Zé Carlos Garcia

/in ,

Aracajú, 1973. Lives in Rio de Janeiro

Zé Carlos Garcia’s sculptures present themselves as uncanny shapeshifters that can recombine their members to conjure up different species of insect, or transform pieces of furniture by cloaking them in plumage. This adding-on creates hybrids that not only preserve the meanings of their constituent parts, but also generate morbid curiosities out of distortions of their natures. Garcia seems to want to evince a certain perversity in his audience, caught somewhere between revulsion and fascination, playing on their voyeurism before such mangled bodies, however fictional they may be.

At Frestas, the artist presents a sample of the art he has produced over the last eight years. In the works Cadeira [Chair] and Pássaro [Bird], for example, he explores the formal qualities of the materials and confers upon them a feathery flutter that seems to contradict their sculptural condition by bringing them to bear in all their enigmatic presence. Something similar happens in Ganimedes [Ganymede], a monumental shapeless mass draped in black feathers plonked in the middle of the exhibition space. Not exactly a mantle, not exactly a wing, the work exists in a hybrid corporeality that seems suspended in time, much like Zeus himself, who reigns supreme over the gods at the same time as he abducts the young Ganymede. The Trojan prince was tending to his father’s flocks when he was seen by Zeus. Enchanted by his beauty and spurred by an impulse somewhere between seduction and sadism, the god of gods transformed himself into an eagle and carried the youth off to Olympus to serve as his personal cup-bearer.

[O.A.]

Obras

Cadeira, 2009
penas e mobiliário

Sem título, 2012
penas e mobiliário

Sem título, 2016
angeli branco torneado

Ganimedes, 2016
penas

Pássaro, 2010
mobiliário e arte plumária

Jogo, 2013
madeira torneada e tinta automotiva

Sem título, 2013
50 peças em madeira, penas e insetos

Yara Pina

/in ,

Goiânia, 1979

Interested in the choreography of the body in mid-violence, Yara Pina explores the potency of the destructive act. In meticulously planned interventions, she destroys everything from uprooted plants to animal bones, tableware, chairs, even easels and frames. These performances normally figure as a physical attack upon the material and space, in which we see the power play between her actions and the materials’ resistance to them. However, the artist’s focus is on the damage sustained by the objects, the marks left behind by her depredations, the last remaining evidence of an annihilated presence.

Before the Triennial opened, Pina carried out a series of actions in the exhibition space, destroying a guitar, chairs, frames and other objects, which were burned, stoned or smashed off the walls. The heaped wreckage and silhouettes scorched onto the walls, also attacked with knives, were all that was left to tell the tale. As Pina started out in drawing, her present work reveals her familiarity with charcoal, improvised out of the charred remains of her objects. Surrounding the incinerated, hacked-up remnants lie all manner of improvised weapons, with rolled-up canvases, paintbrushes and bits of broken frame for handles. The presence of these sharp implements doesn’t only hint at the violence inherent to certain criminal contexts, but also fills the exhibition hall with an unease and latent dread, as if danger were imminent.

[O.A.]

Obras

Sem título 1, 2017
objetos diversos

Sem título 2, 2017
cadeiras

Sem título 3, 2017
violão

Sem título 4, 2017
carvão, facão, crânio bovino, terra vermelha

Sem título 5, 2017
carvão, facão, terra vermelha

Gervane de Paula

/in ,

Cuiabá, 1961

The work of Gervane de Paula questions the circulation of popular icons from the folksy repertoire of Brazil’s Mato Grosso state. The artist looks at the dynamics that attribute value to these symbols and how they can be appropriated by the market and tourism, and even be conscripted into a regionalist discourse. De Paula turns a critical, humorous gaze toward the way an exoticized image is spun for the Pantanal wetlands. Instead of the natural bounty, he depicts the region’s darker underbelly, with pasture consuming wild biomes and rampant drug-trafficking spreading its violence and waste throughout the state, but especially along the border with Bolivia. He also reflects on the art market and how the traditional models and themes of the region’s crafts are replicated and consumed like trinkets from a souvenir store.

