Silver
“Hobbema consists of a front view, hazy and crossed by patches and smudges, of a road that appears only through the presence of the tall, skinny trees lining its entire visible length and that follow the laws of perspective, shrinking as they move towards the horizon. Stolen from a painting by the XVI century artist, the similarity of the scene is strengthened by the use of perspective, a strategy intended to annex the space of whoever stands in front of it, forcing the viewer’s gaze to travel along the path, and clash with the fact that it is painted with silver metallic paint of an emphatic artificiality. As though insisting on the negation of this resource promoting an illusion, fine-tuned by centuries of Naturalistic Art, the artist glues silver-painted rulers in decreasing order, by size, running from left to right. The eye of the spectator hesitates between plunging into the picture or crashing against its surface. Perspective, understood as the structure through which an imaginary narrative is corrected and endowed with the tenets of truth, does not occur in real space, contrary to appearance. Here the artist confronts traditional perspective by applying rulers – the tools used to create the illusion – to the surface of the painting. More than unveiling the rules of assembly for the genre of illusion that the painting produces, this picture displays the tools with which they are all constructed. In these intertextual plays, parodies and palindromes, the artist abandons the mask of the demiurge to display the instruments with which he works.”
(excerpt from “The Piano Factory”, by Agnaldo Faria, published in Daniel Senise. The Piano Factory, Andrea Jakobsson Estúdio, Rio de Janeiro, 2002)
