimension, empathic and reflexive. The artist maintains two eyes and two ears quite open. Not even craftsman merged into production, not even architect alienated in the conception. Not even designer implicated in the practice without deciding on the ends. The artist is in possession of the ends, though these pass by his share. This is his ethics.

This ethics serves him like criterion of choice. All the materials, all techniques and practices are then viable. The work of Ícaro presents itself here a paradigmatic case, exemplary work, able to secure us, with surprise and enthusiasm, that it is still possible, to escape commodity, decoration, and illustration. But that, we realize well, it does not mean to refuse the designer, the craftsman, architect. On the opposite. The artist incorporates in his work the importance of his roles to transcend them in a new practice.

The work of Ícaro is the proof that is still possible to create new material forms, new codes of enunciation, and new ways of acting. That does not mean however to refuse all the past and the whole memory, in an ideal flat plank, in a material chaos, in a social convulsion. On the contrary. The novelty of his work passes exactly by the original relation with the ancient, in a creative process that uses memory, matter, artist and public.

The artist does not need more than he nearby his hand and in himself to reach his ends.

The frames, for example. They frame, both, sensitive and institutional. Craftsman, architect and designer have different glances on the frames. The artist will combine the three in one only glance. His glance flies over the three.

The frames reproduce the model invented in a time according to its idea of art to frame. They send us to the houses and the museums where we know his form. The frames, on the other side, make sacrate the plain of a picture. They are the window where to spy, to inside or out. They determine the inner proportions to the whole representation in her contained. They are the sensitive limits where to stage the representation. The painted frames in gold make it present and they represent a general frame, which glorifies what fits. In the process, the frame gets free and floats in the history without being freed of his materiality. The frame fits as much as is fitted, or unframed, she moves literally and physically.

The artist uses the frame in all his potentialities withdrawing the whole unforeseen aesthetic and symbolic power. Couple it to the machine, it gives him a place, more or less central, what is always independent of the common sense and of the god sense, which explains the usefulness and which attributes a function, sending before for the material, symbolic and practical value, which it acquires in the process of the work.

In the interior of the frame, the common sense waits to find the drawing and the geometry, the colour and the light, the enunciation of reasons or the staging of passions. The common sense waits to value the skill, intelligence, and talent. These are elements that can go out, suddenly, out of the frame or wrap it.

The artist make us look two, three times at the frame, and each time it extracts new plastic, conceptual, practical potentialities, being left without knowledge if it was collected by his material characteristics, while differential sign, or by pure result of the process in which it seems to the whole work to have come (o) to be.

The wax on the wood, a part of a bed, the cupboards, a box of tools, indented diagrams, a cushion of linen, illustrations, a crank, are matter and signs been overcome with loan and coupled according to enigmatic schemes - machines that are moved and that express themselves in a process that always require the action of the public, even in an imaginary way.

The public must not be passive, must not be left determined. The public experience of the work must promote the free action, not the conditioned passivity. The author promotes a dialog with agents, not a monologue with listeners or voyeurs. The artist promotes his critics.

The artist invites the public for his world, his works are hospitable. A craft world, a schematic world, a practical world, all of it immediately useless and enigmatic, playing with the good-sense and the common-sense, choosing his own ways, creating his code itself, putting the problems and proposing the solutions.

Expression of freedom, the work updates creatively as public experience, the taste of the public.

For the artist and the critic, it is never the issue of reproducing what we learn, of recognizing what we knew, but to create publicly sensible experience, as well intangible experience. An innovatory answer to new problems - does not always treat the new for the new, but of the necessity of new solutions facing renewed problems.

Ícaro is freed of the common sense and of the good sense, but he is no longer the romantic that his name evokes. It is the ascent and the fall always renewed in history. Ícaro, in his difference, always throws himself again in the flight towards the sun. The fall is not the end but part of the lively process. Ícaro does not undergo the lack not even the law and that does not release him in a natural and spontaneous wish. It’s not the issue of a regression to a presupposed natural state.

The construction of couplings allows Ícaro to free Life, active and thoughtful, in the processual and performative identity and between production and product. No more the dialectics closed between artist and determinative technique, by one side, work and the determined public for the other. Substituting God live Immanency in Ex-Machinae, Ícaro finds a way and the exemplary forms of practicing an Expressionism Constructivist. A taste machínic, more than mechanical or organic, a connection, more than divergence or conjugation with the world.

Between the Constructivist drift and the spontaneous delirium, between Dadaism and Surrealism, the Expressionism assumed by Ícaro follows clearly the first line of escape. The subject disappears in the process, does not even precede the process: it is in process, in construction. The work makes the idea sensitive of the artist at work and of the world, with his time on the back.

The critic gets enthusiastic!!!

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