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Contributing to the debate on the work of Antonio Dias

A good way to start is to recall one of the early origins of the West. In his Theogony, Hesiod sings like the Muses, the divine messengers, who assertively claim the veiling and unveiling power:

Shepherds of the wilderness,
Wretched things of shame, mere bellies!
We know how to speak many false things as though they were true
But we know, when we will, to utter true things.

This double role, which promotes the most earthly illusion, or a truth that goes beyond history, of the infinite, would also be art. From this perspective we can endeavour to imagine an approximation to the work of Antonio Dias – in fact, to very few fragments of his work – as a thought system.
Let us, in order to do so, use a figure that has been frequently repeated in his work: the rectangle with voids, a rectangle, from which a square has been removed from one of the sides, and which Antonio used as a banner even in the war zone between Nepal and Tibet; he raised his banner of this rectangle with a part missing.
This emblematic figure is, on one hand, a scheme that can be imagined in a completely abstract way, and, on the other, it will find in Antonio’s work a wide range of concrete, solid, liquid, pasty and aerial forms to such an extent that it can be taken as a co-principle, as a matrix. We recall the old and precious rule used to obtain a Fibonacci spiral through a succession of golden partitions: a rectangle is built where the smallest side is to the largest as it is to the sum of both; the same procedure is repeated on the smaller side, and afterwards in the newly produced golden rectangle, and so on; this way of regulating growth, through successive additions, of a given system or object is so common in nature that it will be found guiding from the distribution of sunflower seeds to the shape of the branch of the galaxy in which we live, perhaps.
But someone like Antonio seeps out of the rectangle – removes partly one side and creates a gap, and now there’s a problem, because by creating the curve, it has no attractor, no route, no end; therefore it becomes, indeterminate.We may perhaps try to understand the sense of this problem-raising leakage recurring to the enunciation by Antonio himself:

I want to create a universe within the rectangle (...)
says our ambitious demiurge... and afterwards,
(...) and afterwards, to create a whole, to remove something
from this rectangle..

It is this breach, this removal, which allows the former rectangle to move beyond its boundaries, and the indeterminate to emerge, which to some extent is broader, more open, more encompassing due to the fact that it has spread. Two things are to be considered: first, suppose that Antonio proposes, with his breached module, the image of something missing: this breached module will always repeat itself and in every piece there will be a gap, a hiatus, a kaos (going back to Hesiod), and through this kaos something will be missing, something over-missing.
So it would be a module for repetition, for perpetuation, of something missing. But this understanding might also seem unsatisfactory, to the extent that a void, a reiterated and insistent void, reminds us of something that was inclusive, integral, complete. Perhaps it would be more challenging to consider that this seepage, this opening, would point to something that will still be filled, the breached module does not carry something that has been repeating itself since the past, but suggests something that will repeat itself, that will reverberate in the future.
One can imagine, in the first case, that the amputated rectangle, in its many re-presentations, would suggest an enigma: a never-ending question, because a primitive original unit has been breached, and since then one element, one fragment is missing, it has to be found; so the Sphinx, the plague-enigma, continuously implores: give me what this missing piece, give me what I crave. But this missing piece and this desire are relentless, and the void is no longer a void, and the desire is no longer a craving, when the missing fragment is restored – when Oedipus finds the word to solve the riddle, the truth that restores the lost original unit. The concept of the riddle, therefore, has to do with past rupture, with a repeated fissure since the rupture, and this primitive craving has a closure, reaches an end, a solution, when the last fragment is put in place again.
But, it may also be imagined that Antonio actually proposes a maze, a problem. Meaning, that the missing fragment points towards forming new units, future units, and in this case the repeated module is building something that does not yet exist, it may only be an aura, a possibility, the power of something still to be. In other words, in those houses where two doors open onto nowhere. At first, it resembles a labyrinth like a spatial device, a route to nowhere, a closure device with no place to go, where neither the outside or inside door leads anywhere, leads only to nothingness, loneliness, the same undefined desert in which the where is undone.
Borges, nevertheless, offers another understanding of a labyrinth:

It is said by men worthy of belief (though Allah's knowledge is greater) that in the first days there was a king of the isles of Babylonia who called together his architects and his priests and bade them build him a labyrinth so confused and so subtle that the most prudent men would not venture to enter it, and those who did would lose their way. Most unseemly was the edifice that resulted, for it is the prerogative of God, not man, to strike confusion and inspire wonder. In time there came to the court a king of Arabs, and the king of Babylonia (to mock the simplicity of his guest) bade him enter the labyrinth, where the king of Arabs wandered, humiliated and confused, until the coming of the evening, when he implored God's aid and found the door. His lips offered no complaint, though he said to the king of Babylonia that in his land he had another labyrinth, and Allah willing, he would see that someday the king of Babylonia made its acquaintance. Then he returned to Arabia with his captains and his wardens and he wreaked such havoc upon kingdoms of Babylonia, and with such great blessing by fortune, that he brought low his castles, crushed his people, and took the king of Babylonia himself captive. He tied him atop a swift-footed camel and led him into the desert. Three days they rode, and then he said to him, "O king of time and substance and cipher of the century! In Babylonia didst thou attempt to make me lose my way in a labyrinth of brass with many stairways, doors, and walls; now the Powerful One has seen fit to allow me to
show thee mine, which has no stairways to climb, nor walls to impede thy passage.” Next, he untied the bonds and left him in the middle of the desert where he died of hunger and thirst. Let the glory be with He who does not die.

