In the subtly designed entrance area to her exhibition Past Present – Close and Distant at the Secession’s Hauptraum, two photographic works from 1990 presented in vitrines mark the polar extremes of black and white. Diagonally opposite, a video projection offers a point of entry to a variety of perceptions, the Secession’s modernist architecture also plays a part. From here on, visitors are left to find their own paths through the clearly structured situation, following their associative threads. Walking around the exhibition space articulated by colored partition walls reveals a complex system of different levels of narrative and reflection. Closer, intimate areas form thematic groups, at the same time as they open up to further links and references.

Two gardens by Brazilian landscape architect and painter Roberto Burle Marx (1909–1994), the Residência Olivo Gomes and the Fazenda Vargem Grande, provide the basis for an engagement with the themes of identity and diversity. The emphasis on the process of hybridization in the formation of a national culture points to the marginal position of Brazil with regard to the cultural models of Europe. A central aspect here is the assimilation of foreign elements, especially defined in the period of Brazilian Modernism (Oswald de Andrade’s Manifesto Pau-Brasil and Manifesto Antropófago).

The two gardens are located in the Vale do Paraíba in São Paulo state, a region visited by many scientific expeditions in the 19th century. This area is documented in watercolors by Austrian landscape painter Thomas Ender, who took part in an Austrian expedition to Brazil in 1817 and in reports by French botanist and explorer Augustin de Saint-Hilaire. By choice and selection these early reports and depictions affect our idea of the wilderness of a tropical nature that also plays a part in the designs of Roberto Burle Marx.

The Residência Olivo Gomes in São José dos Campos was designed in 1949-51 by Rino Levi, one of the most important architects of Brazilian modernism. Roberto Burle Marx—working closely with the architect—designed a garden characterized by a unique connection between interior and exterior, between the architecture and its setting.
The garden at the Fazenda Vargem Grande in Areias, a former coffee plantation with a historical building from the colonial period, was designed by Roberto Burle Marx in 1979 on the stepped terraces previously used to dry the coffee beans.

By use of the possibilities offered by Brazil’s native flora, Roberto Burle Marx revolutionized the country’s garden culture and landscape architecture that until then had been strongly aligned with European traditions. The special quality of Roberto Burle Marx’s gardens and landscapes is the relationship between art and nature as well as the dialog, responding specifically to their surroundings.

Inés Lombardi’s photographic works deal very precisely with this diversity; she differentiates and, at the same time, resolves this differentiation in favor of the possibility of communication. Following the narrative thread of Lombardi´s journey through the Vale do Paraiba to the gardens, one is seduced by the “painterly” gaze that she deploys as a design tool in accordance with the principles of Burle Marx. The diversity in the work is held together by associations. Seemingly similar elements appear at different places within the overall installation, opening up relations between each other: the colors of the partition walls, whose tones are based upon Rino Levi’s architecture and reflect the color spectrum of the surrounding garden; the texture of a drawing by Burle Marx or the artist’s collection of roots, leaves, and beetles shown in a vitrine. With this range of references, Lombardi explores the relationship between nature, constructed nature and the urbanity of a Brazilian modernism that feeds into the cultural identity of a whole nation. Inevitably, she also addresses the question of the legacy of this modernism that is so closely interwoven with Brazil’s history.