Lucas Simões (*1980 Catanduva, BR)
lives and works in São Paulo, BR

The exploration of material as a form of expression in the work of Lucas Simões is not, as may appear at first sight, a fetish for materiality, but rather a research that aims to fill the support of the artistic object with meaning. His training as an architect, where technique and poetics are profoundly interlinked, gives one of the possible keys for understanding his production.

Painting, cartography, books, photography, concrete, steel, paper… have already been objects of his investigation. Through daily experimentation with materials and know-how, the artist finds the necessary means of expression, as in his more recent sculptures and installations in concrete, which reflect his research into brutalist architecture and the failure of its utopian sense.

Before he found art-making, Simões was an architect. He worked on commercial projects as part of a large team and designed and built residential projects on his own. He made architectural draw- ings in AutoCAD, the same software he uses to draw plans for his art- works now. Before the pieces in this show were realized (when they existed only on his computer screen), the line separating them from architectural drawings, in Simões’s mind, was faint. They could have just as easily become rooms, spaces, buildings. But by pushing their final form toward drawing instead of architecture, Simões is grasping for a type of poetic purity that was hard to come by when he was designing buildings. His architectural practice was mired in compro- mise, tempering beautiful dreams with practicality. The negotiations that define his art-making practice, however, he undertakes directly with his materials.