Artist: Antonio José Campos Dos Santos
Date: 1998
Size: 135 x 70 cm
Museum: Culturgest - Fundação Caixa Geral de Depósitos (Lisboa, Portugal)
Technique: Sculpture
BRAZILIAN ALCHEMYTunga is what the name suggests, if it is possible for an artist’s name to be an onomatopoeic description of his work. “Tuuunga” seems to be a sound version of the impact of his works, which are often monumental and always come from a Brazilian tellurian force. “Tuuunga”, as a percussion, a repeating vibration, like an immense force, even if this is only felt in small objects. One magnet, many magnets that are kept inside and outside a recipient, like the crystals of the Amazon, like the shattering of contradictions that make Brazil what it is, against all probabilities. His work, in the enormous installations that use copper wires, magnets, sculptures or any elements that turn up, is an alchemy on the processes of joining, gathering and putting together what can be separated. Emerging amid this panoply of devices is a Brazilian,anthropophagic monumentality, a capacity to swallow up everything and bring everything together. However, the tellurian expression in Tunga’s works meets the overriding influence of Joseph Beuys in a common need to make the space theatrical, to form situations that live off a powerful staging of force, which is paradoxically delicate in its precisions. That is the attraction of his works, tautologically made metaphor in the relationship between force and power that inspired Kant in his defining of the Sublime. It is this tropical romanticism that feeds Tunga’s work.Delfim Sardo
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