Rio de Janeiro, 1964 and Lucerne, 1955. Live in Rio de Janeiro

Maurício Dias and Walter Riedweg’s installations are largely produced in dialogue with minorities shunted to the fringes of society. Since 2004, the duo has been developing projects that explore the representation of alterity in history, resulting in such works as Amparo [Support] (2013), Funk Staden (2007) and Throw (2004).

At Frestas, Dias & Riedweg present Realize suas fantasias [Fulfill Your Fantasies], a work that references the ad “Fulfill your sexual fantasies. Photo + telephone”, which Charles Hovland ran for over twenty years in New York newspapers. Through this ad, the photographer offered to take black and white fantasy photos registering all the secret desires of his clients—men, women and transexuals. In parallel, Hovland started doing color photos of male nudes for magazines. In over two decades, he amassed an archive of 3,000 black-and-white negatives, 450 thousand slides and 300 polaroids.

The artists have known Charles Hovland since the early 90s, and, in this installation commissioned by Frestas, they explore the potentialities and particularities of the visual narratives contained in the photographer’s archive, especially in relation to his subjective, pulsating record of sexuality and the urban imaginary in New York during the 70s and 80s. The result is a non-hierarchical narrative of Hovland’s archives, including pictures from his collections and his studio, scenes from the city’s underground life and portraits of the photographer himself, as well as his recent interviews with the duo.

[F.J.]

São Paulo, 1972

The city plays a central role in Daniel Caballero’s investigations. To reflect on the individual and collective uses and occupations of the urban space, the artist collects materials from vacant lots and park or woodland, establishes partnerships, and proposes ephemeral interventions and environmental actions. At Frestas, he presents the installation Viagem pitoresca através do espaço ao redor da minha casa [Picturesque Trip through the Space Outside my House], underway since 2012. The project is a mix of materials gathered and interventions and environmental actions conducted—often in collaboration with artists, collectives and volunteers—in wastelands, squares and parks throughout Greater São Paulo. One of the aims is to recover the history and original species of an endangered biome, the Cerrado (tropical savanna), which predominates in the Brazilian Midwest, but with some remaining pockets in metropolitan São Paulo.

This environmental problem features in Caballero’s installation in the form of structures made out of building materials and scrap, naturalist drawings of the native flora, videos, books and travelogues, plants and transplanted vegetation. The artist weaves a narrative about a resilient nature and, in parallel, collates for a reflection on art documentation as a way of sampling events of everyday life, beyond the artwork and its museum spaces. In so doing, he underscores the inadequacy of thinking about art as something autonomous or confined to material objects. More than simply mapping endangered greenery, Viagem pitoresca… articulates a set of events, interventions and transformations. These gestures demonstrate the potential of art as a social and political act capable of triggering the futures—or at least the utopias—incubating in things and the world.

[F. J.]

Rio de Janeiro, 1955

At the start of his career, in the 1980s, Daniel Senise took part in exhibitions that legitimized his work within the context of the so-called “80s Generation”, a diverse group of artists that was recognized by the critics for its gestural, vibrantly colored approach to painting.

Since the late 90s, Senise has been producing works that dwell somewhere between painting and collage, as the artist appropriates materials from his everyday working environment, such as dirt and nails from the studio floor, and pages from books and art catalogues. As such, the behind-the-scenes debris of artistic production becomes the core subject of the art itself. Texture and chromatic variations are generated using a technique that is not unlike monotype, in which pigments and shapes are transferred from one plane to another through contact.

The works created for Frestas draw from photographs of the Sorocaba Railway Station, a building inaugurated in 1930. The railway itself was one of the most important lines during the 19^th and early 20^th centuries. The station house, once a thriving link between Sorocaba and the city of São Paulo, is currently defunct.

[L.B.]