Pancho Guedes: An Alternative Modernist at the SANG

Space and light and order. Those are the things that men need just as much as they need bread or a place to sleep.
Le Corbusier

The first South African retrospective of the works of influential architect Pancho Guedes runs at the National Gallery until 31st August. The show consists of two discrete exhibitions: the first, curated by Pedro Gadanho, focuses on his intensely productive period in Lourenzo Marx (now Maputo); while the second, curated by Henning Rasmuss and Dagmar Hoetzel, isolates work he completed after the Mozambiquan Civil War when he was forced to flee to South Africa and subsequently became the Dean of Architecture at Wits University. The juxtaposition of the two perspectives on Guedes throws the curation choices into sharp relief, and a dialogue emerges that questions the methods of framing the architect as artist.

The post-1974 exhibition reflects the curators’ training as architects. Although the space of the gallery is used playfully, with geometric dividers decentering the strict division of floor and wall space, the works on display are presented strictly as finalised architectural plans and photographs of “finished” buildings.

The few paintings included in this part of the exhibition are isolated from the other projects, and are presented as artistic objects severed from the creative process of his architectural design. Furthermore, the texts that frame the architectural plans reinforce the concept that the building is primarily a product designed for a client by captioning each design as such.
This room provides a representative overview of Guedes’s oeuvre, but offers no glimpse into the creative process that gave birth to the final products. This exhibition is primarily aimed at the architecturally literate, and may remain fairly impenetrable to an artistic eye that may encounter it casually while trawling the SANG.

The entrance to the pre-1974 section is flanked by a portrait of Guedes crowned by a radiating egg. Indeed, in this section, concepts that are presented as products in the Hoetzel-Rasmuss exhibition are traced back to their embryonic forms.

For instance, photographs of the famous sculpture of two “talking heads” that was presented at the Biennial di Venezia 1976 are displayed in the post-1974 exhibition, while the initial painting can be found in the Gadanho show.

The two exhibitions are complementary, but one is nonetheless led to ask whether the essence of Guedes is most found in the buildings he finally supervised or in the less restrained process of his creative experimentation. Pancho himself has claimed that, for him, making drawings is more important than making buildings; and An Alternative Modernist primarily reinforces the sense of Pancho as an artistic personality that expresses itself through art, instead of framing him as the author(ity) of a strictly defined architectural project.


Painting for the “Talking Heads”

Gadanho chooses to exhibit Pancho’s work as a series of experiments. The final architectural product is curiously absent: the few photographs of the buildings are old, small and few. Rather, the exhibition is dominated by the principle of liminality.

The architectural plans are presented as being only one stage in a series of contingent possibilities that are expressed in multiple forms. The centre of the room is dominated by a series of small wooden sculptures. The sculptures are untitled and resist the mimetic. Some refer directly to recognisable shapes (for instance the sculptures referred to by Guedes as the “Mechanical Flower” and the “Egyptian Barge”), but the majority function as toys that seem to become different objects when they are placed in different positions. Guedes can be seen in the video that accompanies the exhibition playing with his sculptures in this way.

The irreverence expressed in the sculptures does not obscure their referential meanings; but they seem to refer directly to other artists than to platonic forms. The influence of Miro, Klee, Dali and Picasso continues into a series of paintings and rough sketches that are also displayed.

The paintings are notable for the success of their naïf style. Like Duchamp, Guedes considers the relationship between the human and the machine in a post-industrial world. A persistent theme in his paintings is the engine: he represents locomotives, ships, cars and buses; and paints bodies in a cubist style that exposes the fundamental similarity between the man and what he creates.

A surrealist thread runs through all of Guedes’s work; the result of displacement and defamiliarisation. In one painting, a crocodile inhabits a basement. Many of Guedes’s buildings are anthropomorphised (The Smiling Lion; The 5 Caterpillars; The Pregnant Building). The line between the impossible and the concrete is transcended simply by transferring a concept from a drawing to a design.

The naïve style at times disguises highly emotive political statements in Guedes’s work. One painting depicts a stack of dead soldiers in a refrigerated ship being returned for burial in their homeland, the soldiers’ effacement of identity reinforced by the childlike, abstract way in which they are painted.

Like the sculptures, the paintings have been displayed without titles. Although this denies the viewer a familiar point of access into the work, it also reinforces the principles of Guedes’s playfulness and open interpretivity. The curator has designed the exhibition in a spirit true to the Guedes aesthetic. The small captions that surround the works do not attempt to “explain” or fix the meaning of any one work.

The paintings are splashed across the walls with the randomness of a Pollock painting, and are grouped into broad family groups rather than being arranged by strict chronology or theme. The titles of these groupings are tentative statements in the present continuous tense: “Exploring Form and Space” and “Contributing Towards a Modern Space” are examples.

As underlined by the title, An Alternative Modernist presents Pancho as an artist well-informed by the artistic principles of Modernism. The “alternative” may indeed be tautological – Pancho is most Modern precisely when he inverts tradition; when he brings the marginal to the centre.

Much is made of Pancho’s interest in traditional African art – although it is ironically unclear whether this was truly due to a receptiveness to his surroundings or whether the influence of African forms came to him via the channels of earlier European Modernists, such as Picasso, who famously appropriated African forms for the Avant Garde project.

Pancho clearly had a complex relationship with his context and was critical of monolithic notions of “Africanism”. He was nonetheless an important patron of African artists in Mozambique and had an extensive collection of traditional African artifacts.

Although he spent the majority of his productive life in Africa, Guedes always maintained strong links with European Modernism. He was a member of the influential Team 10 during the 50s and 60s, and the strong influence of Gaudi and Le Corbusier on his architectural designs is irrefutable. He referred to some of his own work as “Dali’s soft forms set in concrete and made habitable” and called his Prometheus building his “first built misinterpretation of Picasso’s drawings and paintings for sculpture.”

A Guedes retrospective has been long overdue. Whether Bauhaus-inspired apartment blocks or fantastical floral buildings, his architectural work always ventures beyond the principles of building into the experimentation of form and spatial composition. In him, the functional and the aesthetic impulses become subsumed by the basic Modernist exercise of exploration: finding new ways to use the old.

He is the ultimately democratic artist. He brought his paintings into urban spaces and displayed them as murals; his sculptures were factories and apartment buildings.
There is something ironic in the fact that he has been returned – after all these years, to the gaze of the gallery – while in Lourenzo Marx the buildings themselves are crumbling and neglected. The curators have not, however, done him an injustice, and have played with the gallery space in a way that remains true to the spirit of Guedes’s artistic project.

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