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.
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.
