Sunday in the Park at Pinacoteca de São Paulo revisits works from the last two decades which drastically intervene in the exhibition spaces and their surroundings
In the museum’s entrance hall, pool balls roll across the floor, with some even straying out towards the street. These surprising props result from Renata Lucas’s O Perde (The Lose, 2022): when a ball is pocketed by a visitor playing pool on the museum’s fourth floor, it travels through ducts to the ground level and emerges via a hole in the wall, confusing and extending the limits of the exhibition inside the museum itself. In contrast to a weak solo exhibition at São Paulo’s Luisa Strina last year, where only one sculpture was positioned in the centre of the exhibition room – a silkscreened MDF box featuring the logo of Brazil’s largest e-commerce platform, and slightly too pleased with itself and its ironic coding of neoliberalism – Sunday in the Park is an engaging and joyful show.
Spending a day in a museum is nearly the opposite of spending a Sunday in the park. Here, in this retrospective-toned presentation, Lucas revisits significant works from the last two decades, which drastically intervene in the exhibition spaces and their surroundings. For Roda-gigante (Ferris Wheel, 2024), a 12m-diameter circle has been cut into the surface of the little park in front of the Pinacoteca, its elements – the pavement, the earth of the garden and the kerb – appearing to have been rotated. Lucas played the same disorientating trick at Berlin’s KW 15 years ago, and the specificity of these works to their original exhibition spaces – such as Berlin’s Neugerriemschneider and KW – encourages reading the exhibition as a 1:1 model. Rubbing against the notion of site-specific, Lucas reformulates most of the previously executed works, keeping their original conceptual principles and material aspects but adjusting them to the new space. At Pinacoteca, the radical – and expensive – decision was made to build a new plywood platform over the original floor, covering the vast 900sqm of all the rooms.
This is Falha (Failure, 2003/2024), in which the whole floor of one vast gallery is covered with plywood panels connected by hinges and fitted with handles, with which museumgoers can create new spatial configurations, effortfully folding and unfolding the heavy panels. While the work invokes the artist’s oft-stated anti-neoliberal focus on unproductive action, it also echoes fellow Brazilian Lygia Clark’s explorations of folding space and audience participation during the 1960s. [] (2014) features pivoting walls that, when turned by visitors, spin and play vinyl records embedded in the floor. The speed of the wall’s rotation, at the visitor’s control, determines the music’s tempo and intelligibility.
Despite their conceptual acuity, some accidents seemed to happen without purpose in the interactive works, suggesting technical unpreparedness. In O Perde, some of the billiard balls jumped out of the long channel that would guide them across the floor to enter the downward chute, forcing a museum staffer to pick them up and replace them. In [], the vinyl did not always play when the pivotal wall was rotated, leaving some visitors with a sense of frustration about their interactions. These works are intended to work, not to incorporate unplanned malfunctions. In hindsight, I realised that these technical contretemps highlighted the challenge faced by the institution for works that demand such active maintenance. But in this, too, the artist manages to point out, with sharp irony, how such flaws reveal the limits of the museum in dealing with her work’s challenge to the idea of its function.
Sunday in the Park at Pinacoteca de São Paulo, through 6 April
From the March 2025 issue of ArtReview – get your copy.