In the wooden objects and sculptures that make up Mundo animal [Animal Kingdom], De Paula wrangles with issues inherent to the region and its symbols, such as the visual omnipresence of the jabiru stork in local logos and advertising. In one of his pieces, a mincer chews up a number of jabirus in front of some packs of sugar that depict the bird on the front. The jabiru returns in another installation consisting of a shelf that juxtaposes the typical souvenir fare—jaguars, alligators and typical regional fruits—with an outsized crack pipe. Inside the pipe, instead of crack rocks, we see various jabiru storks, ready to be burned.

[O.A.]

Obras

Mundo animal. Uma droga de arte!, 2017
cola, souvenir, artesanato em madeira, tinta óleo

Celina Portella

/in ,

Rio de Janeiro, 1977

Celina Portella’s videos, photographs, performances and installations constantly explore and test the relationship between the encounter inside and outside the image. In the situations the artist stages, the body—often her own—stars in a choreography that challenges the limits of the imagetic field. Her works use mechanical and technological devices to induce continuities and mirrorings between real and artificial presences, physical and illusory spaces.

In the photographic series Puxa [Pull] (2016), a miniature Portella is seen pulling on a rope to counterweigh some object outside the frame, generating the illusion of a real balance of forces. In the installation Movimento² [Movement²] (2010), the artist is seen on-screen apparently pushing the monitor along a wall-mounted sliding track. In Nós [Us] (2011), the artist dances with layered, life-sized videos of her own dancing self.

A similar approach was explored in Público [Public], an interactive videoinstallation on-show at this edition of Frestas. When the visitor enters the room, a motion sensor in the darkened room triggers a spotlight trained on the entrant, while a series of monitors fills up with images of people applauding, greeting the exhibition-goer with a standing ovation. The virtual applause seems to reverse the roles normally attributed to the artist and the public by evoking a theater spectacle on the threshold between fiction and reality. It’s a process that enables Portella to devise a new relational field, an intricate game that reconciles and accumulates multiple dimensions.

[O.A.]

Obras

Público, 2017
videoinstalação interativa
PROJETO DESENVOLVIDO COM O APOIO DE Secretaria de Estado de Cultura do Rio de Janeiro
(SEC) e Fundação Carlos Chagas Filho de Amparo à Pesquisa do Estado do Rio de Janeiro
(FAPERJ) – Bolsa do programa de estímulo à criação, experimentação e pesquisa artística

Bruno Mendonça

/in ,

São Paulo, 1987

Mutant identities, the fragmented “I” and loosened roles in the workplace are subjects that have become increasingly present in our everyday lives. These still disputed concepts tend to align with the biopower through which the current phase of capitalism chips away at our rights and worms into our digital lives, or “second life”, in order to generate more capital. On the other hand, certain distortions point toward experiments and accruals that create situations that would have been unimaginable before. At the start of the 2000s, the artist Ricardo Basbaum invested in the “etc.” concept as a way of elasticizing the conventional categories of work in the visual arts system: “When the artist questions the nature and function of his/her role, we should write ‘etc.-artist’ (so we can imagine several categories: curator-artist, writer-artist, activist-artist etc.)”.

Etc.-artist (etc.-curator, etc.-singer, etc.-clubber) Bruno Mendonça positions himself as an agent who operates inside and outside this system. Through zines, exhibitions or mic-sessions, he creates environments and platforms—often temporary—in order to discuss and problematize not only the artistic metier, but also sexuality, gender, or any other fixed cultural or urban category. The internet is another medium he works through, and this was the environment on which he developed his work-fronts for Frestas, involving posts, spoken-word exercises, collages, and after-party testimonials that, after circulating for a while on the social media, were transformed into an online publication to be launched with a mic-stand performance at Sesc Sorocaba.

[J.A.]

