Tiago Estrada – The Wall of Pleasure, by Jonathan Beer, 05 Apr 2013

In his most recent exhibition with Rooster Gallery, ‘The Wall of Pleasure,’ Portuguese artist Tiago Estrada (b. 1967) confronts the contingencies of expression and the boundaries of language. The title refers to the central work occupying the ground floor of the gallery. Repetitive onomatopoeias are scrawled across the walls in a neat handwritten text. The ‘sounds’ are guttural and animalistic, “OOOOOOHHHHHH” and “URRRRR,” cartoon sound effects of physical exertion, undoubtedly those associated with sex. The arrangement of the handwritten sounds comes filtered through an intellectual construct – the deviations of scale and arrangement are evocative of an organic and almost cellular pattern, possibly meant to suggest the non-linear evolution and architecture of language itself.

It seems that the silence of the space indicates this linguistic experiment is to remain a purely intellectual instantiation of the onomatopoeia; an exercise to show that within language as a large form, smaller forms of language and expression coexist. Those notions are soon swept away as the audio component of Estrada’s work is introduced. The space is quickly thrust into a new situation as waves of heavy breathing, percussion, animalistic grunts and moans reverberate throughout the space. The piece was composed by Mão Morta bandmembers Adolfo Luxúria Canibal and António Rafael, in collaboration with Estrada.

‘The Wall of Pleasure’ limited edition vinyl record – which includes the sound piece composed by Adolfo Luxúria Canibal (b.1959) and António Rafael (b.1971), in collaboration with Estrada and three original drawings.

The sound is so dense and overwhelming that the ground floor of the gallery transforms into a mental interior of a recorded breathing, grunting human. We look out from inside the physicality of that experience and gaze upon these onomatopoeias which hang on the walls. The white gallery is rendered invisible by the invasive sound, leaving the words to seemingly hang in the air itself, some letters contracting and diminishing while others grow larger.

As the recording plays on the exhibition continues in the basement space. The descent feels corporeal; the trip to the subterranean gallery is correlative to Estrada’s more expressionistic and automatic visual explorations of language on display there. Language becomes fuzzy in this cloistered space, we hear the muffled (though still specific) sounds of the ‘body’ above us, but below we are witness to language pulled apart and less constructed. The six watercolor and graphite works downstairs are representative of the artist’s earlier trajectory: pale but clear passages of color stain paper that contain fragmented and non-descript drawings. Estrada is composing images but with more of an automatic touch, and in combination with the installation and sound piece a parallel between his practice and the Surrealist and Dada movements emerges.

I believe that part of Estrada’s interest lays in questioning automatism’s validity as a creative practice: his own attempts at creating seemingly random pictures are never truly free from the pattern recognition software hardwired in his (and his audience’s) brain. Here a connection materializes to some of the artist’s earlier work which was concerned with trying to upset this very same pattern (in this case, text) recognition process by making marks that mimicked the visual form of handwritten language yet devoid of linguistic information. Again, he uses drawing to undermine language and dissect communication.

The Wall of Pleasure is the beginning of Estrada negotiating the spatial possibilities woven into visual communication and internalizing considerations of scale and translation in relationship between site specific and smaller, independent works. While small conflicts arise between the mechanical style of the handwritten onomatopoeias and the organic and fluid appearance of his previous work, this wrinkle does not diminish the emergent sensate experience that arises from the total experience of the exhibition.

Tiago Estrada is represented by Rooster Gallery, graduated in painting at the School of Fine Arts of Oporto, completed an MFA in Painting at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst and is represented at MoMA Archives, Drawing Center’s Digital Archive Online, Culturgest (Lisbon), Colecção ECO (Marvão). ”The Wall of Pleasure” also comprises the launch of a limited edition vinyl record – which includes the sound piece and three original drawings – and a live performance by Adolfo Luxúria Canibal and António Rafael on April 20th at Rooster Gallery.