A desert-labyrinth; emptiness of a labyrinth; if we open the device, if it becomes a source of multiplicity, unpredictability, new conformations, we begin to understand the breached module as a starting point, a fork in the road, an operator that will choose possible routes: the crossroads, on the left is the road to Thebes, on the right to Corinth; the fork in the road is there, is there, absolutely necessary, but the traveller’s choice is casual, unpredictable, completely free. The labyrinth (and the fork in the road is the elementary unit, the atom, the maze) brings the image of a temporal device, a passage from the past into the future: whenever a choice is made, there is a selection, certain futures are feasible, while other futures are cancelled. Thus, instead of being a means to restore – or close – the past, the module repeats an infinite opening, of an exit to the future; it was repeated and now it becomes a repeater.
We therefore see that the reason for the persistence of this repetition operating device would not be so much to assure Antonio’s identity as a creator, back to the origin of his desire to create, but rather to insinuate a more difficult target, a harder task, an impetus, a drive, a compulsion to always open the work to something else that is not yet there. We may also find that innovative repetition in action in his latest work, in which there is a deviation towards more concrete materiality, which is so complex, almost pungent. For example: Water. A water molecule consists, we all know well, of two hydrogen atoms and one oxygen atom. What is not so well known is the fact that, due to this type of chemical bond between them, these atoms acquire clearly defined spatial form: the hydrogen atoms place themselves in order to establish a specific angle between them of approximately 106.5 degrees. This is typical in all water molecules.
Very well, what happens when a given vapour droplet from inside a cloud, which cannot be distinguished from numerous others, is touched by a sudden breath of cold wind, something amazing happens: like water molecules, which would slip almost freely over each other within, the droplets may consolidate themselves in infinite different ways when each droplet solidifies, the resulting snow flakes will always have an astonishing combination of a fixed standard hexagonal shape, with unusual ornaments, unique and varying from one flake to the next. In other words, the combination of one need – the basic hexagonal format which invariably repeats itself, expressing angular microscopic identity common to all water molecules, and one chance – the singular ornament which invariably does not repeat itself, expressing the relative distribution of the molecules during a peculiar circumstance in which crystallisation occurred. Through the combination of the necessary repetition and irreducible casuality, it is possible for the identical uniformity of the droplets to create a diversity of snowflakes. The delightful snow architecture is at the same time the magnified and multiplied result of the molecular structure and dynamics of water.
Nevertheless, snow flakes are delightful but not beautiful. They cannot be; there is no human dimension, the trace of this being that progresses in the void, hurling into the void, penetrating underneath what is still shapeless, succeeding to subjugate new forms, to extract new patterns, to redistribute the chessboard and pieces again and again. So when Antonio uses new materials, graphite, oxide, copper, gold, creating an integration of heterogeneous elements, a hybrid unit, we can see those densities being transformed, the roughness, this concreteness, into something like its own engine, like a wind blowing; we are then carried beyond, within us a labyrinth void opens; after being touched by the work, we are no longer the same. This is the power of lying in art: it deceives us so much that we forget ourselves.
Perhaps we should presume that, instead of something missing, and seeking it, it would be better to call this opening, which Antonio repeatedly presents and introduces to us, a void. Because to create a universe inside a rectangle it is necessary to set limits, but when these limits are breached, we have a problem, the challenge: what is outside this universe? What does this gap breach, and where does it lead to?
If the universe is understood as a Universe, a totality (and certainly every work of art is in itself a small whole), so what would exist, what would exist outside? The clay rooms give a body and a volume to the module-problem, hide and suggest a link, a fold: if the role of the leakage is to create a void – to let the void enter and exit –, which means that the universe is like a system in its own context; it becomes a whole and its outside is its own internal void; a world where the breached boundaries, instead of separating what is outside from the inside, brings the outside inside the inside. The kaos pulsates in each composition, inducing each constellation. The incompleteness is complete; gold, silver, bronze, iron curves compose shapeless shapes. The seepage, the void, opens to us.

Luiz Alberto Oliveira
Brazilian Physics Research Centre
Rio de Janeiro, 2007

Tranlated to English by Martha Maria Moreira Lima

Bibliography
Hesiod. Theogony.
Translated to Portuguese by Jaa Torrano. São Paulo: Roswitha Kempf Editores, 1986.
Borges, Jorge Luís. “The two kings and the two labyrinths”. In Portuguese in O Aleph. São Paulo: Globo, 1997.
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