Porcelain tiles bearing images foreign to their own materiality and function, arrangements of fruit affixed to the walls, and a projection in which two balls strike one another silently in slow motion compose the space created by Laercio Redondo for Depois do Monumento (After the Monument). As we approach the tiles, fragments of classical statuary come into view — limbs of nude male bodies, eyes, genitals, legs, arms, and torsos — that which was understood as a model of beauty and virtue transformed into ruin, or into what Western culture has constructed as the imaginary of this visual tradition.

The three-dimensional arrangements allude to the genre of still life, recurrent in painting yet less present in sculpture. Here, sculptural fragments are rendered bidimensionally, while the fruits, within the logic of the tradition, return to their three-dimensional condition. Another disorientation concerns materiality: fragments originally executed in marble are printed onto commonplace porcelain tiles, while fruits in marble are combined with fabrics made from industrial latex, accentuating a kitsch aspect.

This juxtaposition of materials and references points to the persistence and vulgarization of this visuality, now present in corporate architecture, public spaces, gated communities, and consumer scenographies. Greco-Roman visual culture, associated with ideals of virility and beauty, traverses history — from classicism to its modern and postmodern appropriations — and re-emerges here fragmented, displaced, and reconfigured.

Between the classical, the kitsch, and the queer, Depois do Monumento constitutes a critical portrait of the survivals of classicism and its associations with virility, as well as the contemporary eroticization of this imaginary.

Ana Magalhães (excerpts from the original curatorial text “Expiating the Monument”)

Photo: Pedro Tressi