In 1988 I took a ‘double decision’ that radically transformed my relationship with photography: to stop producing new images and dedicate myself to the appropriation and re-reading of what I called ‘photographic residues’, limiting the photographic act to what I considered strictly necessary.

From here on emerged, not as a purpose but as a consequence, both a principle of economy in the production of new imaginaries, and the beginning of an investigation about the different life cycles that photographs have, according to their existence in the world of subjects and their representations. I thought that many of the photographs that I found on the verge of abandon asked for (and also deserved…) a new life, that is, some resignification or a new symbolic function.

I started with the vernacular, which seemed the most natural to me, revisiting and reusing images from family albums. Soon after, I was compelled to enter the magical territory of cinema and its direct relationship with the photographic device. Newly admitted to the post-graduation program at the School of Communications and Arts at USP, having cinema as my main area, the 35mm photograms discarded in the garbage of ECA’s editing room immediately became objects of scrutiny and desire.

The photogram isolated from its context is like a survivor that tells about the suspension of a time that has passed, which is revised (and edited), again, as phantasmagoria. If the phantasmagoria leaves no trace, as soon as the cinematographic device is turned off, the photogram is the proof of its existence. Through mechanisms of intertextuality with painting, advertising, art history and photography, there was in the photograms a myriad of possibilities for reading this ‘suspended time of time’, paraphrasing Maurício Lissovsky, ‘a time of unlimited duration, but determined to end’. The anti-cinema was a cinema in reverse.

Parallel to the frames transformed into large format images there was a small group of objects where movement was something invented or attributed, as if the suspension of time could happen from a collage of photographic images; however, the anti-cinema, here, was a humorous pastiche of what in the 19th century was the phantasmagoria that oscillated between photography and cinema.

Rosângela Rennó, 2022

The sculptures in the Uma churrasqueira muito triste series appropriate pre-molded structures for the construction of barbecue grills. Cidade rearranged them in ways that allude to formalist sculptures and public monuments.

The sculptures in the Uma churrasqueira muito triste series appropriate pre-molded structures for the construction of barbecue grills. Cidade rearranged them in ways that allude to formalist sculptures and public monuments.

In the embroidered R series, by Edgard de Souza, one can see the artist’s body at work, moving in a continuous movement back and forth. The only figuration among the embroideries are clouds, in a comment on the search for images in gestural abstraction, which is similar to the game of looking for representations in clouds. The embroideries are produced on linen fabrics, with silk, cotton or linen threads.
The R series is related to the Rabiscos series, produced by de Souza between 2013 and 2015, and shown in the artist’s first solo show at Vermelho. In the series, large and small scribbles, little doodles, were produced from simple tasks imposed on himself by the artist, such as drawing while dancing, drawing with both hands at the same time, or drawing until the paper was torn. The doodles dealt with the movements of the artist’s body.
The R series and the Rabiscos follow Restoration, from 2011. In the work, presented at Edgard de Souza’s first solo show at Vermelho in 2015, and shown at the current solo show, an old, used floor cloth was meticulously restored by the artist. Restoration brings together the dualities with which de Souza works in the three series – and in all of his work: the virtuous and the spontaneous; the private and the public; high and low cultures; the diverging opinions.

In the largest bronze piece produced by the artist to date, two bodies appear mirrored and joined at the torso, one on top of the other. The absence of specific particularities of the original model that shapes the work transforms this body into a representation of the collective.

The bronze pieces based on the human body, which de Souza has been producing since the 1990s, deal with existential themes such as loneliness, death, affection, sex, and with references to art history.

In Terra Incognita (2022), the title of the work appears written in acrylic over linen canvas, using the Timezonetype system, developed by Detanico Lain. Timezonetype is a typography created from the relationship between time zones and the letters of the alphabet. Portions of the map cut by the time zone are used to designate letters. By this way, words are written with pieces of maps, creating arrangements that break the cartographic order and propose new readings of the world based on the written word.

Carmela Gross “HOOK” is both drawing and sculpture simultaneously. This apparent quick gesture took a series of artisanal and industrial procedures to be created. Its title, like its sharp edge, suggests perforation and, consequently, a certain degree of danger.

