The idea of stretching a rope until its tension can be excessive and breaking is inseparable from its consequence: in the ricochet of its halves there is a hiss that foreshadows a whiplash, an impact that produces damage and a physical consequence on some target. The same can be said of any device of uncertain balance, like a seesaw. Every movement in a certain direction necessarily implies an opposite movement, and so on until the energy of the original movement is dissipated. In all these movements, in the flow of their causes and consequences, there is a correlation of forces, tensions and refluxes guided by the verticality of the force of gravity, by the attraction towards the ground. This tension towards the ground, which wears out all horizontal movement, is, at least for humans, the sign of the inevitability of the end, the announcement or permanent reminder that everything is drawn downwards and that finitude is the destiny of movement.

This is Gustavo Sumpta’s (Luanda, 1970) raw material in the various plastic forms he develops, from sculpture to installation and the multiple actions he has been carrying out.

The exhibition he is presenting at Galeria Solar is built around three large-scale projects that structure the physical and emotional space of the gallery.

The sculpture Levantar o Mundo [Raising the World], 2017, is a device designed for an action that nevertheless maintains, even in its absence, the tension of its expectation at rest. The huge steel board deposited on a large tyre intuits, in the power of its scale, the pendular movement with which the artist activates it; the installation Luto [Grief], 2020, is an environment built with VHS video tapes, placed like a cascade of suspended memories, blinded and muted, but present in the massive way that they stretch out, suspended, through space, in black waves as if a presence lived in them in a permanent vanishment. Finally, the sculpture Ofício de Viver. Ofício de Poeta [Life’craft. Poet’s craft], 2022, is a braided wall of tyres, tensioned in the architecture of space as if it were a wall as powerful as it is fragile.

The common point between these works – as well as, in several ways in relation to the others, that are sculptural, performative and videographic – lies in the way they bring together two topics: the air, present in the use of tyres and inner tubes, inherent to breathing but also to its lack, to the pressure that maintains the form sustained by the power of the breath; and the ground on which the tyres roll, where they settle and allow movement by their circularity – and, in that sense also gravity and attraction for what is below, that makes the unknown memories of the videotapes to be suspended, all of them also looking at loss, at lack. In short, towards the ground.

As in the sculpture Herdeiro Universal  (Universal Heir), 2022 – in fact, a device to be activated in the homonym performance – Sumpta’s theme is always associated with loss and resistance, with failure and its exactness, with foreknowledge and its deceptive character – or of a choreographic precision.

It is nothing more than, at each moment, to stage the possibility of inhaling until the limit of the body’s capacity, holding your breath and, before danger, exhaling in a controlled and conscious manner. And make of it an exercise with the right weight, in an extended time, in a light balance.

That is why the exhibition is called Sob o Signo do Pneu (Under the Sign of the Pneumatic Tyre). Of pneuma. Of the enormous weight resting on air.

Delfim Sardo