Exhibition view from "You text nothing like you look" by Lucas Simões, en la Biblioteca Mário de Andrade.
YOU TEXT NOTHING LIKE YOU LOOK
Biblioteca Mário de Andrade, São Paulo, Brazil
November 9, 2024 to February 2, 2025
The artist Lucas Simões presents You text nothing like you look at the Mário de Andrade Library, exploring the interplay between sculpture and literature through mirrored circuits and impulses. His work emerges from an urgency to give poetic expression a tangible form, transforming literary excerpts into sculptural pieces. Each completed artwork receives a second title, creating a continuous dialogue between text and object.
This exhibition is part of the Mário de Andrade Library's celebrations marking the centenary of surrealism. Simões' engagement with the linguistic interplay between sculpture and poetry resonates with the cadavre exquis, a collective writing game developed at the height of French surrealism in 1925. This exercise in automatic, chance-driven writing abandons rational control in an attempt to reveal a broader understanding of individual subjectivity.
In YTNLYL, unpredictability also plays a crucial role, manifesting even in the material's resistance despite the sculptor's and writer's efforts to guide it in a specific direction.
Simões develops recombination strategies that create a semantic context where literary excerpts are layered not only within the text but also in the sculpture itself. It is as if each material speaks its own language, forming relationships—either coherent or contrasting. This sculptural experiment underscores the friction, at times chaotic and psychoanalytical, between these two modes of expression, dissolving the logical, formal, and epistemological boundaries of contemporary art, both in language and sculpture.
You can read the article published in ArtReview on the occasion of this exhibition here.
