LUCAS SIMÕES . YOU TEXT NOTHING LIKE YOU LOOK: BIBLIOTECA MÁRIO DE ANDRADE, SÃO PAULO, BRASIL

YOU TEXT NOTHING LIKE YOU LOOK In YOU TEXT NOTHING LIKE YOU LOOK6, Lucas Simões explores mirrored circuits and impulses between sculpture and literature, embodying a formal urgency to materialize poetic surges. The artist creates sculptures inspired by literary excerpts—textual sparks in their original languages that form the first part of the titles and are engraved on the works. Subsequently, additional polyglot citations, responding to the created object, are incorporated into the titles’ second part. Thus, Simões transforms literary ignitions into new textual provocations, always mediated by the sculptural object. These fragments traverse nostalgic moments, affective identifications, and sensory responses, translated into sculptural gestures such as the embrace, activation of architectural spatiality, and the close juxtaposition of forms that never quite touch. Through this process, analogous pairings emerge between text and volume: silence and emptiness, exclamation and weight, uncertainty and imbalance.Simões’ approach to treating sculpture as text reveals a latent meticulousness in preserving small affections. This is evident in his accumulation of objects and materials that captivated him over the years, stored in boxes in his studio. Revisiting these collections allowed Simões to experiment with new materials beyond the concrete and paper that once dominated his sculptural practice and to distance himself from direct architectural references—a nod to his academic training. The sculptures reflect the verbosity of his research through material explorations: cores of thermos flasks, ceramic plates, glass domes, and loofah sponges are paired with meticulously designed and cut metal sheets. By transforming these manipulations into sculptural forms, Simões departs from synthetic, minimalist abstraction, embracing formal excess and profusion7.The exhibition joins São Paulo’s Biblioteca Mário de Andrade’s centennial celebrations of surrealism. Simões' linguistic interplay between sculpture and poetry aligns with the cadavre exquis, a game invented during the French surrealist movement in 1925. Translating to “exquisite corpse” or “delightful cadaver,” the game involves collective writing: each participant contributes to a folded piece of paper without seeing the preceding entry. When unfolded, a linguistic collage emerges, revealing unpredictable narratives, surprising combinations, and improbable contradictions. Similarly, sculpture, like language, operates through unpredictability. Despite the sculptor’s or writer’s attempt to control material or text, both remain subject to the medium's disobedience.Simões integrates randomness and semantic creation dynamics, amalgamating literary excerpts within text and sculpture8. Each material seems to speak a language, coherently or contrastively interacting with its adjacent solid forms. Grammatical structures—articles, nouns, adjectives, verbs—merge with sculptural components such as base, body, top, and framework, creating an assemblage with intentionally uncertain logic. This highlights the shifting dynamics of the sculptural process9.The fundamental mechanism of the cadavre exquis draws on automatic writing, relinquishing rational control to expand subjective understanding—an approach widely embraced in contemporary art. Rather than collective play, Simões engages in a solitary exchange, reminiscent of his notebook exercises: opening a book randomly to different pages and noting down the sentences his gaze encountered. Just as classical sculpture and poetry follow conventional instructions and parameters, Simões’ sculptural practice reiterates, through the often chaotic, psychoanalytic, and temperamental friction between the two mediums, the contemporary dissolution of their boundaries, orders, and logical frameworks—both linguistic and sculptural.Not only in this experimental series but across his entire body of work, Simões remains receptive to the responses elicited during the sculptural process, attuned to the dialogue between materials and objects. These dialogic exchanges reveal his fascination with ambiguity and the amalgamation of diverse references into opaque symbols. The works flex languages just as they explore materials: Portuguese, Italian, Spanish, and English are molded and carved as deftly as concrete, steel, and gold leaf. The sculptures—imbued with a sense of subjectivity, immersed in discursive dynamics—reflect the persistent disparity between text and image. They challenge the textual containment of sculptural practice, synthesizing literary translation, psychoanalytic transfer, and automated behavior. In gathering these works, Simões examines the potential for a linguistic autonomy of sculpture, all while keeping it permeable to the words engraved on the objects. This interplay creates endless ricochets between form and language, evoking a symbiotic tension that underscores his distinctive artistic approach.

 

 

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