Lucas Simões’s practice is rooted in looking closely at modernist architecture. The work in this show arose from Simões’s investigations into blurriness, which is how he describes the separation between how an architect intends a building to be seen and used—and how the public feels about and lives with it in the real world. Norman Foster once said, “Architects design for the present, with an awareness of the past, for a future which is essentially unknown.” No matter how thoroughly an architect might anticipate the future needs of a building’s occupants, people are irrational and unpredictable. They use the spaces and objects around them in whatever ways make sense at a given moment, whether or not that use was forecast. babados&babadeiras is Simões’s reflection on the veils that keep us from fully knowing other people—or even ourselves.
The new sculptures hang on the wall or from the ceiling. They are made of sheets of steel—galvanized, carbon, copper-plated, or iridescent —that Simões has cut and bent into shapes reminiscent of Brutalist towers, arches from Pompeii, security fences, and a prominent building by Oscar Niemeyer. In many cases, Simões combines this steel with concrete (that he has pigmented and cast or extruded), a material central to both modernist architecture and Simões’s ever-evolving experiments in materials manipulation. He has also installed a floor-to-ceiling gauzy scrim that courses through the gallery, a means of blurring the appearance of his work.
Simões’s sculptures have always seemed to defy the basic rules of physics. Through clever engineering, he can make concrete feel as airy as a marshmallow, or steel as drapey as a ribbon of fabric. Despite the intellectual rigor of his practice, Simões is a sensualist forever enthralled by the erotics of tension and balance. Throughout his work, connections abound to the body and its many pleasures.
The sculpture luscofusco features four identical concrete tongues (or maybe potbellies) swelling out of a horizontal, rectangular steel armature. Simões cut opposing curves into the steel underneath each engorged form that, together with the concrete, recall the elegant, space-agey marble columns from Niemeyer’s Palácio da Alvorada, the official residence of the president of Brazil. Simões observes that the cultural significance of the iconic shapes created by these structural supports is in constant flux—the building stands as a metonym for the current president’s ideology during his four-year term. Luscofusco combines the Portugese words lusco (one-eyed) and fusco (dark) to mean “twilight,” that bleary part of the morning and evening when you can never quite tell what you’re looking at.
Wordplay is a recurring interest of Simões’s. He titled the show babados&babadeiras because the repeating sounds create an aural blur—a linguistic representation of his central metaphor. The sculptures by the same name are one-meter-square forms each made of about a dozen vertical U-shaped steel channels. Between each channel is a tight little gap, through which Simões has squeezed pigmented concrete from the backside of the piece (in a range of colors from neutral grays to rusty reds to acidic yellows and greens). Babado means “juicy gossip” in Portuguese slang, particularly in the LGBTQ+ and drag communities. Its conventional meanings describe a frill or ruffle in a textile, or something wet with drool. Simões’s repeating lines of extruded concrete find a reference point in a drippy/ruffled architectural detail of another celebrated modernist building, the SESC Pompéia. Originally a drum factory in the 1920s, it was transformed in the 80s by Lina Bo Bardi into a multi-purpose community hub for education, the arts, sports, and recreation. It is widely recognized as a model for how architecture can enrich urban life, and is sometimes described as “a little joy in a sad city.” One component of the complex is a cylindrical water tower made up of concrete segments with irregular edges that resemble ruffles, or liquid perpetually leaking out of the tower—a series of babados. To Simões, the tower seems a monument to the many overlooked queer, BIPOC, and female artists and architects who, in recent years, are increasingly surging from the cracks of history into the public eye.
Gelosia hangs from the ceiling and resembles an architectural screen. Horizontal rods suspend pieces of sheet steel Simões cut into variously elongated half moons. Throughout the sculpture’s regularly repeating geometric shapes, he has interspersed a variety of irregular materials—rock, glass, crystal, beads, shells—that seem like they could be the raw stuff of good-luck charms. Simões made this sculpture thinking about the fences installed across São Paulo. From the 1960s to the 90s, São Paulo experienced a sharp increase in crime; many residents erected security barriers around their homes during this time. Even though crime has plummeted across the city over the last several decades, the fences remain ubiquitous. People still hang protective amulets on their windows and doors. But given today’s low crime rates, what are all the fences and amulets really protecting against?
The base of Dimora n.2 is a piece of steel, about 20 centimeters wide, that Simões bent into a double curve suggestive of a pair of arched doorways (or something fleshier). It is mounted to the wall, extends away from it perpendicularly, and is capped with a piece of pigmented concrete the color and shape of an extra-large brick—albeit a brick, apparently weightless, with an unexpected bottom edge that hugs the double arches below it. This sculpture arose from the artist’s recent visit to the outskirts of Pompeii (dimora is “home” in Italian), the ancient Roman city famously preserved under volcanic ash after the eruption of Mount Vesuvius in 79 CE. Simões’s questions behind Dimora n.2—What will the buildings we use today look like in 2000 years? Will people still be using any of them? How?—were the questions that led to the rest of the work in this show.
At their core, Simões’s investigations into blurriness are attempts to come to terms with the many unknowns inextricable from the experience of being human. Architects—especially those who design public buildings—can never know their work like those who use it. None of us knows if the sun will rise tomorrow. And no matter how close you get to another person, your lover’s experience of their world will necessarily always be unknowable to you. As unsettling as staring into the abyss can be, sometimes a question that leads to another is more comforting than an answer.
