Sharing Illusions (2022)

 

 

Letter to Tales Frey (or under the sign Gemini Zodiac Sign)

 

It was on a Monday morning that you sent me a DM inviting me to write this text. We didn’t know each other, so I only knew about your work through exhibitions or through algorithms that got it right by showing me clothes — which you call “indumentos” — built to connect two bodies by the legs, as in the performance art-photo-video Red Carpet (2019) or through the trunk, as in Conductive Wire (2020).

Ever since I saw your production, I remembered how our dear Félix González-Torres (Cuba, 1957 – United States, 1996) introduced a homoerotic element [1] in the hallucination of neutrality of “minimalist aesthetics” — which, deep down, has highly masculine, white, and American assumptions, that is, something quite localized. He strained abstraction and autobiography, while you, in your doubles and multiples, use objects and signs that lead me to think of a universe related to the urban middle-classes, with the social and racial implications of this context. Luminous neons or acrylic signs, velvet clothes, gray hoodies and t-shirts, backlights, high heels, tutus. Elements with heavily coded gender markers that you recombine, demonstrating the limits of binary thinking and other possibilities for articulation.

In some conversation, you mentioned that when you were child, your mother had a women’s gym. Far beyond a personal anecdote, this fact led me to elaborate some questions. First, how this imagery of neons, red dresses and advertising icons seems to relate to an era. Perhaps your adolescence and early adulthood between the 1990s and 2000s, while you were still studying and working in theater. This is important information, as you started in the so-called fine arts dealing with performance art. You even edit a magazine [2] on the subject and, even in the production of objects, there is something performative and scenic in your practice.

But the most complex question that came to me was: What is the status of the body in your work? Something already converted into code. Maybe that’s why the elements you mobilize can be exchanged in multiple internal combinations, but also in different supports or, better, “bodies”. Finite Counts for Infinite Variations (2017) emerged as a performance in which you reproduce the poses that Bruce McLean (1944), Scottish artist, developed in Pose Work for Plinth (1971) and which is the basis for his reinterpretation. Just as he presents the photos of the action in which he emulates a sculpture [3], you also present the images of what could be ephemeral.

Legs are another sign you deal with a lot. The sculpture XXL Lag With Single Foot (2021) is unfolded in videos that record his manipulations. There is another kinetic acrylic wall sculpture in which eight drawings of this member form a circle. Thighlighting (2020), with its title in English and the iconic and eye-catching aspect of an advertising gadget, keeps the same graphic aspect of other works, such as the backlights of the “Double Penetration” series (2021) that show phallic shapes creating a kind of alphabet, presented sometimes just as contours, sometimes just as a shadow, or as a mixture of the two.

What does this body reduced to a code say about our historical moment? Of life mediated for so long by screens? Of instrumental social relations? It is not about the body as interiority, or a phenomenological and indeterminate experience. Perhaps because gender and race are experiences that, deep down, are codes used to control power…

You are an artist who writes, edits, makes performances, objects, videos, photos, teaches and curates. The same problems are addressed and re-articulated both in internal variations in each of the works, as in the set of their activities. Eroticism and permutation. A polymorphism that makes me think about how capitalism camouflages itself and infiltrates the veins of the days to condition us. Would your work be an emulation of this problem? A critic? A symptom of that experience.

The Sharing Illusions exhibition opens in June, the month of LGBTQIA+ pride and its anniversary. Under the Gemini Zodiac sign, you share with us your doubles, re-articulated bodies and projects carried out with other artists, friends, family, and loves. Trapezists Twins (2022), by the way, is the installation – instruction that invites the audience to this fragile balance experienced by two. These are unpublished works in São Paulo and which, in addition to being produced at different times, have already been presented in other situations — which makes me return, almost obsessively, incorporating their way of operating, to the possibilities of rearrangement within each work, between them and in their practice.

In black, white, and red, the palette chosen for the show also seems to deal with color as a code, especially gender. The red and velvet drape of Sissyparity (2020) evoke party dresses and, from within a pile of fabric, you dress each of your limbs with an element, which generates the illusion of a profusion of different bodies and is reiterated by the mirrored way you present the photo or video doubles. But there is something important to comment on this work: the pun between the word “sissy”, a pejorative slang term for fag in English – and which, like “faggot”, our community positively incorporates – and the word cissiparity. This phenomenon is “a type of asexual reproduction […] observed in bacteria, may also occur in some protozoa and yeasts” [4]. A body that divides itself potentially to infinity, therefore. We could do many senses of this association, but I will focus on the one that touches me the most: the problem of the double and its multiple derivatives as an existential position, so to speak, which implies welcoming diversity into unity and vice versa.

The problem of splitting (or sharing?) made me think of the character in the novel Avalovara [5] whose name is a symbol. I imagine you haven’t had time to read this book since we started talking and you came to Brazil from Portugal for work. But I foresee your identification with this figure who has two bodies, two ages, two births, “split-up and unified asteroid”, who sees the world “from a double perspective” and speaks “with a double mouth”. Duplicity without antagonism. Multiplicity in unity. Perhaps inhabiting two thoughts and two bodies will open a fracture necessary for any germination. Fissure and freedom. Love and revolution. I hope you are happy — just that — with the exhibition and with the year ahead.

 

A hug,

Leandro Muniz

 

NOTAS

[1] See: AULT, Julie (org.). Félix Gonzalez-Torres. Göttingen: Steidl, 2006.

[2] The digital magazine Performatus, founded in 2012, whose editions are annual, is edited by Frey and the artist and researcher Hilda de Paulo, who is also his companion. Available in: <https://performatus.com.br/>. Accessed in 10/06/2022.

[3] In: <https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/mclean-pose-work-for-plinths-3-t03274 >. Accessed in 11/06/2022.

[4] In: <https://brasilescola.uol.com.br/o-que-e/biologia/o-que-e-cissiparidade.htm>. Accessed in 11/06/2022.

[5] LINS, Osman. Avalovara. Sao Paulo: Editora Melhoramentos, 1973. Available in an annotated digital version in: <http://www.um.pro.br/avalovara/>. Accessed in 10/06/2022.

 

ARTWORKS

1) Tales Frey, Gestures that Survive in Us, 2020. Video, 04’29”;

2) Tales Frey, Finite Counts for Infinite Variations (Polyptych), 2017. Digital photography on cotton paper, 26,5 x 28,2 cm each;

3) Tales Frey, Trapezist Twins, 2022. Interactive installation composed of circus trapeze and adhesive instruction variable dimensions;

4) Tales Frey, Triumph, 2019. Performative object composed of boxing gloves in naval leather, foam and stitching, 80 x 25 x 30 cm;

5) Tales Frey, Double Penetration, 2021. Wooden crates with light and acrylic, 120 x 10 15 cm each;

6) Tales Frey, XXL Lag With Single Foot – Manipulation I and II, 2021. Video, 04’21”;

7) Tales Frey, Thighlighting, 2020. Acrylic kinetic objects and rotary motor, 100 cm / 60 cm / 30 cm diameters of each piece.

 

 

Exhibition Sharing Illusions (2022), by Tales Frey. Verve Gallery, São Paulo-SP, Brazil. Photo by Estúdio em Obra

 

Exhibition Sharing Illusions (2022), by Tales Frey. Verve Gallery, São Paulo-SP, Brazil. Promotional video for social networks

 

Parallel Program

July 15, 2022 at 6pm

Performance art Il Faut Souffrir pour Être Belle by Tales Frey with participation of Paola Frey.

 

Performance art Il Faut Souffrir pour Être Belle (2022), by Tales Frey. Verve Gallery, São Paulo-SP, Brazil. Promotional video for social networks