permanence the transformation
Me, You and the Moon it is a work of Tongue unprecedented in Brazil and is among the last works created by the artist who began his production in the second half of the 1960s. Throughout his career, Tongue He was interested in alchemy, psychoanalysis, science and philosophy. He constructed a singular mythology with symbolic and material images in which the notions of permanence and transformation are fundamental. The idea that “work is a set of works” is recurring in his work.
Even with the profusion of objects and materials, in Me, You and the Moon there is a strong coherence between the parties. Some elements are recurrent in the artist's poetic vocabulary, such as crystal, plaster or resin bottles, both hollow and solid. Mirrors, crystals, stones, plates attached to hoops and rods, as well as chains or leather straps attached to tripods also appear in other works of art. Tongue. Next to a petrified trunk that is thousands of years old, the use of these materials can evoke the organic and the inorganic or the natural and the artificial.
The fossil of a tree that remained intact, as if time were suspended, coexists with an essence of amber, a fragrance with woody touches that drips as if an hourglass marks the passage of time and the transformation of matter. Using smell and vision, the original and prehistoric elements in the work of Tongue merge with the contemporary and ephemeral presence of the perfume.
Giant fragments of a human body, patinated bronze thumb fingers point downwards, while rounded, moon-silver mirrors reflect the light coming from above. Sculpture of fingers, as if duplicated, point to opposite sides, to the sky and the ground. One of them made of stone, horizontally, aligned with the trunk, indicates opposite directions and points to the self and the other. The gaze of two subjects can cross the fossil and meet in a single one. The two sides no longer seem to oppose each other. In the poetics of Tongue, what is on planet Earth or outside it, the internal and external, just like me, you and the moon, form an indivisible whole.
Caue Alves
(chief curator of MAM São Paulo)
