Picture Berwick-upon-Tweed in England, summer of 1996. On the pastures that separate the town from the North Sea, two kiosks painted black each hand out black kites and black umbrellas; a mast raises a black flag; a black stepladder is there for climbing up and peering over things; a black bench, set before the water, invites one to sit and look. For days, hundreds of dark kites rise from the Elizabethan ramparts of the last English town before Scotland, and a 16mm camera records what the wind does with them. The resulting film is called “Smoke.” Smoke, in the film’s five minutes, is nonexistent. There are only kites which, seen from a distance, look like smoke—which is another thing, and is exactly Lucia Nogueira’s thing: to show the sign and hide its origin.

That film, transferred from 16mm to video, is the nominal center of the exhibition Gomide&Co now devotes to the artist, accompanied by sculptures made between 1988 and 1997 and a group of drawings. Nogueira died in London in 1998, before turning fifty, and her symbolic repatriation has been slow and carried out in stages: the special room Gabriel Pérez-Barreiro reserved for her at the thirty-third Bienal de São Paulo in 2018; the solo show at Luisa Strina in 2020, revealing her drawings of the 1980s to the Brazilian public; now this exhibition, with an essay by Carina Bukuts, chief curator of the Kunsthalle Wien, who had included her in last year’s group show at Portikus. Brazil rediscovers its sculptor by way of the London estate and the New York galleries. It is the usual route of artists Brazil failed to see while there was still time.

Biography matters here because it influences method. Born in Goiânia in 1950, Nogueira studied journalism in Brasília, photography in Washington D.C. and arrived in London in 1975, where she trained in painting at Chelsea College of Art and the Central School of Art and Design—her entire development made through changes in place and language. On the state of those who leave, she said: “There is a connection there; not only with the place where you find yourself, but also with the place you come from—because if you left, you didn’t solve things there, did you? So you are in the middle. I think it is very healthy to be that way.” The statement, which another artist would have declared as a complaint, she declares as a healthy diagnosis. When she chose to film in Berwick, a border town that changed countries more than ten times over its history, Nogueira made a self-portrait by geographic proxy.

The argument this exhibition allows one to formulate with clarity is that Nogueira moved in a singular space between conceptual art and arte povera. Her strength lies precisely in never having paid toll to either. On the conceptual side, the titles: “Full Stop” (1993), “No Time for Commas” (1993), “Monosyllable” (1993), “Without this, without that” (1993). An artist who learned English as an adult treats the structure of her adoptive language as sculptural material with the distrustful attention of someone who knows that all punctuation is a convention where meaning stops. On the povera side, the materials: frayed rope, oxidized bronze, latex, human hair, supermarket bags, gasoline. But Nogueira refuses both the conceptual tautology—the work that exhausts itself in stating its own idea—and the alchemical rhetoric of povera, which promises to transfigure the poor into primordial energy. Nor does she fit among the British object sculptors of her generation, Tony Cragg, Richard Deacon, Bill Woodrow, who converted the found thing into image: she prefers to leave the thing intact and displace only the meaning. Guy Brett, her best scholar, defined this position as an antimonumentality “idiosyncratic, elegant and untouched by any academy.” The decisive word is the last—a school Nogueira never attended but one she occupied alone, the conduit between them all.

The title of this review is a technical description. In “Untitled” (1989)—not the small pair of fur, lead and latex tubing exhibited here but another work of the same year—the artist seals gasoline inside a latex tube fastened to metal; in “Filter” (1990), petroleum circulates between nails and plastic. The fuel is there, literal, invisible, waiting. It is a theme that runs through the entire body of work, storing violence instead of representing it. The sculptures in this show do away with the gasoline, but maintain a similar principle, domestic objects that conceal, under the appearance of chance or play, a charge that does not detonate. Where there’s smoke, there’s fire; Nogueira spent her career showing the smoke and locking the fire up.

“Mischief” (1995) is the exemplary case. A red wooden chair, the kitchen kind, has lost its seat; one of its legs, which from a distance looks like the long train of a wedding dress, is pinned to the floor. Up close, the nuptial fabric reveals itself as a strip of unrolled supermarket plastic bags, crossing the room for two and a half meters. The title suggests that the chair has been caught in a petty offense, accomplice to an act whose beginning and whose outcome we do not know. The humor is immediate; the violence comes to us later, when one notices that the scene joins marriage, broken furniture and household trash in a single visual sentence, and that the seatless chair is a body that can no longer receive any body.

