Alexandre Orion (São Paulo SP 1978)
Alexandre Orion is a visual artist, photographer and designer. He began working with graffiti and public art, self-taught, in 1993, and with photography from 2001. In 2004 he graduated in visual arts from the Faculdade Montessori - Famec, in São Paulo. In 2002 he created the project Metabiótica [Metabiotics], in which his paintings on the city's walls deliberately establish visual relationships with passers-by and urban space. This interaction between the painted figures and real situations is recorded in photographs, which constitute the final result of the work.
With Monica Murakami he co-authored the short film Uma Janela para o Mundo [A Window onto the World], produced in 2002, and in 2004 Desdobramento Rua Augusta [Rua Augusta Unfolding], produced by Big Bonsai. That same year he created the installation Desdobramento I [Unfolding I] in the elevators of the Galeria Ouro Fino in São Paulo, during the Projeto Coisa Fina. In 2005 he took part in the exhibitions Amalgames Brésiliens, in Mantes-la-Jolie, and Rencontres Parallèles, at the Centre d'Art Contemporain de Basse-Normandie in Hérouville-Saint-Clair, both in France. In 2006 he began the urban intervention Ossário [Ossuary], in which he used only cloths to remove the soot ingrained on the walls of the Max Feffer Tunnel in São Paulo, creating images of human skulls.
Critiques
An Unimportant Incident
"Alexandre Órion's proposal could be understood as an urban installation or a kind of exercise on representation. However, his experience flows beyond the limits of labels. Órion creates situations: walking down a street, a certain anonymous passer-by falls victim to an incident in his life. He has been chosen; he becomes a character. Chance has brought artist and character together in an unusual situation. Nothing will be as before. The incident lasts a fraction of a second, the time of the photograph. The place where it happens: the street itself, the space of the photograph. Between the curb as stage and the wall as backdrop, an event, an incident, one more scene from Órion's imaginary theater: the (apparently) unimportant fragment in which his characters become eternal. They left home without planning anything. By the end of that day they had gained visibility, far more than the promised "fifteen minutes of fame"; they gained countless minutes of exposure in the gallery, in the media, in print".
Boris Kossoy
KOSSOY, Boris. Um Incidente sem Importância. In: ÓRION, Alexandre; XAVIER, Ana Maria (coord.). Metabiótica; Metabiotics. São Paulo: Via das Artes, 2006. p. 12.
Orion's Urban Ossuary
"An artist and designer from São Paulo, Alexandre Orion has for ten years been sowing his works of art on the city's abandoned walls. In these interventions he questions what the city does to itself, questions the uncivilized contempt for the place where we live. He exposes himself to the cold early-morning hours to fix for an instant the ephemeral nature of his graffiti, to make his art of the instant, to reveal the delicacy of what is scorned, to give value to what is disparaged.
As a photographer, photography preserves his street work, threatened by the fragility of walls and by the vulgarity that surrounds it. His work is one of the living expressions of modernity, artistic and ephemeral at the same time, lasting in meaning and fleeting in materiality. In the places where it can be seen, it is seen in a flash".
José de Souza Martins
MARTINS, José de Souza. O ossário urbano de Orion. O Estado de S. Paulo, 23 set. 2006. Cidades/Metrópole, p. C9.
Collections
Acervo Banco Itaú S.A. (São Paulo, SP)
Acervo da Pinacoteca do Estado de São Paulo/Brasil
Solo Exhibitions
1995 - São Paulo SP - Trapo [Rag], at Acervo da Memória e do Viver Afro-Brasileiro
2004 - São Paulo SP - Metabiótica [Metabiotics], at Pinacoteca do Estado de São Paulo
2004 - São Paulo SP - Metabiótica [Metabiotics], at MaxiMídia
2004 - São Paulo SP - Desdobramento I [Unfolding I] - installation in the elevators of Galeria Ouro Fino - Projeto Coisa Fina
2005 - Paris (France) - Solo, at Sparts Gallery
Group Exhibitions
1997 - Mambo I e II - Alexandre Órion and Dolly Muniz, at Casarão da Av. Paulista
2004 - São Paulo SP - A 450-Year Journey, at Sesc/Pompeia
2004 - São Paulo SP - The Artist's Photographic Gaze on São Paulo, at Galeria do Foto Cine Clube Bandeirantes
2004 - São Paulo SP - Passaporte Brasil [Brazil Passport], at Clube A Hebraica
2004 - São Paulo SP - SP: 450 Points of View, at Companhia do Metropolitano de São Paulo - Estação Clínicas
2004 - São Paulo SP - Peoples of São Paulo Project, at Galeria Olido
2004 - São Paulo SP - Porto Seguro Photography Prize 2004, at Espaço Porto Seguro Fotografia - selected in the contemporary research category
2004 - São Paulo SP - 8th Tangran Photography Exhibition, at Espaço Tangran
2004 - São Paulo SP - Mutation City, at Sesc/Pompeia
2004 - São Paulo SP - Small Great Works, at Pinacoteca Municipal de Atibaia
2005 - Salvador BA - Group show, at Mercado Cultural
2005 - São Paulo SP - Small Great Works, at Cultural Blue Life
2007 - São Paulo SP - Itaú Contemporâneo: Art in Brazil 1981-2006, at Itaú Cultural
Source: Itaú Cultural
