artnexus #90

Iole de Freitas (Belo Horizonte, 1945) has a particular relationship with space, evident since her formative years. She studied contemporary dance and later design at the Escola Superior de Desenho Industrial in Rio de Janeiro, worked for several years as a designer in Milan and began to create and exhibit her art in the early 1970s with photographic sequences and film ex-periments that proposed unique criteria for installation. After these early experiences, in the 1980s Iole de Freitas worked on sculptures using wire, copper, saws, plastic and other textile-industry materials, and over the following decade moved slowly towards flat surfaces and large curves, building sur-prising articulations that played with the space that contained them, which began to acquire an increasingly more central role. As the artist puts it, she has a special fascination for the work of Tatlin, whose “counter-reliefs” make it possible to cut space. Her various site-specific works drove her to build a poetics of space and to establish a highly personal dialog with architecture, revealing her interest in engaging the challenge implied by built space. Her way of intervening inside and out-side proposes a vision of the notion of the boundary, which moves between the walls that contain the works, and the boundary acquires an accidental character. As members of the audience, observing her sculptural interventions involves accepting the demand of being an active part of that dislocation of space, allowing the body to live its experience of it. The process achieved a growing dynamism and monumentality, alongside the reformulation of questions that were latent in Iole de Freitas’ work. Her project Para que servem as paredes do museu? (What are the museum walls for?), recently opened at Casa Daros in Rio de Janeiro, is inscribed in the artist’s constant question: “Exactly what is that shakes, breaks, sections space?” 
IVONNE PINI