José Patrício

Claudia Laudanno: -¿How does the sense of an ars combinatoria function in your site-specific works, resolved through a “widened field” of view?

José Patrício: -The body of work entitled Ars combinatoria is based on the utilization of domino bones displayed directly on the floor of the exhibition space, or on a low pedestal, or even on the walls, in the manner of paintings-objects, always taking into account their interrelation with the architecture that “welcomes” or “hosts” these works, the circulation of visitors, and the spectators ́ field of vision.

C.L: -What are the guidelines, rules or prospective results that govern the arrangement of your large-scale works?

J.P: -The assemblage of the pieces is preceded by an explicit and restricted rule. However, every time the work is assembled, the countless underlying combinatory possibilities materialize freely, in a continuous articulation of the modular units. The end result depends not so much on one ́s intended control over choices but on the intervention of randomness and indetermination, in such a way that the monumental piece is defined at the very moment of its final arrangement, which involves those thousands of modules with their numeric and chromatic variables.

C.L: -Within these playful appropriations of ordinary, everyday objects (domino bones), what kind of “spatiality” do you create? How do you investigate, in turn, the poetic
possibilities in close relationship with the recourses of accumulation and modularity?

J. P: -This is achieved through an apparent limitation of a technical nature, with the domino tiles resting loose on the floor. The occupation of the space and the ad infinitum combination of the small-sized elements, interacting reciprocally, generate pictorial situations, but based on objecthood, that is to say, they “produce pictorial- like structures” in a state of rupture, with the Renaissance “window” and with painting ́s facture and exhibition conventions, but these are progressing towards the monumental object. On a regular and orderly surface, a probability field of ephemeral existence implies a potential “chaos”, which has its own
regulation syntax, namely, it is an orderly chaos arranged according to diversity and multiplicity. The appropriation and investigation of the poetic variants implicit in the domino tiles occurs in the context of a plastic-formal tradition, resorting to the recourse of modularity and accumulation as basic procedures for the construction of the plural-work and its subsequent meanings.

C.L: - This system of continual conversions, proper to your Ars Combinatoria, produces proposals which are not merely chromatic but are also graphic, mural, Neo-optical and Neo- kinetic. In this respect, what kind of site-specific project will you be showing at the ARCO 2008 Fair in Madrid? How do you work on this research together with your curator, art historian and critic Moacir dos Anjos?

J.P: - The work selected by curator Moacir dos Anjos, which will be featured in Madrid in the course of ARCO 2008, is comprised of domino bones made from white resin, in subtle tonalities and nuances and in different sizes. These tiles are grouped on the floor following the logic of series of perfect squares comprised of 28 pieces. In this future work, structures of different tones and dimensions will coexist side by side, arranged in accordance with the number of tiles I will employ. Working with Moacir dos Anjos, who has been accompanying my creative process for quite a while now, is always a stimulating experience. Besides, the fact that we both live in the same city, Recife, in northeastern Brazil, makes it possible for us to meet frequently and talk about aesthetic issues that we find interesting.

C.L: -Ars Combinatoria is a Post-avant-garde hybrid. It is part of the legacy and the heritage of assemblage and the Neo- constructive and Neo-concrete experiences that Brazil witnessed as of the 1950s, isn ́t it?

J.P: -Without any doubt. The Constructive and Neo-constructive heritage is present in the poetics involving my objects and installations and also in a considerable part of the production of contemporary Brazilian artists. For this reason, it was through my interest in modular elements – used in some works from the late 1990s – that I discovered the domino tiles as “signifying” elements for the composition of chromatic and graphic structures. And as a counterpart to the reductionist rationalism of the concrete movement, the Neo-concrete movement meant, for us, in Brazil, the affirmation of an “experimental” space at the same time as the possibility to opt for a more expressive character of art, postulations whose references are included in the theoretical conception and reflection present in Ars combinatoria.

C.L: -What differences in terms of space did you find at the time of staging your installation, in the group exhibit The Kinetics, held at the Centro de Arte Reina Sofía National Museum in Madrid, and now in this your only international traveling exhibition at the Tomie Ohtake Institute in São Paulo, Brazil? Because, evidently, there are differences. Each “enclave” generates different “tropes” or different figures.

J.P: -Curator Osbel Suárez selected the work Ars combinatoria to integrate it into LO[S] CINÉTICO[S] (The Kinetic [s]). Once the installation was staged in the hall of the temporary exhibitions section of the museum, the surface covered by the domino bones was multiplied through the setting up of mirrors on two strategic walls of the exhibition space. As for the exhibition of the same work at the Tomie Ohtake Institute in São Paulo, Ars combinatoria occupies a rectangular area in the vast topology of the mentioned institution.