Memory, territory, reminiscences

Iran do Espírito Santo's artistic practice includes sculpture, site-specific installations, murals, and paperwork. Its theme is the structure and texture of the object, as well as the correlation between an object and the space around it. Espírito Santo consciously deals with movements such as minimalist art and Latin American conceptualism. He constantly uses abstract geometric shapes and deals with social, political, and economic issues on a global scale.

Watercolor is the medium chosen by Iran do Espírito Santo for his new series El Pangolín , in which isolation is a strong reference in the post-Covid era. This paper work contains repeated geometric motifs combined in groups; all of them describe the shapes of geometric figures such as square, cube and cylinder in front of non-specific backgrounds, usually white.

In general, the colors are quite soft, but Espírito Santo's layered watercolor technique gives them a soft translucency. Despite the repetition of geometric motifs, each work in a group varies individually in shape and color. Other compositional means include rotating, reflecting, and resizing geometric or semi-figurative shapes. For Espírito Santo, developing a motive is a long process, which sometimes takes years, as it employs a step-by-step procedure until it finds its way to the subjects. The geometric motifs reflect the sculptural works of the artist, and the composition focuses on the minimal formal nuances always in the foreground. Despite their strong presence, the geometric shapes of the figures seem unreal, frozen at the moment of eternal repetition; they fill the space and at the same time seem timeless, empty. Color reduction provides information about the mental or psychological state of the figures.

In a way, and in an ambivalent sense, Espírito Santo negotiates in El Pangolín with the writings of the famous museum director, curator and writer Enrique Juncosa, recording the obscure and intermediate places that record and reverberate memory, territory, history and reminiscences of the Latin American landscape.