The first solo show at Galeria Vermelho by artist Cinthia Marcelle, who was recently awarded the Future Generation Art Prize, from the Pinchuk Art Centre, Zero de Conduta (Zero for Conduct) began to be conceived during the 2008 economic crisis. A decisive, critical moment of suspension on the border between the annulment of rules suddenly revealed as obsolete and the adoption of new paradigms, the idea of crisis served as a theme for the artist in the creation of a world suspended in the sum of its artifices. Sculptures and photographs present situations and characters revealed by the crisis, an entire temporary world in which the relation between price and value, capital and labor is being reinvented on an ongoing basis. For an instant, the image of the market as a regulatory entity is abolished and an entire new world can arise. This is what takes place, for example, in Sobre este mesmo mundo [This Same World Over], a work presented at the 29th Bienal de São Paulo, in 2010. On the surface of a nearly 9-meter-long chalkboard, Marcelle suggests the crumbling and failure of the educational systems by almost completely erasing all the writing on the chalkboard and leaving the vestiges of this anachronistic knowledge in heaps of chalk dust on the floor.

Although Marcelle works on various supports – as is the case of most artists of her generation – video and photography seem to be the instruments with which the artist has attained her greatest power of synthesis. Her narratives, created by small actions realized repeatedly for a video or a photo camera, rely on simplicity to achieve clarity and objectivity, while retaining their poetics. This precise artistic gaze emerges in the new series of photographs that are part of the solo show Zero de Conduta. The four diptychs seem to narrate a process of deranging the world, through simple actions staged by common people, in places lacking identificatory elements and in a visible process of transformation.

This world in suspension that awaits a conclusion for the crisis also arises in the installation Economia [Economy], which occupies the gallery’s white cube. Created for the ceiling of the room, Economia suggests a frozen time. Nearly devoid of objects – like the showcases of the Temporário [Temporary] series installed by Marcelle in Vermelho’s entrance hall – the space occupied by the installation recalls a large North American car dealership battered by tough times and the necessities of the market.

Zero de Conduta points to the current instability and fragility of the social and economic systems. In this scenario, man is deprived of the social and economic structures that ensure his well-being in the world.