Eduardo Aquino’s exhibition at the School of Art Gallery at the University of Manitoba has a mysterious title: Tapume. The word, it turns out, is Portuguese for construction hoarding – those hastily built wooden barriers that protect pedestrians at major building projects. Typically, these structures become cluttered with concert posters and tagged with graffiti, scraped and otherwise marked by the life of the city.
Aquino, a Brazilian-born artist and architect who teaches at the University of Manitoba, stripped away much of the ephemera and installed the hoarding around the perimeter of the gallery. In his hands, the space almost becomes a chapel, offering an opportunity to seek calmness by looking into the uncluttered parts of our own psyches. This mental reprieve from the noise and bustle of everyday life is not unlike the physical buffering that hoardings provide at construction sites.
The hoardings outside Qaumajuq, the Winnipeg Art Gallery's new Inuit art centre. (courtesy Eduardo Aquino)
This particular hoarding came from the Winnipeg Art Gallery’s new Inuit art centre, Qaumajuq. Aquino was struck by the visual quality of public mark-making later painted-out by squares of colour. It made him think of Russian avant-garde artist Kazimir Malevich, as well as American artist Mark Bradford’s found constructions. He came to think of the hoarding as an “incidental found painting.”
More than anything, the dimly lit installation evokes the colour-field paintings of American artist Mark Rothko, particularly the dark-toned triptychs and singular works that create a sense of purposeful sanctuary at the Rothko Chapel in Houston. Like Rothko, Aquino uses a minimalist strategy to engage our curiosity and encourage reflection.
Eduardo Aquino, "Tapume," 2022
installation view at School of Art Gallery, University of Manitoba (photo by Karen Asher, courtesy School of Art Gallery)
The rough bareness of the hoarding at first feels underwhelming, even off-putting. But, with time, I begin to notice details – knotholes, scratches, gang tags and a flowing red heart. I become deeply aware I am surrounded by a purposeful piece of found art and begin thinking of the installation as a makeshift safe space for spiritual reflection or even as a site for sensory deprivation therapy.
Aquino has covered the gallery floor with creaking sheets of plywood, their markings akin to the residues time and experience leave in our bodies. To sit on the floor is to be immersed in a world of our own. Looking up, the lights and sprinkler heads become surrogates for stars in the gallery’s cool beige sky. Yellow electrical cord, thick and dirtied, festoons the top of the boards, powering the caged lights that illuminate this secular sanctuary.
The Tapume installation at the Winnipeg Art Gallery from Sept. 11 to Nov. 7, 2021. (courtesy Eduardo Aquino)
Aquino envisioned Tapume in three distinct iterations. The first, last fall at the Winnipeg Art Gallery, saw the hoarding moved indoors and installed like a long walk-through painting. He saw the tension between this utilitarian element from the urban environment and its location in the refined white cube of the gallery as both social commentary and a homage to the labour involved in constructing Qaumajuq.
Eduardo Aquino,"Tapume" (detail), 2022, installation view at the School of Art Gallery, University of Manitoba (photo by Charlie Topnik)
His final iteration, in late fall, will be at the university’s Architecture 2 Gallery, where the hoarding will be further deconstructed into a series of large-scale paintings.
Ironically, the current exhibition offers the quietude we often lack in daily life by using a structure that epitomizes the fast past of change in an increasingly hectic urban environment. Yet the hoarding’s origins at a cultural site that seeks to preserve artistic treasures, many of them historical, complicate this reading.
Ultimately, Tapume is as we are – plain, rough, impressionable and fleeting, yet with a capacity for peace and reverence. Therein lies its beauty. ■
Eduardo Aquino, Tapume, at the School of Art Gallery at the University of Manitoba in Winnipeg from Aug. 25 to Oct. 14, 2022.
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