Still Life

Bound by geographical proximity and a shared background in architecture, Ignacio Unrrein and Lucas Simões distort the design line that underpins rationalist space, bending it into a paradoxical sinuosity. The undulating line common to both practices carries a deeply subversive quality: deviation eludes the total visibility of the straight line, univocal thinking, the rigid imposition of a wall that becomes a barrier. The blind corners of the curve produce zones of shadow — opaque spaces in which to find refuge.

Simões's works are organic bodies, anthropomorphic in their postures, now crouching, now lifeless: hung from the ceiling, they surrender to gravity, declaring their own specific weight. At the origin of these works lies a questioning of the rationalist tradition that dominates the architecture of São Paulo. During a residency in the modernist spaces of Pivô, the artist's eye was drawn to the concrete beams running across its ceilings. These load-bearing elements, rigid and imperturbable by definition, are translated in Simões's imagination into autonomous forms, released from their original function: slack in attitude, they slump in on themselves in an intimate, almost foetal withdrawal.

It is the title of the series, Dormientes (Sleepers), that reaffirms the reference to a living body — if not human, then at least organic in nature. The steel reacts spontaneously to the antioxidant treatment, taking on iridescent pastel reflections that escape the artist's control: now pink, now green, now yellow. These biomorphic forms lead lives of their own, each expressing its own individuality in contrast to the rationalist idea of a standardised architecture. Simões binds their bodies in the grip of a coloured fabric strap, further testing the formal possibilities of an encounter between materials that contradict one another.

Yet the "dormant" character of the works on view also evokes a state of latency, a possibility of action momentarily suspended. Held in an in-between time, these steel silhouettes are in fact moulds, transitional tools for casting forms in concrete — a material dear to the artist, who here stops one moment short. What is celebrated is precisely the incompleteness of the production cycle, the imaginative fertility of the non-finito: the void enclosed by the metal profiles is form in potential, the idea of a possible sculpture. The title of the series thus points to the double value of sleep: rest from the strenuous structural task of architectural support, and otium as a necessary emptiness — the pause and silence that prepare the ground for intellectual flourishing and creative power.

Though distant in their materiality, Unrrein's walls reveal a similar intention. Suspended in a timeless dimension, they rise lightly and fold with the ease of fabric, as if responding to an imagined draught that warps their profile. Incapable of supporting anything, they acquire a substantial autonomy, freed from the function that confined them to mere elements of support. Once again the artist proposes a flexible architecture, one that returns to the idea of the curved, undulating line as a political act, antithetical to the univocity of the straight line — the line Friedensreich Hundertwasser called "godless" and "cowardly", an instrument of bourgeois conformity and functionalist morality. Further proof lies in the columns punctuating the room: in counterpoint to the squared columns that characterise the space, they are clad in a precarious, ambiguous and paradoxical materiality, reasserting the mingling of signs and meanings at the core of Unrrein's research. Here the hollow brick abandons its traditional orthogonal geometry to embrace exposed concrete in a circular motion that alters both its constructive behaviour and its symbolic dimension.

The bricks that make up these works, bound together by roughly applied pours of cement, immediately evoke the informal settlements scattered across Latin American metropolises, where exterior finishing loses its importance — mere ornament in an architecture of survival. The exposed brick condenses the political and social character of Unrrein's work, developed over the years through Tapiar Buenos Aires, his ongoing mapping of the Argentine capital, to which the maquettes presented in the exhibition also belong. Used to seal doors and windows, the tapia is a brick structure that prevents the occupation of an abandoned building, constructively analogous to the walls of homes in the so-called villas de emergencia. In Buenos Aires it is common currency, and it embodies the social injustice of a system in which the Western notion of private property excludes and divides along class lines.

In the paradoxical appropriation, by the propertied class, of a building technique associated with the villas and its recognisable aesthetic lies a perverse contradiction. As Yona Friedman reminds us, in tribal societies "a piece of land belongs to whoever manages to build a fence around it or cover it with a roof." Likewise, in an informal settlement, property does not answer to an abstract bureaucratic allocation; it belongs, rather, to those who build it in order to use it. In the villas, the criterion of legitimacy is real need. Two parallel and adjacent logics thus coexist in Buenos Aires. In the very centre of the city, informal settlements built by their own inhabitants proliferate as far as the eye can see; a short distance away, grand colonial-style buildings, entirely unused, preserve their inviolability precisely thanks to the brick walls that seal their openings.

In Unrrein's maquettes, the sharp contrast between the smooth mouldings of the tapiada façades and the coarseness of the brickwork signals a semiotic inversion. The meticulous care with which he shapes and lays the tiny ceramic bricks stands against the aseptic character of the façades. The handcrafted process pushes the white surface that contains it into the background — the opposite of the treatment given to lacunae in art restoration. It is the elevations of the stately homes that take on an abstract, ideal character, impersonal despite their ornament: mere frames for the tapia, raised to monumental status. The trace of the gesture preserved in the cement surfaces condenses the need for an architecture on a human scale, material and full of character, set against the abstraction of a bourgeois housing standard. In counterpoint to these works, played out entirely on the inviolability of domestic space, a series of building bricks is clad in English porcelain which, in turn, imitates wallpaper worn by time. Finished in a third firing, each fuses into a single object the severity of the construction brick and the intimate familiarity of interior decoration. Here the inversion is literal: the interior, to which the tapias of the maquettes denied us access, breaks out of its own sphere and appears on the outside. The mark of time reaffirms its affective charge and negates the impersonality of the supporting surface, in a visceral treatment of architectural discourse.

Whether through the sinuosity of the curved line, the coarseness of cement that preserves the trace of the gesture, or symbolic and chromatic references to an intimate domesticity, both artists approach the architectural element with a desire for proximity. Not an abstract rationalist projection, but a living body — porous and sensual — to be handled and explored, in a reappropriation of the building techniques that underlie any architectural discourse. Unresolved in their status as objects suspended between sculpture and construction, these fragments of a possible architecture reaffirm the need to understand architectural practice as an open and shifting process, ambiguous when necessary: a human-scale activity, responsive to individual impulses and social needs, of which Argentina and Brazil offer precious examples.