Ricardo Càstro

/in , , ,

São Roque, 1972. Lives between São Paulo and Rio de Janeiro

Abravanar is a verb invented to designate modes of unleashing vital energy through interaction with elements of cultural memory, sometimes abstract and sometimes clearly harnessed to popular festivities, religious cults and the mass media. The abravaner may expand the self through the sensory experience of colors and light, musical chants, and the receptive, perspiring, connected body. Ricardo Càstro has been abravaning since the early 2000s, and this has yielded artistic and spiritual manifestations, both his own (and often privately so) and of others, be they partners or publics, to whom he offers beauty in return for empathy and exchange.

Wava consists of three portals: Platinum song, Stair lip and Coffee table. In silver, gold and crystal, respectively, the three works propose meditation rituals. Once activated in their totality (as the artist intends), they heighten our perception of an invisible, high-frequency wave that spreads and intensifies. The stirred wave spills into Sorocaba, where Ricardo spent a month as a resident, and out over the internet, where he has amplified this presence and possible interactions on Google Maps and Instagram, scattering clues and creating routes of access in the form of invitations. From geometries to gypsy drift, through tarot cards in a town square, a performance at the foot of a public monument, and a lot of face-pulling, all frugal and exuberant, onwards it goes, but lest we forget: exuberance is just an abravanist pretext.

Obras

Wava, 2017
técnica mista
PARTICIPAÇÃO André Bragança, Gabriel Junqueira e Marcelo Fagge

WAVA is an invisible wave that can emanate from the three elements (portals) arranged here in a triangle.

In this space, any individual can trigger the wave. The sequence of interaction with the elements and the rhythm of the experience should be decided by each participant. We recommend that participants enter barefoot.

Suggested interactions:

Canto platina (Platinum song)_RECEIVE
Lie down and stay in that position until you can tune into the platinum wavelength. Here the key is one of rest, meditation, attention to one’s breathing, the internalization of energy—attuning.

Naco de escada (Stair lip)_SHOUT
Ratchet up the volume, concentrate on something you want to break with and holler as loud as you can. Here the key is one of radicalization as a way of jolting energy into flux; of the possibility of bringing buried inner questions into the outer realm—liberation.

Mesa de centro (Coffee table)_DIALOGUE
Talk to a crystal ball in your mind’s eye, without touching it. See your future, visualize. Here the key is one of understanding, reformulation and the possibility of redirecting your ideas—redesign.

Escola da Floresta

/in ,

São Paulo, 2016

Like a geopolitics invented from the outside-in, Latin America lacks cohesion among its members—its people and its nations—, a connectedness that could enable them to recognize and cultivate something shared, both historically and in the present. Begun by the artist and educator Fábio Tremonte, the Escola da Floresta [Forest School] attempts to lay the groundwork for this and other discussions. With no fixed headquarters or even a website, the project, created in 2016, has fostered networks of interlocutors from different countries across the continent and promoted horizontal dynamics of knowledge. Shared journeys, walks, texts, films and shared kitchens are just some of the project’s triggers.

At Frestas, the School staged a series of performative readings via live feed on Facebook. The idea was to throw some light on the indigenous situation in Brazil by resurrecting a hard-hitting and long-forgotten document. Spanning 30 volumes and some seven thousand pages, the Figueiredo Report was the result of an investigation completed during the military dictatorship about human rights abuses against indigenous populations between 1946 and 1968. Packed full of documental evidence of torture, slave labor and genocide, as well as environmental devastation, the report was left gathering dust until 2013, when it was found at the Museu do Índio and sent to the National Truth Commission, an organ created to investigate human rights abuses during the dictatorship. Read by the Escola da Floresta on consecutive days as part of a multi-voice vigil, excerpts from the report bring to light facts that urgently need to be assimilated into memory.

