| A silent, scentless, slick and sinuous column of smoke travels 36 meters upward from the ground into the oculus of the rotunda above it at the speed of 120 kilometers per hour, continuously disappearing into a void. That which is deemed immaterial is here material. The impact of this blurring of boundaries and certainties is hard to qualify, but it is unlikely that anyone could be entirely impartial to it. The central piece of Anish Kapoor’s first solo exhibition in Rio de Janeiro, Ascension, is at once highly sophisticated and simple—a dichotomy inherent in the artist’s artistic production over the years. |  |
Transcending Physicality through Materials – Camilla Belchoir
A silent, scentless, slick and sinuous column of smoke travels 36 meters upward from the ground into the oculus of the rotunda above it at the speed of 120 kilometers per hour, continuously disappearing into a void. That which is deemed immaterial is here material. The impact of this blurring of boundaries and certainties is hard to qualify, but it is unlikely that anyone could be entirely impartial to it. The central piece of Anish Kapoor’s first solo exhibition in Rio de Janeiro, Ascension, is at once highly sophisticated and simple—a dichotomy inherent in the artist’s artistic production over the years.
The Centro Cultural Banco do Brasil in Rio houses a select group of works by Kapoor which engulf the viewer in a world of collapsed assertions and constant perceptive reassessments, one that creates feelings both of familiarity and estrangement. This is a group of works that challenges cognition to the extent that any contradictions present carry one towards a heightened sense of awareness—a gateway to transcending boundaries that were set, foolishly, in an attempt to confine the metaphysical.
The exhibition occupies the building’s main rotunda and first floor. Upon entry, Ascension sets the tone and, in watching the column of smoke dance to the conditions of its surroundings, one is reminded that sophistication resides in delivering the extraordinary ordinarily. Although what one confronts is a simple column of smoke drawn upwards by a huge industrial exhaust created by an aeronautical engineer specifically for this project, the logistics of how it functions doesn’t taint its auspicious condition. No matter how many times one’s seen it before, it is impossible to capture Ascension. It is organic, ever-changing, yet always familiar. To those who collect contemporary art, I imagine that this is a life-investment; a piece that will forever puzzle and delight as it is impossible to get bored with and impossible to truly “own.” It is so much more intriguing than a garden fountain, although not far from the yearning it ignites.
Ownership is a complex notion and Anish Kapoor’s works will always resist it. The first floor rooms show pieces less grandiose than Ascension, yet they are just as intriguing. Kapoor is not a sculptor in the operative sense of the word. He is a creator of conditions. Column is a steel cylinder 2.5 meters high, 1.5 meters wide and 1.5 meters in depth with a slit down the front allowing the viewer entry into its core. The inside is covered in the bluest blue lacquer and the feeling of confinement from the steel tube shape ends as soon as the viewer crosses a certain point inside; close enough to the reflective lacquer that one’s reflection dissolves horizontally into a new reformulation of the invisible self, outstretched and as one with the structure. All notions of depth and physical reference collapse, but referential memory allows another regression back out of it. I can’t help but think of Alice, falling down the rabbit hole.
Confronted head-on, When I am Pregnant seems like no more than a dirty patch on a pristinely white wall. At an angle, the smoothest of protrusions reveals itself as it bulges outward from the wall. Here, it appears anything but the obsessively sanded gesso it’s made up of.
Nearby, a huge and untitled solid brass piece is propped up against the wall and appears polished to a point beyond glistening. The twinkling vulva-like piece is daunting yet inviting; striking the familiar chord of empathy. Knowledge of its presumably cold and hard metallic feel doesn’t cancel out the sense of cosiness it entices.
Kapoor’s works entice the viewer to outstretch a hand and to confirm what the eye cannot assert. Yet, to the touch too, the works are surprising. Iris is a stainless steel porthole on a white wall. Its spiral reflections draw the environment that surrounds it inside, representing it anew to the viewer who, in turn, is also drawn into the piece in standing before it. Attempts to rectify the notion that one is not actually in another environment other than one’s original point of reference here translate to trying to touch the fine surface which separates them in the same way that skin does in delineating one’s body in space. Sky Mirror at the Rockefeller centre in New York during the autumn of 2006 brings the sky to the earth and touching the sky seems like reaching for an entirely different apex.
The bluest blue, the reddest red, the smokiest smoke, the brassiest brass; Anish Kapoor takes materials beyond their staple, recognisable states and presents them as somewhere between the real and surreal. They are thus undeniably what they seem and yet unfathomable such. Mere images do not do the real work justice. As Duchamp once declared, “It’s not what you see that is art, art is the gap.” Only this fully encapsulates Kapoor’s works.
