Brazil Now: A Cross Section Of Art – New Exhibitions

Flavia Junqueira

Flávia Junqueira opens expected second individual exhibition in São Paulo

Flávia Junqueira at the Baró Gallery ushers in the biggest solo show that she has done so far. In Study for Fun, the artist displays two series of unpublished photographs enlarged, and an installation made during a one year period of artistic residence in Paris. Flávia noticed carousels in the city and wanted to buy a guide that pointed to where they were.  She found that there was nothing like that in existance, “So I decided to map them”. “I made a map to locate these objects extremely fanciful in the midst of the real world,” she recalls. Carousels mapped by Flávia in Paris were recorded on Polaroid and now, resized in extensions, make up the series Affective Cartography.

The series Child and Family gathers photo enlargements of old families, found the artist in Parisian bookstores. Each image will detail how tiny photographs of amusement parks in France. Completing the exhibition, an installation mounted in the center of the gallery brings a carousel that rotates on the contrary, to music also reversed.

Study for Entertainment marks a new phase in the production of Flavia, who has explored the boundaries between real and fictional promoting meetings between these two poles almost abrupt. Now, the artist combined the approach to the study of the representation, making these more subtle and indistinct borders. “The representation passes through the sieve of affect and alter the reality,” she says.

It is also the first time that Flavia is dedicated to an installation. Or handling of a large object, such as prefer to set the carousel. In it, leads minimal intervention to reverse the flow of movement and sound. “There is some frustration, emptiness … But still, the object is beautiful. The environment has always sided fantasy” concludes the artist.
 
Exposure Study for Fun – Flávia Junqueira  15 June at 20 July
Baró Gallery, street Barra Funda, 216, São Paulo – Brazil Entrance Free

Top Photo: Courtesy Flávia Junqueira © The Artist

Brazil Now: A Cross Section Of Art - New Exhibitions

Zipper Gallery presents new foreign artists in São Paulo

Zipper Gallery promotes the opening of the exhibition “Welcome” curated by Paula Braga, the collective feature artists who just join the team represented the gallery. Especial highlight to new foreign artists unusual in earlier times in Brazil.

The Colombian Adriana Duque photographing characters disturbing and attractive at the same time: children dressed lavishly baroque scenarios that seem to overlap, as a fantasy, the real domestic interiors humble. Posing as small monarchs, children have the same pair of blue eyes, and shall wear a crown that marks the contemporary to be also a headset. The luxury crown that keeps the sound in a secret world of sounds (or hushed silence), that only they hear and that sustains the fantasy alienated.

Mexico’s Ricardo Rendón sends us felts that are patiently bored and make a synthesis between craftsmanship and mental processes. From a rectangle of felt, the artist produces dozens of variations when it is empty of matter, drawing hundreds of slices of tissue, which surprisingly does not disappear, but becomes stronger in the new form.

In Portugal, Rodrigo Oliveira looks to Brazil and talks about the mention of modern architecture and industrial stereotypical items (like rubber sandals and handbags fake brands), the paradoxes of a society that amalgamates fullness of resources and social need.

The brazilian Daniel Escobar appropriates graphic productions as travel guides or pieces of advertising billboards, meant to communicate a clear message, and turns them into works that encourage open criticism of methods of control society. Also Brazilian, Marcelo Amorim conjures up childhood images also appropriate manuals and photographs that dictate rules of behavior, reproducing them by hand and watching them with a milky layer, which becomes diffuse, just unanswered, such as the processes of assimilation standards of conduct before adulthood.

Camille Kachani, Lebanese, revives the dead wood of broomsticks and hoes, banks and boxes, as if the tree felled for making utilitarian objects back to life, refusing a servile function.