Douglas de Freitas points out in his text ‘Carmela Gross’ vast primer to face the world’ that Gross’s works “blurres boundaries between sketch, machine-made and handmade / city, crowd and individual, with its tools for questioning the established order, its imagistic assaults, and its weapons for facing the world and art”.

In 1989, Gross presented her works made in iron for the first time. Ana Maria Belluzo wrote at the time: “The figures that define Carmela’s visible universe appear at a time prior to the sign. As a form, they resist the automatisms and facilities of language and impose themselves as visual presences prior to any meaning.”

In the Mamarracho series, doodles are drawn, digitalized, enlarged 1000 times and then painted on white canvases. The black lines haphazardly cross the canvas, overflowing onto the wall, making these works hybrid image-objects.

The white slates from the “Ruído retórico” [Rethorical noise] series have words and phrases that are carved (and sometimes erased with acrylic mass) on their surface. Messages such as “tudo vai bem” [everything is going well] or “dócil” [docile] call our attention viewed from a critical perspective of the current Brazilian sociopolitical situation.

The white slates from the “Ruído retórico” [Rethorical noise] series have words and phrases that are carved (and sometimes erased with acrylic mass) on their surface. Messages such as “tudo vai bem” [everything is going well] or “dócil” [docile] call our attention viewed from a critical perspective of the current Brazilian sociopolitical situation.

Parte da série ‘A retórica do poder’, em que Cidade se apropria das emblemáticas Black Paintings de Frank Stella como base formal para uma critica ao emprego da arte como estratégia de dominação. “Essas formas minimalistas já estão implícitas no nosso cotidiano, desde a arquitetura hostil, a bolsa de valores e as formas dos prédios espelhados. […] As “Black Paintings’ poderiam ser feitas por um robô: todos pretos e repetitivos com formas geométricas totalitárias que te levam a perceber símbolos velados através do jogo geométrico”, diz Marcelo Cidade

Part of the series ‘The Rhetoric of Power’, in which Cidade appropriates Frank Stella’s emblematic Black Paintings as a formal basis for a critique of the use of art as a strategy of domination.“These minimalist forms are already implicit in our daily lives, from hostile architecture to the stock market and the shapes of mirrored buildings. […]
The ‘Black Paintings’ could be made by a robot: all black and repetitive with totalitarian geometric shapes that lead you to perceive veiled symbols through the geometric articulation,” says Marcelo Cidade.

In “In a Fog,” Marilá Dardot collected phrases with the word “silence” written by various authors, creating an archive. This collection has taken various forms.
“Bajo la niebla [In a Fog],” from 2010, is one of the glass notebooks that compile part of the archive in Spanish. Its structure is stainless steel, and its pages are made of glass, featuring sandblasted texts.

Book covers from the Nations of the World collection are undone, leaving fragments of maps and composing new geographies.
The indexes of the same books announce chapters that describe countries using nationalist phrases. A part of the fabric of the cover, folded, gives the title to the work: Actions of the world.

This work is part of a research by Longo Bahia focused on the relationship between the image of communism as a political utopia and images of ruins from a “real” communism, such as the monuments built in the Republic of Yugoslavia between the 1960s and 1980s. The research of the Concrete Communism cycle began to be developed during an artist residency at the Hestia Art Residency & Exhibitions Bureau in Belgrade, Serbia.

“Niemeyer” is part of a series of paintings on art transport crates, based on images of Brazilian brutalist buildings and Yugoslav monuments. The wooden crates are dismantled and then reassembled as planned constructions. The figures are painted in colors ranging from black to white, and the compositions between figure and background.

Power relations permeate the materials chosen by Komatsu. It is these relations that often constitute the true raw material used in his work. “Lusco Fusco” brings together the precariousness of Drywall with the ephemerality of news from newspaper clippings.
With cuts and punches, Komatsu breaks through the surfaces of his paintings into geometric or gestural abstractions, while fragments of news suggest representations of what could emerge there. While his titles suggest a place between day and night, his forms suggest something between figuration and abstraction.

