Electric Field 01: Anger, Salt, Health, and Time

Forging lines, balancing geometries, tracing contours and, not infrequently, bringing meanings into conflict, Rebeca Carapiá’s works establish and illuminate complex relationships between form and language, body, territory, and discourse. This group of sculptures, entitled “Electric Field 01: Anger, Salt, Health, and Time,” was created by welding and shaping iron and copper, the latter serving as the works’ central material. The process required to arrive at this installation involved several stages of production, from heating, twisting, and sawing to cutting, fitting, and shaping, all carried out by the artist’s own hands. She creates curves, circles, and other geometric and sinuous forms that compose the works, with varying diameters and heights. The work establishes a physical structure in space that, in turn, suggests a metaphysical field. The small supporting base underscores an intelligent relationship among weight, balance, and proportion, as well as the friction between materials, concerns central both to sculpture as an artistic language and to Carapiá’s practice.

The artist thus conceives and materializes a vocabulary and grammar that operate both materially and symbolically. The forms, initially devised in poetic notebooks, which also hold drawings, prints, and memories, abstract signs and gestures that evoke the many hardware stores of Salvador’s Cidade Baixa, a working-class circuit of laboring bodies within the city. They do not, however, prompt a desire for translation. Instead, from tiny sparks to larger air bubbles, as with iron and fire, anger and health, they inflame the senses of observation and movement, conducting sedimented energies into a vast field that is magnetic and dissonant.

Engaging technologies that transform nature and subjective experiences in dialogue with their geopolitical contexts, Carapiá’s works decode the social and productive meanings attached to matter. Whether raw like iron or noble like copper, materials associated, respectively, with male labor and dominant minorities, the works question assumptions of strength, access, and the gender norms ascribed to them. This process, involving fire and silence, contour and roughness, salt and sweat, skill and dexterity, expands these qualities beyond the object itself, forging an enlarged imagination.