Brazil Now: A Cross Section Of Art - New Exhibitions

Flammable Leonilson

The Museum of Contemporary Art of Ceará (Brazil) opens an exhibition from the important Brazilian artist José Leonilson Ceara (Fortaleza 1957 – São Paulo 1993). The show, consists of approximately 175 works, is the largest ever presented in Fortaleza and is composed mainly of three collections: Bezerra Family Days, Museum of Contemporary Art of Ceará – MAC CE and Modern Art Museum of Ceará – MAM SP. The works occupy 13 halls of the MCA and scale through a powerful journey, an overview of the artist’s work that showed in his poetry the relationship between Art and Life, building a writing marked by the confluence of the biographical and fiction. The exhibition appropriates one of his titles – Flammable – to elect axes that guide the curatorial thinking, as explain Bitu Cassundé, curator’s exhibition.

After 20 years of the death of the artist, there is vitality and topicality of the issues that permeate his creative process, exposure Leonilson Flammable, has a cutout for the upcoming public Fortress, as well as agendas / notebooks that can be scanned accessed by the public, plus the premiere of the documentary “under the weight of my loves” produced by Itaú Cultural about the work of Leonilson.

Museum of Contemporary Art of Ceara June 11 at 19h September 8, 2013

Brazil Now: A Cross Section Of Art - New Exhibitions

MAC São Paulo More… Two Moments of José Antonio da Silva

The monographic exhibition of José Antonio da Silva’s works belonging to the collection of MAC USP can be construed as an unpholding aspect of the issue of authorship in art history. This comes from the fact that we are here confronted with a self-taught artist, whose paintings have been seen as “fruits of his isolation during his youth” (Lourival Gomes Machado), and whose reception in the world of art was due to his rapid incorporation into modernist debate and the presence of his work in important collections, such as that of the former São Paulo Museum of Modern Art (MAM) and São Paulo Museum of Art (MASP), just after his discovery by critics Paulo Mendes de Almeida, Lourival Gomes Machado and Pietro Maria Bardi. The “invention’ of José Antonio da Silva as a painter took place in the second half of the 1940s, where here and abroad, modernist critics and artists were again taking interest in a dear issue to the notion of modern art, violently attacked in the interwar period in Europe: the idea of “primitive” in artistic creation. In 1948, while José Antonio da Silva was opening his first solo exhibition at Domus Gallery in São Paulo, French artist Jean Dubuffet, for instance, was founding his Foyer de l’Art Brut, in the basement of René Drouin Gallery in Paris, gathering works produced by self-taught artists.

Between primitive and concrete, José Antonio da Silva made his way as a painter in the context of modernism of the 1940s/50s. That his work has been seen through one perspective or another is more to do with his introduction into the history of modern art in Brazil, in a moment that seems to mark a turning point of the notion of modernism: the abandonment of realist tendencies and the plunge into abstractionism, says Ana Magalhães, curator.

Brazil Now: A Cross Section Of Art - New Exhibitions

THE ARTIST AS AUTHOR/THE ARTIST AS EDITOR

Based on the works that comprise MAC USP’s collection and curated by Tadeu Chiarelli, this exhibition presents two distinguishing characteristics of the art scene over the last decades: on one hand, artist who act upon the world and demand his role as author by creating formal gestures and structures that validate his individuality – a “warm” attitude towards reality; on the other hand, artist who, by means of a “cold” attitude” towards reality, act as if he created a game comprised of ready-made images to which they gave new meaning, either by arbitrarily choosing one image or another or by articulating several images.

The exhibition contains a selection of works by Brazilian and foreign artists that represent the authorial strand in art over the last decades (Ivens Machado and Karel Appel, among others) and by artists who act (or have acted) as editors of the world (Robert Rauschenberg and Regina Silveira, among others). The exhibition also includes artists who put into perspective the idea of authorship by creating collaborative works (José Leonilson and Albert Hien, Shirley Paes Leme, Fernando Lindote and Felipe Cama).

Photo: Felipe Cama © The Artist

 MAC USP: Avenida Pedro Álvares Cabral, 1301 São Paulo – Brazil  Free entrance

Words: Douglas Negrisolli  © Artlyst 2013 / Photos: Courtesy of the Galleries

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