Full Circle
Kiki Mazzucchelli
The circle is one of the simplest shapes in Euclidean geometry: a closed curved in which all points are equidistant from the centre. Working in collaboration, artists Eduardo Padilha and Michael Schwab have taken the circle as a starting point in order to develop Full Circle, a multi-faceted project which includes two exhibitions, a workshop, a publication and a website. Rather than exploring this figure only as a pure geometric concept, existing exclusively on an abstract plane, they were also interested in using it as a tool to create works related to lived experiences in the urban environment. Lived experiences, of course, do not follow the rules of geometry: if we consider the subject as the centre of his or her own circle, the shape is constantly changing and incomplete, traversed by flows. For instance, one's social circle is permanently expanding, contracting or overlapping with someone else's. In a similar fashion, the final exhibition in this project, taking place at Studio 1:1 in London is not simply a display of finished works by two different artists, but the result of a collaboration experiment which has evolved over time, discarding, incorporating and juxtaposing spaces of circulation, and responding spontaneously to the architectural space of the gallery during the installation period.
One of the central pieces in the show is Schwab's 'GPS Circle', which starts with the artist drawing a perfect circle on the map of the gallery's surrounding area. Using a GPS receiver, he then tries, as faithfully as possible, to follow the route created by this circle by walking on the streets shown in the map. Constantly obstructed by buildings, walls and other insurmountable obstacles, the final configuration of his route is a distorted, jagged shape reproduced on the gallery floor which retains none of the smooth perfection of the initial circle. Above it, hangs one of Padilha's works, a mirror ball covered with a light-coloured patterned fabric on the surface onto which yet another silver pattern has been printed. Except for a few spots where the fabric has been cut out in circular shapes, most of the mirror surface is obliterated, stripping the object of its original function. It is as if the few visible mirrors had leaked out of the holes in the fabric, becoming the silver patterns that now overlap the original ones. Working in relation to each other, 'GPS Circle' and 'Untitled - Mirror Ball' seem to set the tone of the exhibition. Together they create a tension between indoor and outdoor spaces, where the gallery is simultaneously the centre of an arbitrarily demarcated area, encompassing its vicinity, and an enclosed space in which the feeling of domesticity is brought about by the upholstered object.
In this show, elements found in the urban fabric are often reworked and brought into the exhibition space, where they may or may not be recognisable as such. These elements can be accidental patterns, abandoned objects, architectural details and others, probably encountered by chance. Schwab's paintings 'Hammersmith' and 'City', for instance, are based on scratches found on the doors of a tube train. Their form is replicated in grey paint over baby blue and baby pink backgrounds, an unlikely palette that suggests they should not be regarded as a serious exercise in abstract painting. Rather, they are about appropriating and displacing found forms. In a similar fashion, a painting on the wall reproduces a mark found on the gallery door, using this fortuitous drawing in order to organise the interior space. A flashy, perforated golden gate which decorates the facade of an architectural practice located near the gallery served as inspiration for another work by Padilha. In his curtain piece, made with a thin golden fabric, he reproduces the design of the gate by cutting and pleating it, using a strategy that is analogous to Schwab's in his paintings. In both cases, there is confusion between public and private spaces, everyday forms and art, accident and design.
In some ways, there is a proximity between these artists' approach and what Italian critic and writer Pierluigi Nicolin calls Merz architecture, which he claims has recently attracted the interest of architects due to '...the new irresistible fascination of the incomplete...the act of assembling a multitude of plastic forms and materials, found objects, "spoils and relics" that were enclosed and partly walled up so that they could serve as records of previous states. Incomplete on principle, growing, changing constantly...the theme of assemblage has become a basic condition of the new globalized world...creating symbols of centrality rather than aiming at convergence at a point, the new Merz architecture emphasizes tangents, vanishing points, twists and crossings, without reinforcing the expression of a certain Piranesian drama in the predisposition of its new figures.' [1] In Full Circle, although the GPS and mirror ball pieces create an idea of the exhibition space as the centre of something, other works in the show point towards various directions, appropriating and assembling elements that belong originally to different locations and which here are displaced and invested with new meanings. The resulting installations are therefore a kind of Merz space that could be infinitely reconfigured in different places, each time incorporating new elements.
Padilha's 'Untitled', a work in which he juxtaposes a perforated piece of fabric, a sleeping bag found on the streets of London and stencils made on the gallery wall, is an assemblage that seems to project the interior of the gallery into the outside space of the city. The stencil on the wall forms a pattern that resembles Portuguese tiles on building facades, elements of ornament in the urban fabric. It is partly covered by the sixties style printed sleeping bag, an object designed for a private activity to take place in public spaces. The top layer consists of a perforated patterned curtain, a quintessentially domestic element. From a formal point of view, the superimposed patterns in the piece have a strong decorative character, at the same time working as indexes of specific environments and suggesting a transition from private to public. Whilst Padilha's use of patterns generally follows a movement from inside to outside spaces, Schwab seems to work in the opposite direction. In a series of computer drawings, he has reconstructed the pattern of planted trees in different parks. The figures produced are aerial views formed by circles which seem to delineate the distances between each tree, forming seemingly chaotic patterns. In a previous incarnation of the Full Circle exhibition, which took place in Amsterdam in 2007, Schwab showed an unusual, extremely fluid and abstract tag he collected in the streets of Paris, reproducing the graffiti on one of the gallery's walls in a gesture of bringing forms found in the fabric of cities into the exhibition space which is constantly at play in his work.
But in the case of Full Circle, the works of each artist should not be considered individually. One of the most interesting features of the project's final exhibition is the strategy of display chosen by the artists: sometimes two works are juxtaposed, sometimes patterns and colours are added to the architectural space in order to emphasize a certain piece or a specific relationship between two or more pieces, and the exhibition space becomes something like a single large assemblage. The superimposition and intermingling of two different practices produces a third space of experimentation for each artist, where they have to constantly negotiate and re-signify their works. There is, of course, a shared interest in everyday objects, structures and patterns, although their methodologies and formal solutions are usually quite distinct. Padilha's work has a painterly quality; he has a flair for bright colours, printed fabrics and ornamental elements. Schwab's is often more geometric, generated by technical measurement systems, sometimes purely abstract, like his reproductions of accidental patterns. Displayed together, they seem to intensify the relationship between the space enclosed by the gallery walls and the fabric of the city.
Kiki Mazzucchelli is a London-based independentent curator and a member of the Centro Cultural Sao Paulo curatorial board.
[1] As quoted in 'Merzspace', Hans Ulrich Obrist. In: Obrist, Hans Ulrich, dontstopdontstopdontstop... New York/Berlin: Sternberg, 2006. p.105.