Collection

  • Jimmy Robert, Vanishing Point, 2013

    courtesy of Stigter Van Doesburg, Amsterdam

In his works Jimmy Robert raises issues related to the body: its representation, memory and visibility, at the same time referring to the narrative strategies borrowed from post-modernistic literature, which is based on subjective vision of history and readjusts from the logical, chronological plot. An example of this strategy is the work entitled "Vanishing Point", first presented during the 8. Berlin Biennale in 2014, in which the artist confronts the expressive and emancipation potential of dance and poetry with the minimalistic architecture serving as a physical emanation of the ideas. The installation is composed of a wooden structure, on which the artist placed a roll of paper, to be used as a screen for two looped video projections. The first video presents a figure dancing ecstatically inside a building of the Ministry of Education and Health in Rio de Janeiro, designed in the 1930s by Oscar Nemeyer and Lúcio Costa, Brazilian architects and modernistic urbanists, authors of modern architecture in South America. The scenes of the dancing euphoria are juxtaposed by the artist with images of the building’s architecture, its elegant, modernistic line, austere interiors and the white and blue flooring alluding to the colonial era. The looped video projection is accompanied by a looped “projection” for two voices – a peculiar dialogue between the rational, didactic male voice and the sensual female voice reciting in Portuguese the poem "First Lesson" (1979) by a Brazilian poet, Ana Cristina Cesar. The work was created as a form of resistance and a dramatic attempt at self-expression in the era of dictatorship of the 1970s, i.e. forty years after the pioneer building by Niemeyer and Costa had been adapted by the Nazifying regime of Vargas towards the end of WW2. Through the metaphorical loop of time and meanings between the lyrical voice and dance and the “epic” architecture, Robert shows interpenetration of these seemingly distant plains and intertwines them in an integral, unbreakable whole.

Year: 2013
Medium: mixed media
Format: variable

Material: birch wood structure, roll of paper, two looped videos transferred from the Super8 camera to HD, sound
Acquisition: purchase
Ownership form: collection
Source: Stigter van Doesburg
Index: MSN: 4300-10/2015
Acquisition date:
Financing source: Cofinanced by the Ministry of Culture and National Heritage under the 'National collections of contemporary art 2015' priority