Retromemória

The work of Lenora de Barros to the glass room Amigo MAM establishes a dialogue with the work Spider, 1996, of Louise Bourgeois, which was on loan at the museum and was exhibited for around 20 years in that same location. The work is directly related to the museum's outdoor sculpture garden.

The artist unfolds the dialogue she has established with female artists such as Lygia Clark, Yoko Ono, Cindy Sherman e Meret Oppenheim in a retroactive conversation with Louise Bourgeois. From the memory of the place, rear-view mirrors, images, poems and sounds, Lenora de Barros builds a large metal spider that activates the recent past. In addition to touching on the history of the exhibitions at the Amigo MAM, the installation involves verbal aspects (visual and sound) integrating the graphic and phonetic aspects of the word, which is close to the verbivocovisual dimension invented by the Irish poet James Joyce.

Retromemory, 2022, draws on the concrete tradition and reviews constructive art from a contemporary point of view. At the moment the Amigo MAM presents in its programming the second generation of modern art and geometric abstraction, Lenora de Barros makes us think about the works that have already been exhibited at the museum, helping us overcome losses and face the challenges of the present. The images reflected by the mirrors that form the spider are like doubles, representations that reproduce the visible world, the fragmented movement of memory, project lights and syllables from the poem around the room. The title of the work is decomposed and words such as “memory”, “spider”, “entanglement” echo throughout the museum, which intertwine and produce other meanings.

The mirror is this enigmatic object, which, even though it is outside of us, helps us to understand ourselves better, whether to look inside or to move forward. As the world seems increasingly accelerated, traveling at high speed requires us to be able to see blind spots, what is behind, without having to turn our body towards what has already passed. Even though sometimes it seems like everything is going backwards, Retromemory It is not about returning to the past, nor about nostalgia, but about building memories and stimuli so that we can move towards the future.

Curator: Caue Alves