This series stems from a curiosity about notions of future that were used in dead languages. Among the languages used in the work are those that disappeared by domination of some other culture, by the decline of political organizations that had that language as mother tongue, by transformations and mergers with other linguistic registers or by the isolation of their speakers.

From this research, the work seeks to create the panorama of different “becomings” that have never really been consummated. It also seeks to record the projections of a future that have become past. In its form, the work also weighs on these transformations, for the letters that form the words are presented in blocks of detachable sheets, allowing the viewer to take the letters that make up these expressions and reassemble them as they wish.

In this way, the public at the same time activates and “kills” the original work through its transformation.

The analog enlargement altered with oil paint and other chemical interventions made in the laboratory was conceived from an image that captures the artist’s first communion as a child. The many layers of interventions refer to what is sublimated in the original image: He’s black roots and the knowledge that has been erased from history. In the new image, reoriented and resized by the artist, his young figure appears holding symbols that refer to both moments: that of domination and the one of belonging.

Amazônia, Rio Branco is part of the group of works produced by Albergaria from the study trip “Amazon Expedition: Seeking to understand the greatest diversity of the planet”, coordinated by botanist Lúcia Lohmann (Institute of Biosciences of USP), which traveled the rivers Black and White and its margins.

The Bondage series consists of small-scale concrete paintings that depict the actual or fictional removal of various statues around the world, specifically those celebrating colonial figures or military ideologues. The statues are portrayed against an abstract background, as if they were levitating.

In “Projeto (re)construtivo: “Movimento” de W.C”, Marcelo Cidade reimagines one of the most emblematic works from Brazilian Concretism, Waldemar Cordeiro’s painting “Movimento”.

Cordeiro’s work was exhibited at the 1st São Paulo Biennial in 1951 and marked the Concrete Art in Brazil. For Cordeiro, the artwork was a product resulting from visual ideas that the artist executed plastically, without any connection to natural reality. In his text “The Object,” from 1956, Cordeiro states: “Artists create […] objects that have historical value in the social life of humanity. The created objects become part of the external, real, and banal world. The partiality of romantics, who seek to make art a mystery and a miracle, discredits the social potential of formal creation.”

For Marcelo Cidade, the external world has basic urgencies that surpass the power of formal creation advocated by Cordeiro. In his work, the painting from 1951 is juxtaposed in a textile conglomerate commonly used in social actions against the cold felt by the growing population experiencing homelessness. With spray paint on a donation blanket, Cidade reaffirms the material potential of everyday needs and confronts the numerous failures of the Brazilian modern project.

Bizâncio [Byzantium] is part of a set of works made by Moscheta from fragments of lithographic stones. With them, the artist organized “columns” of superimposed stones that take the name of ruins of past civilizations.
Here, represented object and instrument of representation merge through the stones that were multiple times used to generate prints, forming a sort of potential library.

In this series Candiani works with the mathematical qualities of traditional Mexican dances. The
artist worked from the choreographic notation methodology developed by Zacarías Segura
Salinas and presented in the book Danzas Folkloricas de Mexico. Dance Scores deals with the codification presented in the study by Segura Salinas and also with the symbolic qualities of
frame embroidery.

Los Sonajeros is a traditional dance that is performed with variations throughout the state of
Jalisco in Mexico. The purest is the one performed in Tuxpan, which is danced on January 20,
the day of the town's patron saints, San Fabian and San Sebastián.

The dance dates back to pre-Hispanic times, according to the chronicler Sahagún, the Toltecs, founders of Tuxpan "were good singers and while they sang or danced they used drums and
wooden rattles" very precious to those that accompany this dance to this day.

This series of works continue the artist´s investigation on the role of copper in Peru´s economy, where this natural resource is exported as a raw material for its use in tech industries. These new works incorporate a series of abstract symbols that are based on different modernist corporate logos used by diverse industries and corporate entities. By using these geometric symbols in a traditional woven form, Garrido-Lecca questions the relation between these modern images, tied to the engines of modernization, the global economy, and their links to pre-Columbian abstraction.