When thrown through your front window with a threatening note attached, bricks can become powerful symbols. But as far as inanimate objects go, they aren't the most potent of signifiers. Even Carl Andre's seminal 'Equivalent VIII', the infamous pile of 120 identical bricks, is precisely about just how meaningless a brick can be. For Tonico Lemos Auad, however, bricks are rife with the memories of his Brazilian hometown, and this show is an exploration of that symbolism.
'Brick House' dominates the front space of the gallery. Its imposing bulk offers no entrance, just wall after wall, refusing to let you in. But hints of life manage to seep out. A thick coiled rope, a dead branch, a bottle filled with sand, a long delicate silver necklace. These objects leak from the cracks in the bulging mortar, like lives peeking out from within the impenetrable room, desperate to escape. There's a sense of sadness to the work, the dead branch seeming to imply that the lives within are long gone, the silver necklace hanging like the memory of a lost love.
The additions to the brick walls are subtle and fragile, the ghosts of some former domestic life, like an unattainable future or a forgotten past imposing itself on your present. But the structure itself is ungainly – monumental yet non-threatening. It implies density, but could very well be hollow.
Slightly more successful are Auad's series of chalk sculptures. The sea-battered ruined plinths, their surfaces dotted with spiky metal letters like the detritus from a charm bracelet, mirror the solidity of the bricks without the clumsy aesthetic. Auad's work is a battle without end, imposing the soft, fragile and light on the hard, robust and heavy, but seeming to allow neither to win out.