The importance of an exhibition in an artist’s trajectory is not only that of reaffirming his presence and the continuity of his work within the circuit of which he is a part but – also and especially – that of offering us the means according to which we may reassess the breadth of his work: its complexity and its ramifications.

In addition to his output in the fields of printmaking and sculpture (particularly sculpture of monumental scale), Sérvulo Esmeraldo’s work also reveals itself through his creation of artists’ books, object books, kinetic sculptures and his activities as a cultural agent responsible for curatorial initiatives in the city of Fortaleza. And this exhibition represents yet another opportunity for close contact with an oeuvre that pioneers a number of different aspects and is unique in its scope.

In the mid-1980s, the artist Eduardo Kac published a chronological mapping of the great watersheds and experimental tributaries of scientifically and technologically oriented art produced in Brazil.1 Through it, we were able to see how isolated the work of Abraham Palatnik was during the mid-1960s. To our astonishment, though, the Sérvulo Esmeraldo retrospective held in São Paulo last year included a kinetic object titled O Escriba [The Scribe] – a 1962 box-device in which various needles are set in motion by the action of invisible magnetic forces, conferring upon that object a performativity unique in Brazilian art work of the period.

While teaching at the Bauhaus, the Hungarian artist Moholy-Nagy published a study titled “The Five Evolutionary Stages of Sculpture from the Standpoint of Treatment of the Material”2, in which he decla- red that the evolution of sculpture could be summed up thusly: from the static treatment of mass to motion. In its most advanced stage, the artist stated that kinetic sculpture would not only be responsible for the inclusion of real (no longer represented) movement in the dimension of the art work but, also, for the creation of “virtual volumes” derived from that very kineticism. From then on, sculpture would be understood as “the median point between material volume and virtual volume, between a tactile comprehension and a visual comprehension of matter”.

Within this context, Sérvulo Esmeraldo’s Excitable sculptures are activated by spectators who stimulate the work’s internal elements through static electricity; these works mark the artist’s contribution to the international kinetic art movement by virtue of their uniqueness and inventiveness and by the absence of an electric motor as source of repetitive, regular motion. In the Excitables, “the body is the motor of the work”. As in The Scribe, they constitute artistic evidence that phenomena which occur in the physical world originate in an invisible world of dynamics. Or, as the artist declared, “(…) I cannot help but think of invisible forces which, because of my intervention, were somehow altered.”3 Esmeraldo adopted an “artistic stance before science” in his research and works with the latent energy of imponderable fluids, with magnetism, or upon the occasion of his project for the creating a rainbow of water to be sprayed upon city streets. Sculptures devoid of true relief, his Theorems are geometric constructions not merely limited to the outlines of a material design made of steel; they expand within their environments by means of their own shadows. With these works, the place in which the work is installed is outlined by lines that act as dematerialized extensions of the piece within the environment. Virtual sculptures.