EXPOSED FRACTURES: AN ANALYSIS OF THE PAINTINGS IN “DECONSTRUCTIONS” BY ALAN FONTES – BY ALEXANDRE RODRIGUES DA COSTA
Introduction
The series Desconstruções (Deconstructions), from 2014, by the Minas Gerais artist Alan Fontes, born in the city of Ponte Nova in 1980, aims, through images collected from newspapers, magazines, and the internet, to work with the concept of the house as ruin—fragments of memories, remnants that survive the disaster. This theme recurs throughout his work, as we can observe in A casa (The House), 2005–2007; Bar da Ana (Ana’s Bar), 2006; A casa dos espelhos (The House of Mirrors), 2006; Kitnet, 2010; Casa Kubitschek, 2014; and Sobre Incertas Casas (On Uncertain Houses), 2015. The house appears in Alan Fontes’ paintings and installations always in an unusual manner, at the moment when the artist seeks to break with the common sense that tends to define it as shelter and comfort. In Desconstruções, the house is presented to us as an inverted place, for what we see are its interstices—its interior, which now blends with the surrounding space (Figure 1). Once a place of protection, the house in this series of paintings reveals itself as that which escapes utility, becoming a formless body before which order no longer prevails. The house therefore becomes an in-between place, where mathematical order, faced with what eludes reason, fails and collapses. In this sense, disaster allows the house to be seen as a monstrous being—an idea that finds support in the critique that the French thinker Georges Bataille formulates regarding architecture.
Between Disaster and the Formless
In the series Desconstruções, Alan Fontes, by engaging with what remains after disaster, moves toward what Georges Bataille proposes when analyzing the issue of architecture in Western culture. For Bataille, architecture is yet another name for the system, the regularization of the plan—that is, everything that, in the form of a monument, is designated as the expression of social order. In the second issue of the journal Documents, published in 1929, Bataille opens the Critical Dictionary with the entry “Architecture.” In this text, when reflecting on architecture as an expression of society, Bataille observes how monuments project order, power, and fear, in such a way that…
“Whenever architectural composition is found in places other than monuments — whether in the face, clothing, music, or painting — we can infer the prevalence of a taste for human or divine authority” (Bataille, 1970: 171).
For the architect, the dominance of the idea over matter, translated into design terms, prevents difference, since repetition becomes immobilized in harmony, at the moment when the annulment of time occurs through the maintenance of constant patterns. According to Denis Hollier, in his reading of architectural metaphor in Bataille:
“The execution need only fulfill its program, subjugating it until it disappears within it. The project, by nature, is destined to reproduce its form, and, in order to ensure its own reproduction, it eliminates anything that has not been foreseen and that time may lead to oppose it. The future (the completed building) must conform to the present (the conception of the plan). Time is eliminated” (Hollier, 1989: 45).
In the paintings that make up the Desconstruções series, Alan Fontes seeks, in images of houses in ruins, that which challenges the project: disaster. In these paintings, disorder prevails at the moment when the house no longer sustains, through its structure, the permanence of form. Disaster, in this sense, breaks with the idea of the project by preventing repetition from being maintained as the consecration of harmony: “harmony, like the project, rejects time; its principle is repetition, through which every possibility is eternalized” (Bataille, 1992: 62). Disaster thus carries a conception of its own time (Figure 2). In the words of Maurice Blanchot:
“When disaster strikes, it does not strike. Disaster is its own imminence; but since the future, as we conceive it within the order of lived time, belongs to disaster, disaster has always withdrawn or deterred it — there is no future for disaster, just as there is no time or space for its accomplishment” (Blanchot, 1980: 7–8).
The disintegration of the house dissolves both the boundaries between inside and outside and the relationships established between past, present, and future, since the safe space is replaced by an indeterminate space and time. The fragments resulting from the disaster survive doubly as vestiges, for they refer to a partially erased origin and to an obliterated, incomplete representation. What we see is formed from the ruins of a deteriorated present, whose debris becomes visible through the painter’s choice to highlight them, privileging disorder, the precariousness and fragility of objects as bearers of our memories. Time disfigures memory by allowing the disaster to disperse and collapse not only the house, but also what is kept inside it. The painting is composed of remnants under which the skeleton—the structure of what was once a home—appears incomplete, disjointed amid the rubble, this decomposing body made up of shattered roofs, walls, and objects. The conception of the house as a living being becomes more evident when we look closely at some of these paintings and notice how the rubble produced by the disaster resembles viscera. Torn apart, Alan Fontes’ houses emerge as precarious as those in the works of artists such as Robert Smithson or Gordon Matta-Clark, for they are denied a “before,” a history that could bind the ruins to any specific point in time. The loss of reference throws us into a structure that oscillates between form and non-form, whose excess arises from a process of simultaneous division and reunion, because, like an organism that reproduces by fission, there is no longer any hierarchy over what remains of the house: “Everything divides into two. Meaning moves through the cleavage” (Hollier, 1989: 77).
In this sense, this excess, which visually resembles interstices, simultaneously evokes the formless and the labyrinth in Bataille’s work. Coined as an entry in the Critical Dictionary, the formless, according to Bataille, “is not only an adjective with a given meaning, but a term that serves to declassify, requiring that each thing have its form” (Bataille, 1970: 217). The formless, however, is not a concept, for its existence is only perceptible as an operation—in fact, a counter-operation—since it declassifies, “designates what has no rights in any sense and spreads everywhere” (Bataille, 1970: 217). Just as the formless is conceived as a kind of sabotage against the academic system, Bataille, according to Denis Hollier, “reverses the traditional metaphorical meaning of the labyrinth, which generally links it to the desire to escape” (Hollier, 1989: 60). The labyrinth is the operational existence of the formless, for its anti-hierarchical structure opposes the idealized geometric conception, in which the exit would represent the realization of the project or utopia. Denis Hollier, when analyzing the question of the labyrinth in Bataille, comments:
“One is never inside the labyrinth, because, unable to leave it, unable to comprehend it with a single glance, one never knows whether one is inside. We must describe the labyrinth as an insurmountable ambiguity, a spatial structure where one never knows whether one is being expelled or enclosed; a space composed exclusively of openings, where one never knows whether they open to the inside or the outside, whether they are meant for exiting or entering” (Hollier, 1989: 61).
This dead-end excess, a structure that disorients, can be seen in the houses in the Deconstructions paintings, in which the structures, as they fall apart, confuse the inside and the outside (Figure 4). The house is now made up of open spaces, but in such a way that, with some walls still standing, the temporary becomes the time of an unknown threat, a place of loss, of not knowing. Instead of seeking a way out of such a labyrinth, we would remain lost in it, fueled by the encounter with the impossible as an affirmation of the instability of uncharted terrain, always open to the demand of aimless wandering. The labyrinth, conceived as an operation of the formless, affirms the precariousness of architecture, its inevitable end, in which decomposition prevails, by exhibiting, through ruin, the rupture with a supposed idealized project and place. Thus, by revealing the structure, its inside and outside, Alan Fontes ends up highlighting incompleteness, in the sense that death is present through decay, of the house that disintegrates under the impact of disaster. The house, in a state of ruin, appears as a place of undone experiences, where the private is revealed through the mutilation of its rooms, the opening of spaces that project outward, displaying what was once hidden.