Windows overlooking Rio - Daydreams

From the dawn of times, Man, to protect himself against environment hostility, has searched refuge in somber caves whose one and only access made defense easier. However, different from animal species, he soon felt like illuminating his habitat, making it less depressing, decorating its walls with scenes from everyday life as a recollection of the external world. Thus, for the human nature inborn necessity, which is confirmed through the species evolution, Man has developed from the first prehistoric "graffiti" to the Pompeian house frescoes in which "trompe-l'oeil" had a double purpose: to open imaginary windows on blind walls while prizing them with decoration. Throughout all historic periods hitherto, these genres of aesthetic existence have walked together and fortunately, solid evidences were left. As a matter of fact, the fresco or the picture, no matter what century or time it belongs to, represents, above all, the fruit of this human nature exigency, which consists in re-creating lights and spaces where they originally had not existed.

All this does not consider techniques nor schools; being it a work of Botticelli's or Magritte's, Canaletto's or De Chirico's, Rothko's or Matta's, Paul Klee's or Duchamp's, each artist, in his own way, with his own technique, his own language, and the aesthetics of from his time, treads the same path, and if the results look so different, reality remains the same: a spiritual dream advances over everyday reality.

Who, - facing the empty walls of a room from where pictures (abstract or figurative, old or modern) have just been removed, and whose aspect before had looked normal, - has never experienced this sensation of oppression and claustrophobia as if someone had walled the windows in this suddenly reduced room?

All this could not have escaped Jorge Eduardo. And this is why he reinforces the idea of windows in his works and, renouncing the traditional frames, he substitutes them by old doors and windows recovered from demolitions.

In the twenties, Duchamp had already found the source of his "ready made" in objects from everyday life, removing them from their banal functions, to place them originally as a work of Art. In Duchamp, creation materialized at the moment of choosing the object. In Jorge Eduardo, on the contrary, the choice of the window or door among demolition materials is nothing more than the beginning of a long creative process. The composition of his window determines spaces where it would be impossible to include any scenery. Research has to be precise, otherwise the work, instead of entering the "trompe-l'oeil" game, would be reduced to the condition of a mere collage. And creation resides exactly in the choice of the scenery to depict and in the pictorial quality of the execution.

Jorge Eduardo, in his windows, manages to reconstruct and recall the poetry from a Rio de Janeiro, which fortunately still subsists, but which few among us know how to re-create.

His windows may be considered the most beautiful in Rio de Janeiro. Any-one of us would dream of having a window with a similar view in his room. Jorge Eduardo proposes, suggests and teaches us how to see; he becomes almost threatening when he tries to make us believe that, after all, Rio has not changed much since 1892.

We only have to look at the two windows: Tempo 1 (Time 1) (1892), in pale hues of a nearly invisible gray; and Tempo 2 (Time 2) (1984), with the luxuriant colours of a tropical country.

Thus, through his daydreams, he incites us to admire from his windows, sceneries which look real but which, in fact, are nothing more than the result of his dreams and his contemplations.

Jorge Eduardo's windows and views from Rio de Janeiro possess the same emblematic mystery of a rebuilt and negated reality which Magritte used in some of his works, like the famous picture in which a pipe dominates, and under which the painter wrote, to mark the contrast between Reality and his thoughts: "This is not a pipe."

Claudio Bruni Sakraischik
Rio - Rome, March, 1986.