Light, dispersive, ubiquitous: the non-sculpture of Iole de Freitas by Sônia Salzstein, 2020

The word sculpture could hardly be applied to most of the work created by Iole de Freitas throughout her career, which began in the early 1970s after a significant experience in dance, a form of art she had practiced from the ages of 6 to 25, and as a designer, from the mid-1960s to the early 1970s. Her biography, as we can see, places body, movement and form (or the limits of form, which she always tried to stretch) at the center of the artist’s concerns, immediately suggesting an affinity with sculpture – but also signaling her interest in contemplating these three major axles of her work through an approach that extends far beyond sculpture. In any case, although her production preserves an original bond with sculpture, that is, with the primordially corporal language that this form of art affirms, it has branched out into a multiplicity of spatial proposals — photographs, performances, films, reliefs, installations — , and has never ceased to strain the classical, constructive premises of the sculpture tradition.

The super-8 films created by Iole de Freitas between 1972 and 1973 already announced a poetics of the body, which would irrigate all of the spatial interventions the artist would make in her career. In these films, it is remarkable how the perception of the body itself invariably appears fused to the environment in which it moves — or that moves it. These are works that ignore depth of field, for everything happens by means of surface events, a succession of membranes that are seen enveloped in a halo of light, that slide amongst each other in a bundle of intrinsically physical and sensorial relations, dissolving spatial hierarchies and limits. So complete is the spatiotemporal perception of the body in these films that one would not know what is “inside” or “outside”. Air and light — or the body made into particles, synesthetically impregnating the whole environment — seem to be all that the world is made of.

The artist’s methodical dealings with sculpture itself would come to light in the early 1980s, and would be marked by a relentless and percussive consideration of the categories and repertoire of the sculptural tradition as we know it, cultivated in the legacy of classicism, in the monumental quality of its “virile forms”, a tradition whose classical allegories of totalization and spatial domination are historically summarized in the civic hygiene of the temple, the palace and the monument. Differently, a mode of operating as if from the edges — as if the artist sought to involve everything that the sculpture “left out”, freeing up breaches and voids — took hold in her work, from this early period.

This is not to say that Iole discards the constructive power that was also part of the classical tradition. On the contrary: in subsequent years, her work would delve into the constructive legacy of the modern avant-garde, emptying it of its programmatic and prescriptive aspects. Moreover, just as some of the neoconcrete artists had done less than two decades earlier, she reintroduced the issue of the body at the core of the constructive process, which naturally added a permanent focus of instability and formal indefiniteness to her work. A production in sculpture — or related to the field of sculpture — emerged, in tune with the anti-classical currents of contemporary art, but which did not abdicate the structural intelligence of the constructive tradition, and for which constructive and deconstructive forces of form would have to be equally considered and weighed.

Additionally, one could clearly see at this moment of consolidation of Iole’s artistic practice, how her work revealed consonance with experiences that had been tested by women artists around the world in relatively recent times: from Eva Hesse’s post-minimalism, to Yvonne Reiner’s exploration of dance and the plasticity of the body, to Lygia Clark’s experiments in reeroticizing the body from the mid-1960s onward, and from these to the Italian production of povera and body art, a movement in which Iole had also taken part, having been active in Italy in the vital years of its emergence. Since then, her work has matured into a language suited to surface phenomena, tensioned by a rich vocabulary of body expressions embodied in gesture. Of gesture itself, it would consolidate a fine efficiency, from fast and assertive to flat and restrained, a reservoir of tensions and possibilities, imparting speed and an extraordinary energetic potency to the work, which even on a large scale would never lose its homology with the body.

At the same time, between the 1980s and the 1990s, a repertoire of materials and constructive processes based on the delicacy of surfaces, but also on the violence of their imminent disintegration became established: translucent membranes and taut planes responded according to their greater or lesser ductility to folds, twists, cracks and sutures. Time radicalized these interventions beyond the reach of the gesture, and at the start of the second millennium a significant readjustment of scale took place, which began to demand structural reasoning from the work (which, however, never silenced the physical, corporal power, the first reference to gesture, to the dispositions and affections of the body). The artist hereafter contemplated her interventions in tension with architecture, at the same time that, by radicalizing a poetics of surfaces, she stretched the limits between interior and exterior, between “inside” and “outside” to a new level.

Light and open linear structures, almost always aerial, with a minimum of strategic support points, on the walls or on the ceiling; from the inside, they seemed to seek to swell or stretch the built spaces – they were species of organisms pressuring architecture with their twists, elevations, distensions, refrains…  Iole patiently deconstructed the classical paradigm of verticality, the perceptual premise of spatial coordinates, the privilege of a center of gravity of space, of which architecture and sculpture had historically been the quintessential repository.  From the spatial arrangements that extend in space with grace and cutting speed, seeking to overcome gravity, the titanic body energy still stands out in a well distributed economy of gesture, even if the works of the last two decades no longer bear the direct intervention of the artist’s hand.

This approach from the edges, which refuses the positivity of the objects; Iole’s predilection for interstitial, “atmospheric” spaces, evidently dialogues with the remarkable precedent of the experimentation done by already mentioned neoconcrete artists, such as Hélio Oiticica and Lygia Clark, who had radicalized the European constructive vanguard, leading it to unexpected outcomes anchored in a phenomenology of the body. But Iole, who could no longer count on the intimate, idyllic or regenerative dimension in which the neoconcretists had perceived the body, proposed this phenomenology of the body in the densely interwoven space of contemporary life, in a clash with the system of culture that neoconcretism, in its time, was not allowed to experience. In the light of a vigorous half-century trajectory, positioning itself, so to speak, on the edges of the constructive tradition, flanked by the pressures of an increasingly insidious and prescriptive spatial logic such as the one that regulates life in large contemporary metropolises, the work of Iole de Freitas has achieved a secret constructive power and subtlety, hidden in its small strategic gestures.

Sônia Salzstein