​A Casa do Finito, a solo exhibition by Alan Fontes at Galeria Albuquerque Contemporânea, presents the artist's recent work in full harmony with the trajectory and singular grammar he has established over the past few years: the pictorial image and real space, the relationship between gray and a minimal and punctual chromatic palette, the distinction between public and private, what belongs to the individual and what belongs to history. This non-linear set of interests is complemented by an investigation into the nature of the image and its capacity to affect everything around it, within the potential and indeterminate limits it establishes with the observer.

A Casa do Finito is also the name of the installation that gives the exhibition its title. It represents a work environment: an office—or, as the COVID-19 pandemic has consecrated the term, a home office—typical of a middle-class home, whose furniture was designed for the architectural dimensions in which it is installed. Even if there aren't enough books or objects to fill the large bookshelf, it's there, with empty spaces filled with a collection of anything but casual images. In front of the canvas, a deck chair tied to it by strings expands the viewer's perception beyond the realm of pictorial representation, creating a contrast between images of distinct natures. By incorporating elements of the world into his work (in a procedure that alludes to what Robert Rauschenberg did in the 1950s with the Combine paintings), Fontes seems to discuss the limits and freedom of representation, emphasizing the indeterminate place in which the materiality of the deck chair is situated.

In the arrangement of the canvas, the bookshelf is simultaneously figure and background for a personal collection of images that present themselves as signs or traces of a presence-absence. Books, photos, objects, and newspaper clippings are indices of the absence of someone whose cell phone's screen is still on and who perhaps hasn't noticed that a bottle is about to fall to the floor. As signs, these elements act in a correlative sense in the relationship they establish with one another, or as a circuit of ideas, preferences, and personal tastes. Within the scope of such connections, the three Coca-Cola bottles, a reference to Cildo Meireles's work, Insertions into Ideological Circuits, from 1970, function as a fragment that illuminates the whole. They reinforce the eminently political nature of the structure of meanings woven around the various elements on the shelf, thus conjuring up an imaginary of doubts and uncertainties.

As is common in the artist's work, there is no human figure in his canvases. Perhaps because this is not possible with his use of gray in his paintings. Fontes decided to incorporate this color as a skin in his works, as a form of erasure, to nullify reality and make the painting powerful in the face of the material and ordinary reality of objects. In art history, the use of gray as a film that settles over the painting dates back to the Middle Ages. The monochromatic painting technique in shades of gray is called grisaille, and in the artist's use of it, there is no neutrality, but rather a latency that sustains an immemorial, mythical, or fictional time. A time that is not reduced to chronos, to its linearity, but a time that is outside of history. Within this temporal suspension, fostered by grisaille, the encounter (or confrontation) of the LP, the cell phone, images of war around the world, a disruptive tornado, and diachrony—represented by Felix Gonzalez-Torres's work Perfect Lovers—conform to a ruinous temporality, imprinting a feeling of permanent melancholy on the canvas.

In the "Book of Stone" series, the relationships between painting and object, image and matter, gain new depth. A set of images created from photographic archives of urban landscapes finds its support in the concrete sculptural object, whose form suggests that of a book. The multiplicity of images constructed by the artist in the books on display highlights the public dimension of architecture in compositions that are sometimes monumental, sometimes prosaic. Architecture, as a work of art whose perception by the masses occurs through use, differs from individualized contemplation, from a private relationship between the observer and the work, which has always given it the vocation of being the bearer of a collective memory.
 

If, through his previous series, the artist discusses the interconnections between individual and collective memory, their relationships, porosities, and conflicts, in the Finite Series he adds an investigation into the very expressive nature of the image in a construction that mobilizes the notions of memory, montage, and dialectic. In the four diptychs, monuments and buildings on one side are confronted with abstract paintings of expressive brushstrokes on the other, which dominate almost the entire canvas. In some of them, like a tiny grafted fragment, the representation of a tornado signals the disorder of the contemporary world. Viewed in dialectical confrontation, the canvases account for the collapse of a rationalist and utopian project of ordering life, with which modernity flirted at various times.

As a theme, architecture is, for Alan Fontes, a bearer of individual and collective histories. A shrewd narrator, giving visibility to aesthetic, political, social, or economic projects. In the domestic sphere, it is a privileged source for understanding a symbolic repertoire of ways of living. But it is in the tension constructed between the public and the private that, in The House of the Finite, the “art of space” occupies, by metonymy, the task of being the double of time. And it is through this spatiotemporal relationship that the artist invites the observer to the sensitive task of seeing in a state of alertness. Only under this condition can the images safeguard their memories and the possibility of always being questioned.