IOLE DE FREITAS
"The weight of one’s own" 2015
Sculpture in stainless steel sheet with 900 kg
2,50m high x 7,00m wide x 2,20m deep.
This work was part of the MAM exhibition in Rio de Janeiro in 2015, “The Weight of One’s Own”. The stainless steel plates, whose strength is significant and malleability difficult, demand intense torsions and surgical engineering calculations, due to the rigidity and weight of the material. Despite the specificities of the material, however, some sculptures remained suspended in the air (such as the one that is presented today at the Usina de Arte), evolving in space as an imponderable aerial dance, counterpointing the idea of lightness and movement to its original weight, with a fine line between the gestural and the geometric, or between expressiveness and formal precision.
Between the hazy mirroring on one side of the sheet and the opacity of the concrete on the other, the very concreteness of this steel plate is delineated as a body simultaneously rigid and fluid, which at times absorbs and reflects the outside, and at others asserts itself as a radical obstacle to the eye. To the moving image we already had of the dancing forms in space, we add another index of their apparent volatility. Iole’s sculptures are always evoking fluxes of passage, from one place to another, from inside to outside or vice-versa, from the concrete reality of the object to the void. Space permeates the sculptures, moves in and out of them, envelopes their surfaces and is enveloped by them, in a relentless circular transit. Iole de Freitas’ work implies at the same time volume, body and membrane, tension and distension, wall, and air. Her sculptures seem to constantly want to transcend their perimeter, to go beyond, to leave their borders and evolve into other spaces, in dialogue with architecture and the landscape. In the piece that is now installed at the Usina, Iole also loves the way her sculpture dialogues with the other works in the collection.
Iole de Freitas
Belo Horizonte, Minas Gerais, 1945
She currently lives and works in Rio de Janeiro
www.ioledefreitas.com.br
Born in Belo Horizonte, at the age of six, Iole moved to Rio de Janeiro, and began her training in contemporary dance. She studied at the School of Industrial Design (ESDI) of the Rio de Janeiro State University (UERJ) from 1964 to 1965. From 1970 on, she lived for eight years in Milan, Italy, where she worked as a designer at Olivetti's Corporate Image Studio under the guidance of architect Hans von Klier from 1970 to 1971. She began to develop and exhibit her work in the fine arts in 1973.
Iole immediately absorbs the transforming urgency of the environment to which she reacts with her initial investigation in her films, photographs, performances, and sculptures. For this former dancer (for 25 years), all her creations speak of movement, expanding the area of the body, they speak of light and shadow, lightness, and weight.