[A.M.M]

Obras

  • Escola da Floresta [Leitura pública do Relatório Figueiredo] mídia: Facebook, transmissão ao vivo postagem: 11/9

Angélica Freitas e Juliana Perdigão

/in ,

As in a dialogue moderated by invisible rules, perhaps probability, frequency, telepathy or espionage, Google likes to complete our searches for us. Typing in “ways to”, the search engine promptly suggests a number of options: “be wicked”, “be richer”, “save money”, “make money”. If you look up “things that fly” in Portuguese, the Brazilian version will throw up links to UFOs and drones. No helicopters, no airplanes, not even the Brazilian-made Super Tucano, the jet fighter which, after transporting large quantities of drugs at the behest of serving and as yet unpunished government ministers and members of Congress, became a flying emblem of the political crisis Brazil has been mired in since the bribery and graft scandals involving politicians and state-run companies, like Petrobras, first exploded in 2014. Paraphrasing this sort of arbitrary and apparently automatic associative writing, Angélica Freitas began a series of poems dedicated to tying up the loose ends of the scandal—of the laugh-so-as-not-to-cry variety—, some of them handwritten, seeing as they are doomed to be forgotten anyway.

Across the pages of the author’s notebook fly a priest tied to helium balloons, verses by the 1980s girlband As frenéticas, the unpublishable nicknames given to a senator embroiled in the corruption scandal and some beautiful, faithful buzzards. For the soiree Macrofonia, held at Casa da Luz in São Paulo in June 2017, the texts were given new associations in sound and image. Armed with some prerecorded soundtracks, the musician and actress Juliana Perdigão probes Angelica’s live readings with sounds ranging from the rhythmical to the ambient, sometimes existing solely to underscore what the flux of things allows to slip by. Like an exercise in co-creation between two interlocutors from different fields, both equipped with the discursive apparatuses of their time, Coisas que voam [Things that Fly] continues after this initial event. Invited by the Triennial, the series takes up a two-month residence on Facebook and YouTube.

[A.M.M.]

Wanda Pimentel

/in ,

Rio de Janeiro, 1973

For a long time, the Brazilian art critics that analyzed Wanda Pimentel’s work placed her outside the experimentalism and political contestations that characterized much of the country’s conceptual output during the 1960s and 70s. Highlighting her specificities, these readings tended to associate her with either Brazilian constructivism or North-American new figuration and pop art. More recently, however, the lyrical silence, mystery, stillness and ambivalent figuration that are so strong in Pimentel’s art have seen her reconsidered and repositioned within the context of Brazilian political art and the feminist debate.

The pieces on-show at Frestas are paintings and reliefs in wood produced during the 60s and 70s, many of them from the series Envolvimento [Involvement]. For the critic Fernando Cocchiarale, this series signaled not only the beginning and direction for Pimental’s career, but also her political identity. The selection on exhibition evinces both a private repertoire and ongoing dialogues with local and foreign artistic movements. These interfaces endow Pimentel’s work with certain attributes, such as a planar spatial arrangement; a graphic feel and saturated tones; a figurative ambiguity of interiors, bodies and objects; and a representation that tensions the naturalized connection between everyday domesticity and the feminine universe.

[F.B.]

Obras

Envolvimento, 1973
acrílica sobre tela
Coleção João Sattamini, comodato no
Museu de Arte Contemporânea de Niterói

Sem título, 1968
vinílica sobre tela
Coleção João Sattamini, comodato no
Museu de Arte Contemporânea de Niterói

Sem título, sem data
vinílica sobre eucatex
Coleção João Sattamini, comodato no
Museu de Arte Contemporânea de Niterói

Sem título, 1969
vinílica sobre duratex
Coleção João Sattamini, comodato no
Museu de Arte Contemporânea de Niterói

Sem título, 1978
acrílica sobre madeira
Coleção João Sattamini, comodato no
Museu de Arte Contemporânea de Niterói

Sem título, 1969
vinílica sobre tela
Coleção João Sattamini, comodato no
Museu de Arte Contemporânea de Niterói

Sem título, 1970
vinílica sobre madera
Coleção João Sattamini, comodato no
Museu de Arte Contemporânea de Niterói

Sem título, da série Bueiros, 1970
vinil sobre madera
Coleção João Sattamini, comodato no
Museu de Arte Contemporânea de Niterói

Sem título, 2013
Coleção João Sattamini, comodato no
Museu de Arte Contemporânea de Niterói