Jonas Arrabal: Ensaio sobre uma duna

In Ensaio sobre uma duna [Essay on a dune], an unprecedented installation that occupies the center of the Sala Casa and gives its name to Jonas Arrabal's first solo exhibition at Athena Gallery, we have almost an overview of Arrabal's output, bringing together apparently very diverse materials that have interested him since 2011. It is like a curious dialogue with the boxes in a suitcase of Marcel Duchamp or with André Malraux's idea of an imaginary museum. Arranged on shelves and reverberating through the walls are elements of nature and organic materials such as squid paint, twigs, shells, barnacles, oysters, shellfish and other scraps, as well as some sort of collection of salt samples extracted from the water of places such as the beach in Rio de Janeiro, Concepcion Bay in Mexico, and the beach in Riomaggiore on the Ligurian Sea (Italy). There are also industrial materials such as glass, steel, mirror, bitumen, lead and bronze.

In my notes for this text, I stated that these organic and industrial materials are in opposition, but as I wrote then I tended to think that they are actually very close together. " Everything important that I have done can be put into a little suitcase," said Marcel Duchamp. In his Essay, Jonas Arrabal places materials side by side that are important to tell our story. Materials that are in the present to talk about past and future, which are both remembrance and expectations. They help us tell the story of human "progress," but they are also part of the story of the artist himself. 

Jonas Arrabal was born in Cabo Frio, the largest city in the Lake District of the state of Rio de Janeiro and the destination of his family of oriental origin in the early 20th century. Founded in the early years of the 16th century by the Portuguese, Cabo Frio had for a long time in the extraction of salt its main economic activity. The 1930s were the peak of salt production, with 120 extraction points that produced about 80 thousand tons of salt per year – virtually 70% of all the salt that was consumed in the country at that time. In the last four decades, this volume has decreased dramatically to the modest 15 thousand tons in recent years.

The brightness of the salt pans in the landscape and their relationship with the ocean, also an experience of abundance, decline and ruin, mark the artist's approach. A fundamental aspect permeates these questions: time. Or rather, the passage of time. Whether in the affective or historical/functional sphere, time is the space between two points. It is duration. For the artist, time is a sculptural tool that acts on bodies, on the landscape. Here, time means action, a verb, but it also means a climate, weather and agent of the landscape. Much of Jonas Arrabal's thinking is anchored in observing time and how to make it visible.

The image of a dune, present in the title of this exhibition, is like a visual representation of time and the artist's work process. Like natural hourglasses, dunes are ecosystems built by the action of winds, which wear down rocks or gather small grains of very fine sand in gigantic quantities. When they hit obstacles on the way, such as vegetation, they bulk up and gradually turn into mountains of various shapes and sizes. In constant transformation, dunes can change their shape, move, decrease or increase, depending on the strength and direction of the winds, and the resistance they find along the way.

Like the dunes (and tides), Jonas Arrabal's production brings together elements that meet and reorganize themselves constantly, even showing their structures and verses, as essays interested in experiencing. In just over ten years of work, the artist has been building a body of work that reflects on the constant transformation of things and places. Everything here exists, has existed and continues to exist. It has a past, it resists in the present, and it rearticulates itself in an attempt to guarantee the possibility of a future. In his Essay on a Dune, Jonas Arrabal shows us that insisting on longing to stay alive is inevitable.

Fernanda Lopes