Walter Luiz Lopes Miranda, a visual artist, professor, curator, designer and illustrator from São Paulo, immersed in the world of art, has already surpassed the milestone of one hundred solo and group exhibitions in Brazil and abroad. Under the signature of “Walter Miranda”, he weaves together Science and Art in two-dimensional and three-dimensional pieces, installations and performances, aligning the environmental crisis with the chaotic use of technology, particularly microelectronic technology.
Using computer parts, printed circuit boards, keyboards, mouse, diodes, and buttons, he subverts their functions to create critical forms that prompt reflections based on the refocusing of what seems obvious (Figures 1 to 15).
In a text prepared for the catalog of the Cartographies of Gaia exhibition (2020), which he curated, art critic Enock Sacramento emphasizes that “The message he seeks to convey with his work is that nature can exist without man, but man cannot survive without nature. And that the world has become dangerous because, according to Albert Schweitzer, men learned to dominate nature before they could dominate themselves.”
Regarding the Cartographies of Gaia exhibition, it is also worth highlighting the guiding nature of the printed circuit boards and the way Walter Miranda rearticulates them as the basis of his constructivist technique.
During his lecture The Golden Section: from Mathematics to the Arts, he recovers the meaning of the concept of proportion and correlates mathematics and art, highlighting the applicability of the “divine proportion” in works such as the Pyramid of Cheops, the Parthenon by Phidias, the Vitruvian Man, the Mona Lisa by Leonardo da Vinci, the Modulor by Le Corbusier, for example.
The artist himself uses the resource to compose some of his works, such as Requiem for Gaia: Descompasso (Figure 16) and the series The New Middle Ages (Figure 17). In fact, mathematics is integrated into the poetic fabric of his work, as in Por do Sol - Mondriano e Walteriano (Figure 19), about which he explains: “The works in this series also present a visual and metonymic correlation between the computer boards, the geometrization of the sky and the interpretation that observers usually make when viewing my works” and Confucius and the five virtues of man (Figure 20), to name just two.
The dichotomy between skeptics and those who defended the seriousness of the Covid-19 pandemic gave rise to the series It's in the eyes of the beholder – Pandemic Look, composed of three works symbolizing the globalization of the disease through “the pictorial representation of green, brown and blue eyes and the inclusion of electronic elements characteristic of current technology that generate a stylized image of the virus”, Miranda informs us (Figure 18).
The aims of the Industrial Revolution are addressed in the work Technological Mousetrap II (Figure 21), part of a larger set, with the aim of thinking about the pitfalls of the reckless use of technologies that impact the environment: “The electronic component inserted inside the mousetrap and which has a shape similar to the coronavirus model was placed next to the Earth to make explicit the threat of potential risks that we face as a species. The mousetrap was placed on a golden electronic board in allusion to the illusion created by contemporary technological devices. The electronic chips that surround the board form a fence that separates humanity from a supposed golden dream” (Walter Miranda).
Concerned with staying attentive to the philosophical questions that permeate life and art, he condenses in the series Parallel Evolution (Figure 22) the history of humanity from prehistory to the present day, full of signs that marked each of these eras. The playful nature of the composition appears in the series of five works called Para não dizer que não falei das flores, created during the pandemic, when it served as a counterpoint to the gravity of the moment.
Walter Miranda plans his works like maps, in multiple layers, inviting the reader to unravel his visual writing and expand the dimensions of the possible.