“No Time for Commas” (1993) takes the principle to the limit of the comic and beyond. A wooden table lies upside down, legs in the air, with the vulnerability of an animal stuck on its back. Inside the tabletop, a tied paper bag—driven by a battery-powered toy—shifts without rest from one side to the other, always tracing the same route. One laughs at the absurdity of the bag trying to escape. Then one’s gaze turns to the edges of the tabletop, which are the walls of a pen, and the laughter changes tone: something is trapped in the very conditions that keep it alive. The title explains the rest. A sentence without commas is a sentence with no pause to breathe.

“Monosyllable” (1993) returns sculpture to language. Two wooden boxes—one tall and empty, leaning against the wall; the other low, half-open—hold locks of human and artificial hair. Adrian Searle, standing before the work, observed that to speak in monosyllables is to say little more than yes or no—or rather, yes and no—and proposed reading the two boxes as the image of a divided self. That reading is good, but what interests me comes before: a sculptor who titles boxes with hair inside them as “monosyllable” is affirming that the object speaks, perhaps only a little and grudgingly, at the edge of muteness, but it speaks. Nogueira’s entire body of work is a language of minimal utterances. The cut hair, a remainder of the body the box does not contain, is what is left over when the sentence ends.

The drawings, the third vertex of the argument, undo any suspicion that they were a secondary activity. Nogueira drew by the thousands, and the show gathers everything from the india inks on card from 1987—black forms oscillating between utensil and ideogram, pulleys, bottles, hooks suspended from chains that the wash nearly dissolves—to the watercolors of the late 1980s, where naked bodies fold over one another in stains of diluted blood, with a rawness her sculptures never allow themselves. The loop closes with a sheet of c. 1995 in which vertical stripes of color run down like a paint test turned landscape. Searle noted that in it “everything is figurative, everything is an abstraction,” and the formula, which would seem evasive applied to another artist, is here exacting. Drawing was the place where Nogueira said what her objects whispered. Tacita Dean, witness to the Berwick project, extended that to the sky: “Smoke,” she wrote, “was a drawing upon the landscape”—the color black cast as contour over a place that does not contain it, the india-ink brush adrift upward. The film, seen this way, belongs to this wall as much as the framed works do.

It is in this expressive territory that the series inscribes what Luisa Strina revealed in 2020 and which remains the best-kept secret of the work: “Inferno Divine Comedy” (1983), fourteen sheets in pencil, charcoal and watercolor, absent from the posthumous retrospectives of London, Porto and Cambridge. Nogueira faced the theme that mobilized Botticelli, Blake, Doré, Rauschenberg and resolved it in subtraction: her boat of Dante and Virgil is ethereal and self-contained where Delacroix’s was flesh and darkness, her Cerberus more ambiguous than Blake’s. Made in the same year as Nogueira’s “Twelve Stations of the Cross,” the series shows the young artist processing the great narrative organizations of the West in order to extract from them only the essential: the crossing between one state and another. Dante wrote the entire “Divina Commedia” in exile. Nogueira, who drew her “Inferno” eight years after leaving Brazil, knew where the work exists—neither in the place one departs from nor in the one where one arrives, but in the middle.

There remains the question of what this work answers. The temptation is to say a world ever more devoid of meaning. I prefer the opposite. Nogueira’s world—and ours more still—suffers from an excess of meaning. Everything already signifies; everything has already been captioned. Bukuts is right to write that the sculptures suggest we are surrounded by an abundance of forms and meanings, and that what is needed is less new creation than attention to what is already before us. Clarice Lispector, whom Bukuts mentions, wrote in “A Breath of Life” that the word is bait. The word fishes for a meaning language escapes. Nogueira’s objects fish in the same way—the chair fishes for the absent body, the table fishes for captivity, the boots fish for the march that never happened. Hence her poetics are at once of estrangement and welcome, without contradiction: these are objects of the house—chair, table, cupboard, shoe—that receives us, but each has been displaced to the exact millimeter that it takes for the house to look back at us. Rodrigo Moura, in a recent statement, spoke of fields of tension between estrangement and familiarity. That is it, with one further accuracy: the greeting is the bait. The estrangement is the hook.

I return to Berwick. The black kites rising in that film are, after all, smoke signals—the oldest technology of communication from a distance, ciphered messages crossing a border. In the skies of São Paulo hover no black kites. We look at the video as one scans someone else’s horizon, searching for signals that are no longer there.

“Lucia Nogueira: Smoke” at Gomide&Co, 2644 Avenida Paulista, São Paulo, Brasil through October 3.