The group show Contra a Parede involves works that relate directly with the walls of the exhibition space. In these installations, paintings, videos, photographs and performances, the walls of the exhibition space interfere directly in the construction and temporality of the artworks, questioning the idea of the neutrality of the white cube inherited from modernism.

This is what occurs in Desvio de Poder 1 [Diversion of Power 1] by André Komatsu, installed in Vermelho’s hall 1. in the installation, Komatsu inverts the idea of the completed artwork and presents a wall of concrete blocks constructed on top of a large spot of white paint. A similar procedure appears in Novo [New], a work that is part of Marilá Dardot’s Nova Pintura [New Painting] series, where Dardot appropriates words and phrases used in store window displays and applies them on transparent surfaces, revealing not only the surface of the wall but also the stretcher bars that hold the work.

An installation created by Carmela Gross in 1997, Feche a Porta [Close the Door] is composed of six steel chairs. Gross takes these large-scale, hinged, stark objects lacking any sort of finishing, removes them from the floor and installs them directly on the wall, thus altering their normal function.

Hundreds of raindrops made of cement and glue invade the exhibition space in the installation Toró by Lia Chaia. Installed on the wall and on the floor of the white cube, Toró reveals the interior of the architectural structures, suggesting the clashing between the concrete of the urban metropolis and nature.

For his part, Nicolás Robbio presents the installation Sem Título [Untitled] that suggest a prohibited space. This installation, similar to a wooden sawhorse demarcates a region of fragility and constant risk. Mil [Thousand], by Daniel Senise, stacks up paper blocks resembling clay bricks but made with the paper taken from art exhibition catalogs and invitations to vernissages.

In the installation Mal Dito, Maurício Ianês creates a play on words inscribed directly onto the wall. A similar procedure appears in the work Equivalências [Equivalences] by Cadu. The installation is activated by a movement sensor that draws an arc on the wall. Every day the position of the tip is changed, generating a new drawing every day.

Contra a Parede counts also with works by Chiara Banfi, Cia de Foto, Dora Longo Bahia, Fabio Morais, Guilherme Peters, João Loureiro, João Nitsche, Marcelo Cidade and Marco Paulo Rolla.

The CA-BRA residency project featured works by young artists from Costa Rica, El Salvador, Nicaragua, and Brazil, created during a residency process in Belo Horizonte.

Created by CEIA – Centro de Experimentação e Informação de Arte, in partnership with Espira La Espora, an initiative of Nicaraguan artists, and with Fundação Clóvis Salgado, the CA-BRA residency is part of the Conversas project developed by CEIA throughout 2011, in Belo Horizonte. The project also includes a residency for local artists, a cycle of six free lectures and the release of a publication. According to CEIA coordinators Marco Paulo Rolla and Marcos Hill, one of the main objectives of the project is to prepare the ground for a larger event that will take place in 2012, entitled “Permeability between the different artistic languages today”. The event aims to “promote possible dialogues between different media expressions and stimulate exchanges between artists”.

Participating in the CA-BRA project are artists Denise Aguilar Huezo (El Salvador), Jullissa Moncada and Alejandro Flores (Nicaragua), Javier Calvo and Fabrizio Arrieta (Costa Rica), Carolina Caliento, Guilherme Peters, Fernando Pirata (SP, Brazil), Marcos Davi, Inácio Ribeiro Mariani, Raquel Versieux and Sara Lambranho (Belo Horizonte, Brazil). For approximately twenty days, the 12 artists worked in a collective studio in Belo Horizonte, creating from their individual experiences and conversations with Dora Longo Bahia (SP – Brazil), Marco Paulo Rolla (MG – Brazil) and Marcos Hill (MG – Brazil).

About CEIA

Founded in 2001 by artist Marco Paulo Rolla and art historian Marcos Hill, CEIA – Center for Experimentation and Art Information aims to stimulate activities related to the creation and dissemination of contemporary art, promoting various exchanges that bring together in Belo Horizonte artists from various parts of Brazil and the world.

Quase aqui features a set of paintings and collages, all created in 2011, which blend new findings with the logic of the artist’s already traditional architectural landscapes, in which he incorporates elements extracted from the tangible space that surrounds him.