Adolfo Luxúria Canibal is a founding member and lead singer of Mão Morta, a published poet, lawyer by trade, and an agitator. António Rafael joined Mão Morta in 1990 and is the band’s keyboard and guitar player

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The Writing on the Wall, the Paintings in the Basement by Thomas Micchelli on April 20, 2013

It’s not uncommon for artists to fall short of their own expectations, only for the public to find delight in the charged gap between the aspiration and the goal.

In the case of Tiago Estrada: The Wall of Pleasure, which is on view through tomorrow at the Rooster Gallery on the Lower East Side,  the artist’s stated intentions are impossible to achieve, but that doesn’t stand in the way of a thoroughly enjoyable show.

Estrada, a Portuguese artist born in 1967, has been focusing on the intersection of handwriting and drawing for a number of years. In a statement dated April 2011, which appears on the Artist Registry website of the Drawing Center, New York, he writes:

Western writing practices reflect the way we draw. These inclinations have an important role in the formation of our persona. The ways in which we doodle and scribble are similar and repetitive in their essence.

According to the press release for The Wall of Pleasure, Estrada is attempting “to find a truly apprehensible universal language, not guided by any set of grammatical rules or even mental inhibitions.”

The installation’s “use of repetitive onomatopoeia written on the walls,” which takes up the small storefront gallery’s entire street level, is meant to isolate “the notion of scream, particularly the one associated with sexual intercourse in Western culture.”

Tiago Estrada, “The Wall of Pleasure” (2013). Detail of site-specific installation. Wall drawing and sound, variable dimensions.

This means that there are lots of clustered “Ohs,” “Uhs” and “Aiiiis” written in black marker on the white walls in various sizes and configurations. A comparison to bathroom graffiti is as expected as it is unkind, but it is also difficult to sidestep. And that’s about as universal, at least to my mind, as the language of the show gets.

However, if you ignore the installation’s intention and just pass your eyes over the shapes that the word clusters take on, you can feel as if you are immersed in a black-and-white aquarium with dozens of schools of fish darting by. Not an unpleasant sensation in the least.

The portion I heard from the accompanying sound piece, composed by Adolfo Luxúria Canibal and António Rafael in collaboration with Estrada, was terrific — a pulsing, grating wave that lends heft and urgency to the loopy lettering on the wall. And you can pick it up on limited-edition vinyl for twenty bucks.

But that’s not the end of the story. In the gallery’s basement, at the bottom of a dizzying spiral staircase, six paintings done in watercolor, graphite and colored pencil gouache on paper are on display. While they are not particularly sizable works, each 31 inches tall with widths varying from 31 to 38 inches, their expansive passages of white paper interrupted by spills of pale oranges, yellows and greens, textured with graphite jots and rubbings, make them feel big and open.

Imagine Joseph Beuys with a Mediterranean soul and you’ll get an idea of what these works look like. The limpid colors and silvery marks evoke aerial landscapes, however elliptically. The seemingly random interactions between the watercolor washes and the faint, squirrelly graphite appear to be simultaneously pushing into and pulling off the surface, a there/not there quality both lyrical and arresting.

And speaking of Beuys, the landscape allusion got me thinking that his student Anselm Kiefer would not feel so ponderous at times if he had more of Beuys’s — and Estrada’s — lightness of touch.

The paintings are collectively titled “Newbies” (all 2013) and are numbered one through six. A brief chat with the gallery director revealed that they came about through a distillation of writing gestures, which the artist reduced until there were no letters left, only the abstract movement of marks.

But all that extraction seems to have brought Estrada to a place where he has unintentionally escaped his conceptual trappings and drilled down to a true universal language, which is and has always been, simply, painting. And that’s beautiful.

Tiago Estrada: The Wall of Pleasure continues at Rooster Gallery (190 Orchard Street, Lower East Side, Manhattan) through April 21.

http://hyperallergic.com/69161/the-writing-on-the-wall-the-paintings-in-the-basement/