GROUP EXHIBITION

Edu Monteiro, Gabriella Marinho, Guy Veloso, Hal Wildson, Jan Kaláb, Marcela Gontijo, Marcelo Monteiro, Marcos Roberto, Mateu Velasco, Pedro Carneiro, Tinho e Xico Chaves

Dias melhores, VERÃO
Curated by: Erika Nascimento and Ricardo Kimaid
12|15|22 - 02|11|23

Dias melhores, VERÃO

“Dias Melhores, Verão” presents a rite of passage and change of season, which welcomes the coming year. An exhibition that symbolizes freshness and friction when designing a I wish for better days. To close 2022 and celebrate the first year of the gallery in the Gávea neighborhood, we gathered guest artists, such as Gabriella Marinho, Guy Veloso and Marcelo Monteiro, alongside the represented artists, Edu Monteiro, Hal Wildson, Jan Kaláb, Marcela Gontijo, Marcos Roberto, Pedro Carneiro, Tinho and Xico Chaves.

At this crossing pace, we passed under “Atol”, an installation by Gabriella Marinho, composed of several ceramic objects handmade by the artist, with small pieces of glass, which allude to oceanic islands. Suspended by a net, we can see the immensity of the sky through the gaps in this fabric. In this enchantment coming from the sky and the sea, we enter the environment of vibrant colors, with works that go back to the memory of childhood, the intensity of the heat, the diaspora, the street, the carnival, the landscape, the body and the relationship of desire, both for changes and for a criticism of consumption.

To celebrate this moment, we bring the representation of the Iansã warrior, orixá of winds, storms and intensity, through the photography of Guy Veloso, where the artist portrayed the commission from the front in the "Ritual of the evening" during the school's 2019 parade of Portela samba. After all, how can we talk about summer without bringing the biggest popular party in Rio de Janeiro? Next to it, the painting "Oloxá, Rainha, Janaína, Iemanjá", by Pedro Carneiro, holding white flowers in the background of a vibrant pink, an ode to healing, luck and protection.

Throughout the exhibition, we have a photographic cartography of the series “Paisagem Vertical” (2022) by the artist Edu Monteiro, who has been following the wear and tear and transformations of the vertical landscapes in the south of the country, and the series “Memória e Infância”, by the artist Hal Wildson, who rescues the importance of the rivers' survival, specifically the Araguaia, which flows through the states of Goiás, Mato Grosso, Tocantins and Pará. Highlighting the complexity of the working class painted by Marcos Roberto in the series "Tapping the sun with a sieve", where he uses a rough sieve, a common object in civil construction that allows sand to pass through the steel mesh, to paint a worker carrying a cart of drinks - this working class, for the most part without minimum working conditions, are present in the daily life of the beaches of Rio de Janeiro.

Colors and shapes are fundamental elements in this exhibition, such as the intensity of color and its dialogue in space present in Jan Kaláb's paintings and Mateu Velasco's embroidery, in the materiality and texture of Marcelo Monteiro's sculpture, and in the gestural and oracular of painting “Mutação” by Marcela Gontijo, which features vertical and horizontal lines resulting from a system created by the artist through the I Ching.

As usual, at the end of each cycle, we recall events and reflections over the course of the year and launch our wishes for New Year's Eve, where we aim to see the world in another way, with another lens, as in the objects of Xico Chaves, in which the artist presents a “Book of Stone” with a peephole and “Cosmic Glasses".

Throughout 2022, it was created in the gallery's centenary mansion, a place dedicated to artistic enjoyment and experimentation by our represented and invited artists. The artists Mateu Velasco and Edu Monteiro were invited to occupy this place throughout the group exhibitions "Das foams, wanting to save a ruin" and "Riscos, breaches and ruins" respectively, as well as in the individual exhibitions "Calor" by Jan Kálab, "Re- Utopya" by Hal Wildson, "Cartas ao Afeto" by Pedro Carneiro and "Oráculo" by Marcela Gontijo. In this exhibition we invite the artist Tinho to occupy this space with his new series “Marcas de Poder” which brings reflections on consumption and its influence on society.

"Dias Melhores, Verão" launches the expectation of opening paths and micro transformations for us to "hope for" better times. As in the song:

“The equilibrist hope

knows that every artist's show

must go on"

(Aldir Blanc and João Bosco)

Text: Erika Nascimento

Preview

TINHO occupation
MARCAS DE PODER series
Curated by: Erika Nascimento
12|15|22 - 01|21|23

occupation TINHO

MARCAS DE PODER series

Tinho is sansei (grandson of Japanese) and one of the precursors of urban art in Brazil, his experience on the streets and reflections on the place of belonging in a context of migratory flows, made him think about the aesthetics of consumption, formats and patterns settled down. In 1993, the artist began producing puppets, initially inspired by puppets or puppets.

By transforming the scraps of the dolls, where each piece of fabric donated or found by the artist in various regions around the world, Tinho brings new meanings and experiences to his characters.

Over the years, these dolls gained new supports, sizes and representation on screens. Parallel to this production, the artist has been researching the transition between figuration and the abstract to try to account for "being Japanese-Brazilian" (Brazil is currently the country with the largest number of people of Japanese origin living outside Japan). To this end, the artist has been interested in the history of clothing in painting, in the social construction of fashion and in the transformation of materials, to bring up themes such as symbolic exchanges, brands, consumption, migration, globalization and social and economic "status". The “Emulation” exhibition at CCSP held in 2022 by the artist brought some of these aspects.

His most recent productions in paintings from the "Marcas de Poder" series, bring, instead of scraps of fabric, the great luxury brands, such as: Vogue, Louis Vuitton, Chanel and Dior and others such as Nike, EA Sports, Tiktok, Globo , BBC, Nintendo, Banco Itaú, Ifood, Dell, Apple, flags of nations, for building your dolls.

In this series, Tinho puts his cloth dolls as protagonists in a dreamlike way, and, in a direct and objective way, inserts logos of the big brands stamped on the body of these characters, bringing up questions about social construction, symbol of identity and belonging in certain groups and forms of expression.

We can evoke several thoughts to try to deal with this dense theme that Tinho proposes in this series, from approaches from the field of psychology, anthropology, sociology and philosophy. As the sociologist Pierre Bordieu reminds us, when defining "distinction" as a differentiation strategy that is at the heart of social life.

Thus, some questions are raised: what makes an individual choose certain brands? Would they have this power of distinction? How does the desire for consumption of these brands penetrate individually and collectively? How in the media and globalized world are brands symbols of identification? And when certain groups, hitherto subaltern, start to consume these brands? Tinho also brings identification with the other - the "I" reflected in the other - and questions the very identity of the SER.

Far from being able to answer these questions, but rather shed light on the subject, Tinho points to a kind of "machine for replicating behavior", where we often see individuals adhering to brands and ways of life based on a belief, almost a "faith" in the construction of the identity of the consumer product, and more, in the distinction or acceptance in certain groups. And it is this replicability that can be observed in this new outfit of the dolls painted by the artist.

Text: Erika Nascimento