Exhibition the (time), by Waltercio Caldas

The exhibition “the (time)” coincides with the artist’s 80th birthday. It is not, however, a celebratory retrospective nor a chronological arrangement of his production; here, time is fluid, and the 108 works—created at different moments in his career—are distributed throughout the spaces of the House according to visual affinities.

The exhibition invites the viewer to navigate through this universal, seamless, and irrevocable measure of time. Not only the present time, but also that evoked by T. S. Eliot in "Burnt Norton":

Present time and past time / Are both perhaps present in future time / And future time contained in past time / If all time is eternally present / All time is unredeemable.

In 1959, Neoconcretism added an experimental dimension to the logic of Concrete Art, singularizing and universalizing Brazilian constructive art. In the fragmented decade that followed, the generation of Waltercio Caldas did not have the comfort of a “style” to shelter them; in this liberating solitude, each was compelled to invent their own language. For Waltercio, the constructive aspect, though present, is far from being the sole protagonist of his poetics.

While Neoconcretism called upon the viewer to physically interact with the work, for Waltercio the contact is of another order. If many Neoconcrete objects only fully realized themselves through movement—such as the "Bichos" by Lygia Clark—for him, sculptures are defined as “static,” leaving to the viewer a visual interaction based on their own movement. His works possess the prerogative of constructing their own space and, within it, completing their existence.

The artist’s objects are the subjects of an articulated action between the senses and the mind. They stimulate doubt, opening an abyss between what is seen and what is thought. Elusive objects that reveal their transcendence only at the exact moment for those who discover them in the gap between seeing and understanding. Transparent objects, whose second look will always be a revision of what has already been perceived.

For Waltercio, what matters is granting objects the power of their constitution before they are named. In this way, they preserve an essence irreducible to the language that would classify them. In his own words: “I would like to produce a piece with the maximum of presence and the maximum of absence.” Visual intelligence, combined with humor, permeates his work, as does the establishment of a constant doubt about "What is world and what is not".

For Jorge Luis Borges, time is a labyrinth of simultaneous possibilities, unfolding into multiple paths. By choosing them, we define who we are. In this way, we are not only in time, but we also constitute it.

We invite the visitor to move through the poetics of these spaces as an entity that, despite all the difficulties of the contemporary world, allows the Casa Roberto Marinho to fulfill its desire to present the best of the art of our time.

Lauro Cavalcanti
Director, Casa Roberto Marinho