The installation Recuo ("Retreat"), created by Iran do Espírito Santo for the Capela do Morumbi at the Museu da Cidade de São Paulo, reasserts the artist's current concern with architectural design. Iran do Espírito Santo is a tireless explorer of the design of objects as the starting point for his work, and the appropriation of architectural canons has been a constant in his career.
This work, structured as a mural painting by means of 54 strips in gray hues, arranged with great precision from light to dark, creates an optical effect of depth and three-dimensionality. Composed on a panel in wood and gesso in the same dimensions of the chapel's back wall, the color of the strips becomes more intense towards its center, where the darkest hue is placed. The last strip reproduces the symbolic reduction of the wall's design, opposed to the entrance threshold, which underscores its synthetic dialogue with the architectural space.
The artist harmonizes elements of minimalism and Pop Art with outstanding refinement. His creative gesture brings to mind the work of Gerardo Barros with flat spaces, by consciously dealing with the importance of presenting the relationships between the delineated shapes, which is characteristic of Modernism. One of the pillars on which Recuo is founded is perspective, and its creator carries this aspect to its ultimate consequences.
The artist introduces a degree of humor in his installation, as he challenges viewers entering the chapel and encountering the installation located in the back, directly across the entrance. The optical illusion brings visitors, by means of visual sensations, towards a space that becomes deep, like a tunnel—a retreat. As they approach the work, they are taken by surprise by the fact that their depth perception is only in the symbolic field. The installation is flat. In this way, the artist proposes a play between the pictorial space and the real space, a dialogue between the almost aseptic plane of the painting and the textured space of the architectural setting, the represented space and the physical space.
Curated by Douglas de Freitas, the exhibition was conceived for this single work, set in the space of the old Morumbi chapel; this strategy gives the installation a sacred-art undertone.
Capela do Morumbi is located in a preserved lot in the old Hacienda Morumbi, a São Paulo neighborhood that developed after the partition of the tea-growing hacienda. In the 1940s, the Morumby Company sold its last parcels; the Hacienda house was part of these last remaining lots, and near it was a decayed adobe building.
Several historical interpretations have been offered for that structure. It could have been a chapel devoted to St. Sebastian of the Slaves, and the restoration project pushed forward by architect Gregory Warchavchik already in the 1940s was based on this idea. The chapel remained closed until 1974, when the Morumby Real State Company donated it to the City of São Paulo. After a process of restoration, it opened for the public on January 25, 1980, for cultural activities.
The space, managed by the Museu da Cidade de São Paulo is devoted to contemporary art exhibitions.
Helcio Magalhaes