Reading a book, watching a film, entering an exhibition, and actually seeing it—all require a double movement: displacement and engagement with the world. The exhibition "Poetics of a Landscape_Memory in Mutation," by Alan Fontes, winner of the CCBB Contemporary Prize, by articulating different times within the same space, reminds us of this recipe, as obvious as it is easily forgotten.

Over the course of a two-month residency in downtown Rio de Janeiro, the Minas Gerais artist cultivated different ways of mapping that region, from digital ones to those that emerge as a result of aimless walks. Panoramas of the area where the CCBB is located captured via Google Earth were reproduced in five paintings. The largest of these, seen on this page, is based on a 2009 image of Praça Quinze and Candelária. In another, more poetic and less anchored in its referent, we see a tiny Ilha Fiscal transformed by the artist into a kind of boat sailing through a thick fog.

While the exhibition presents us with a pictorial dimension whose roots lie in the satellites, on the other, we are faced with a second landscape of the same space, constructed from the intimate condition of a flâneur, with items found on the streets and collected throughout the artist's stay in the city. Thus, awaiting us are a modernist sofa, empty picture frames and frames, rugs, a coat rack, telephones, tiles copied from the hydraulic models of the traditional Confeitaria Colombo, geometric wallpaper, and a reproduction of a tiny facade of the Odeon cinema. But note: everything is painted gray.
 
A Reflection on the City

This gesture not only confers a second death on the objects—they are definitely not there in their functioning states—but also has the effect of bringing everything together under a single veil that calls us to discern the differences between them with effort. For, amidst the gray, there are unsuspected hues. It is through our commitment to the act of seeing that we are able to trace the relationships between the minimal landscape of objects and the public landscape appropriated by satellites and transfigured by painting. Thus, we capture the speed with which the urban fabric transforms the permanence of certain indices of private life, and we confront the difficulty of grasping diverse temporalities. "Poetics of a Landscape _ Memory in Mutation" becomes an especially pertinent exhibition as it positions itself as a reflection of a city that needs, more than ever, to reflect on itself and the destiny it wishes to chart. And since those who make a city are those who live in it, the exhibition ends by reminding us of the obvious: that this task is ours.