In his critical text for Lucia Koch’s exhibition “Córte” (Section), Francesco Perrotta-Bosch emphasizes that the artist works with “rubbish”: The raw materials that are the subjects of her photographs consist of discarded packaging. The exhibition brought together the most recent works in this series of images of the inside of boxes, on which Koch has been working for close to twenty years.
In Koch’s pictures, these cardboard interiors sometimes evoke simple domestic interiors; at other times, they seem like stages on which some drama is about to occur. Something is strangely familiar in these spaces devoid of people but filled with references to the history of art and architecture. Arroz Jasmim (Jasmine Rice; all works cited, 2023), for example, offers a Minimalist composition of forms and colors infiltrated by a beam of light. A small opening in the box pictured not only simulates a window but also, significantly, represents a perspectival vanishing point. Light is the central character in this photograph, which was enhanced by its hanging next to the only window in the gallery. The way in which Koch works with scale in the photographs imparts an architectural spatiality to an ordinary object of no great size and lends an enigmatic effect to these images.
The window cut into the left side of the box interior shown in Lasagna seems to look out on a garden or woods. Light filtered through the foliage outside casts dappled reflections on the facing inner wall of the carton. The photograph is not affixed to the wall but is held up by a freestanding wooden structure so that the bottom of the image nearly touches the floor. This display, along with the striking dimensions of the work (nearly eight by five feet), help it achieve a sensation of immersion. Kombucha breathes new life into the constructive geometrical visuality very dear to Brazilian modernist art and architecture. We see the cardboard dividers that create compartments for a dozen bottles, but the bottles themselves are absent. While the cardboard grid creates an overall regularity, what becomes more evident on close inspection is the commonplace nature of the cardboard box, its slightly crooked folds and lines. Also, a fleeting, almost imperceptible yet significant clue is evident in this play between embrace and refusal of a history of Brazilian architecture so lauded that it nearly became the definitive and sole model for later generations. The uneven perimeter of the cubes forms a design similar to those of cobogós, perforated ceramic or concrete bricks used to create screen walls that provide shade and ventilation—an architectural device particularly associated with the work of French Brazilian architect Lúcio Costa (1902–1998), among others. Between homage and critical judgment, appearance and simulation, architecture and trash, Koch’s work constructs a poetics of doubt.
Translated from Portuguese by Clifford E. Landers.
