“O peso de cada um” (The Weight of Each One) is reviewing the impressive work of Brazilian artist and sculptor Iole de Freitas. Born in 1945 in Belo Horizonte she’s become one of the most influential voices of Latin American art redefining the use of material and its relationship to the installational environment. Hosted by Rio de Janeiro’s Museum of Modern Art, MAM Rio, the exhibition occupies the entire monumental space of the premises with a new site-specific installation composed of three large scale sculptures (two of which are suspended) in matte stainless steel as well as a series of works in glass with photographic print on film dating back to 1996/1999, from the artist’s and the museum’s collections.

SHARE THIS ARTICLE O Peso de Cada UM, Iole de Freitas, through 17 January, Museum of Modern Art Rio de Janeiro mamrio.org.br

Within her professional journey of 40 years, Iole de Freitas is now working whith steel plates instead of the polycarbonate and steel tubes structures that had been marking her production since 2000. For the MAM Rio’s Monumental Space, she created two suspended sculptures with curved stainless steel places that are twisted and tensioned by steel lines. Each plate measures 6m x 1,5m each, and the sculptures weight about 800 kilos each. The third sculpture is placed on the space’s floor and weights two tons.

Despite the material’s specificities, however, the sculptures are suspended in the air, evolving through the space in an unfathomable ethereal dance, their original weight giving way to the idea of lightness and movement. The current pieces conserve the thin line between the gestural and the geometric, or between expressiveness and formal precision, which has always been present in this set of works, but it is now coupled with the unexpected recovery of the reflections and mirrorings that the artist used in her works during the 1970s, at the outset of her career.

From her training in dance and ballet, Iole de Freitas retained the values of displacement and elasticity that the corporal gestures activate in space, along with the simultaneously precise and voluble nature of the intersections between form and environment.

The duality between mirroring and opaqueness – qualities that alternate along the surface of the sheets – describe a body that is simultaneously rigid and fluid, sometimes integrating and absorbing the external reality, sometimes affirmed as a concrete substance and visual limit. The sculptures’ previous aspect of spatial mobility has thus been complemented by a further sign of their perceptive volatility.

Contrary to earlier works, the artist chose for this show to eliminate all materials that could make reference to the idea of lightness and translucency. The present use of strong stainless steel sheets thus demands new formal arrangements, a greater expenditure of forces for the maintenance of their balance and preciseness in the work’s rhythmic and kinematic questions. Aspects that are all contributing to de Freitas’ interest in building a deep relationship between her installations and the respective museum’s architecture – a subject she’s been occupied with ever since the 1990s when she started her research on the question “Para que servem as paredes dos museus?” (What are museums walls for?).