This is what takes place in the new series of paintings Quase aqui [Qlmost here], in which Senise appropriates the tops of workbenches used in his studio, using them as a support for the work. over the marks and vestiges of years of work, Senise applies white oil paint, creating a homogeneous and uniform field that points to a moment of reflection about the procedures that characterize his work.

In three new collages, Senise combines organic elements with his architectural landscapes that distort the logical construction of the perspective. A similar but more radical procedure reappears in the set of nine paintings in which the artist breaks away from the architectural structure of internal spaces, creating a vanishing point for the secluded and uninhabited environments that he normally depicts in his works.

Completing the exhibition is a new collage created with pages of the encyclopedia História Universal. In it, Senise constructs modular spaces based on the pages of the encyclopedia, removing their images and keeping only a part of the technical descriptions, in a process similar to the one he used in the Skira series, recently presented at the 29 Bienal International de São Paulo (2010).

Work presented in Marco Paulo Rolla’s solo exhibition at Bahia’s Museum of Modern Art (2010) Casamento Sagrado suggests issues related to androgyny and alchemy magic. Optimistic, because it understands men as an evolved being with a superior soul, the series, on the other hand, emphasizes the inconstancy and fragility of men using multiple materials and images, establishing a dialogue that ironizes societies moral dogmas.

Mil Palavras features more than 30 new works by Leya Mira Brander which, as is usual in the artist’s oeuvre, create narratives based on their combinations. In one of her first prints – a periodic table of chemical elements – Brander already pointed to this procedure, which has become recurrent in her work, namely, the combination of elements (individual prints), each with unique elements, grouped linearly on the wall or in showcases (27th Bienal de São Paulo, 2008) in such a way as to create narratives that reveal Brander’s imaginary universe and make her a sort of storyteller.

In Mil Palavras, however, Brander combines depth and perspective with bidimensional prints, cutting and overlaying a number of them to construct sculptures that arise in the form of boxes, books, or simply objects and drawings suspended in the air. Color is another new element that the artist has added to this newest series, by way of the gold leaf that Brander uses to highlight parts of the drawings and to provide a rhythm to her stories. The appropriation of images from the history of art, a tool that brander has used in previous works, reappears as well in Mil Palavras, in drawings that refer to the works of Degas, Di Cirico, Bosh, Edward Maybridge and Egon Schiele.

The solo show Desviantes presents the first four works of the new series by Ana Maria Tavares entitled Hieróglifos Sociais [Social Hieroglyphs]. The result of a research carried out by the artist since 1997, this series proposes a critical reflection on the legacy of Brazilian modernism, based on a rereading of the architecture of the Oca Building (Ibirapuera Park, São Paulo, 1951), by Oscar Niemeyer (1907), creating a deviant universe that suggests the resumption of the rational order that pervaded the construction of modernism’s concepts.

Constructed in aluminum, stainless steel, teflon and digital drawings, the four metallic panels that occupy Vermelho’s hall 1 form horizontal cuts of landscapes buried in the ground, alluding to modern architecture, which modeled a new understanding of the world that arose based on political and social prerogatives of its time. When submitted to digital manipulations involving multiple perspectival shifts – visual devices created in the process of altering the Oca building’s original design – this architecture becomes deviant and gives rise to an abyssal perspective of the world. The pieces are structured as modular sliding panels, one over the next, in a rhythm that allows for the construction of new landscapes that are added to the nearly kaleidoscopic perspectival shifting of the surrounding space projected on the polished surfaces of black or silver stainless steel. While the images expand within the fixed panels, they are also imprisoned in a sensual game of veiling and unveiling, where the landscape becomes a hostage of the work and, at the same time, its salvation.

With titles taken from Rio de Janeiro adult motels, such as Calypso, Comodoro, Palazzo and Royal – thus pointing to a condition pertaining to a parallel, deviant universe – the work is constructed based on subtle paradoxes where the modernist reasoning is cross-influenced by mundane things, by the deviation of the prevailing order and the possible pleasure that results from these procedures.