Starting with photography, Letícia Lampert has progressively turned to the three-dimensional element. The main element of her poetics is the city, which, being a result of construction, presents us with a succession of materials and textures. To speak of the city is to speak of architecture, of accumulation and, today more than ever, of verticality. In the last century, cities, which are a product of human culture, have grown and (re)created themselves in a way that destroys any connection with the human scale. Streets unsuitable for pedestrians, increasingly tall buildings, increasingly smaller apartments, and spaces for conviviality increasingly suppressed. For such an urban project, which aims to be increasingly pharaonic and uninhabitable, not even the sky seems to be the limit.
Lampert, however, seems to have something to say about this. She is interested in the architectural mesh created by the accumulation of facades in the urban landscape. Starting from this, she creates a series of works that are initially more pictorial in nature, and then address the three-dimensional.
While our cities and their endless accumulation of buildings are generally accompanied by a multitude of visual noises, this is not the case in the work in question. As she experimented with mediums other than photography, the artist reduced this architectural grid to compositions made of pure lines and colors. In landscape painting, the horizon line is always the crucial element. And this line, in Lampert’s work, is tortuous and uneven; after all, we are talking about the city. And only this element matters here. It is the essence of the city, its primary affirmation.
Her three-dimensional works are composed of small, colored concrete pieces with pronounced cutouts that fit into one another, thus producing the illusion of an intricate urban horizon. This horizon and this landscape, as well as the structures that emulate them, are constructive in nature, as the artist suggests in the titles. None of this is apparently natural, and that is where a delicate work of color comes in.
A horizon does not exist alone; it is always in relation to something. And that something, even more so when we talk about an open space, is the sky. Buildings and architecture, increasingly tall, are drawn amidst this infinite ethereal space. But the sky is not neutral: it produces light, shadows, and all sorts of atmospheric and meteorological effects. And Lampert’s horizons are a result of this relationship. In *Days and Hours*, these concrete structures, grouped side by side, present different configurations and colors. Some have lighter, cooler colors, like light blues and grayish tones, others have more ochre, earthy, and heavy shades. These are colors that exist on their own in the urban landscape, but here, in this poetics, they exist in relation to the sky, the light, and the passage of time as the day and hours pass.
In compositions for sunny and rainy days, works of a pictorial nature, the atmospheric effect becomes even more present. A sequence of winding lines and horizons is present once again, but the blues and grays they contain are diaphanous, flooded by a strong clarity that retains only what is essential to them.
Letícia Lampert reminds us that the city is human, and because it is human, it is constructed, mutable, and, why not, finite. This message, however, does not come through a pessimistic one. Because the city is a construction, it can be recombined, rethought, rearranged. And it is possibilities of rearrangement that Lampert offers us. In these presented configurations, the relationship with the sky, light, and atmosphere is essential for the best positioning of horizons. If the contemporary urban metropolis devours everything in its path, our artist’s work appears to remind us that there is still room for the sky.
Theo Monteiro
May/2023