Alexandre da Cunha uses material found in ordinary, cheap and widely available utensils — such as brooms and plungers — to build complex sculptures and installations. Drawing on the precepts of geometric abstraction, his works often reflect a constructive concern and are filled with a sense of irony. In Portal (Maison Tropicale), Cunha appropriates a type of tray commonly used in popular student restaurants known as bandejões (“large trays”, in Portuguese). With their standard and widely recognizable industrial design, the compartmented inox trays are used to serve food in separated slots. In Cunha’s work, we have a frontal perspective of the pieces put together side by side, creating a mosaic of geometric forms. The juxtaposition of the compartments that hold the drinking cup evoke the architecture of Maison Tropicale, a pre-fab residential project designed by French architect brothers Jean (1901-1984) and Henri Prouvé (1915-2012). Built in Niamey, Niger, and in Brazzaville, Congo, between 1949 and 1951, these houses, which were ventilated by circular orifices, were to be replicated across the African continent, namely in former French colonies. The enterprise was halted due to its high cost, and the few houses that were built ended up being removed from their original place in order to be transferred to exhibitions across France and the USA in the 2000s. Drawing on these references and objects, Cunha creates a sort of screen, or portal, a self-supporting structure in dialogue with Lina Bo Bardi’s (1914-1992) iconic glass easels at MASP’s Picture Gallery in Transformation. As a “portal”, the work suggests connections, comparisons and displacements between objects and contexts, from the design of popular student restaurants to pre-fab houses, a modernist project designed by French architects in Africa, which have been transformed into museum sculptures.

— Guilherme Giufrida, assistant curator, MASP, 2021

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