Eduardo Berliner (Rio de Janeiro RJ 1978)
(08/17/1978) - Rio de Janeiro - Rio de Janeiro - Brazil
Visual artist, painter
Eduardo Berliner's work is always related to the context in which it is set. Landscape, architecture, cultural residues and human relationships are reconfigured through personal narratives, memories and the painting process itself. He works daily in his studio. When away from it, he frequently draws and takes notes in his sketchbooks and keeps photographic records. These are works that at the same time serve as a starting point for paintings dealing with a different materiality, temporality and scale.
Critique
The color palette of these paintings is deceptive in its coolness. The situations depicted in sober tones present seemingly uncomplicated, banal subjects and confound the viewer's interpretation. Stacked chairs, the back of a banner, a glass spilled into a puddle, a hand truck upside down. Avoiding poetic flourishes, these and other compositions unsettle through an economy of elements which, paradoxically, does not contribute to discursive clarity, since it raises an enigma out of a presumed thematic obviousness.
One of the great questions of the contemporary artwork is its potential not to remain confined within itself, assimilating references from the world into its own object nature, making its surroundings a part that integrates the work and gives it meaning. Thus, the image represented in a painting, for example, is the trigger for a reflection that goes beyond the icon. Certainly, this intellectual procedure has been present since the Renaissance, but what we see today is the possibility of the work existing even without materiality or visuality, able to stand solely through an understanding of its context, whether or not expressed in the author's discourse.
Although they do not move toward a wholly immaterial work, Berliner's paintings are laden with the conceptual and surprise us with their reflection on the human mirrored in the absurd artifacts and settings depicted, which, mostly aseptic, attest to the existence of human beings in the world. In the text hidden beneath the surface of the images, the artist, though acerbic, makes no critique of manners or moral value judgment, much less analyses of Pop culture or the contemporaneity that engenders it.
However, the great motif of his pictorial work is painting itself, with its facture, its procedure and the visual and narrative possibilities to be achieved on such a traditional support - yet one always open to new stylistic forays. In this movement, the low, slightly somber palette evokes cloudy dusks and generates a murmuring silence. In turn, the objects depicted in this opaque color appear intact in their composition but are in fact dysfunctional in relation to their context: nothing works in its proper place.
It is also interesting to note that the situations suggest a static temporality which, curiously, lies in the human and not in the object. For human time, although dynamic, is the eternal prisoner of the present instant, and is therefore watertight, just like the inanimate elements of these paintings. This aspect further heightens the thematic absurdity of the scenes and the volume of the murmuring silence that envelops them.
As for Berliner's process, this new series represents another stage in his pictorial work, previously marked by angry facture and by the juxtaposition of various elements and techniques. Another important component was the materiality of oil paint, used in thick layers. Now, however, the homogeneous surface is more valued, while extensive areas of color give form and volume to the object, dispensing with the outlining that made the canvas a sketchbook. This new way of applying paint, however, concerns both the imagistic and thematic references of the composition and the conscious desire to explore new challenges in the difficult practice of returning to painting in order to touch the world.
Daniela Labra
Disfunção
Eduardo Berliner's studio is on the old Rua Real Grandeza, in the center of Botafogo, Rio de Janeiro. It occupies the upper floor of a two-story building, with clothing stores and other small neighborhood businesses below. A narrow staircase leads to a very bright apartment with large windows, high ceilings and comfortable rooms.
In the first, smaller room, I see the latest canvases Berliner has made, hanging on the walls. It is a space that allows one to appreciate and compare his recent output. For the artist, it is also a place where the works await their "maturation" before going to the gallery or an exhibition. I notice some objects there - a cut piece of tree-fern fiber (xaxim), a large pair of garden shears, a strange elongated plant. In a chest of drawers, drawers full of works on paper. Near the sofa, a large pile of sketchbooks. Other older paintings hang on the wall of a corridor leading to the kitchen. I move on to the main, larger room, where the artist paints. Pinned to the walls are canvases still in progress, generally large, over 2m x 2m. Beside them, also pinned to the walls, are some photographs and drawings that serve as references for the paintings. There are no armchairs or chairs here, only work tables. I ask Berliner why the table with the paints and palettes is so far from the paintings. He explains that, following a lesson from Charles Watson, who was his teacher, he keeps the palette far from the canvas so as not to "bury himself" in the work and, each time, to step back from what he is producing, "cleansing the retina".
The last room, at the back of the apartment, is the artist's office. It is a small room with a desk holding a computer and a bookcase full of books and DVDs - films by Bergman, Tarkovsky and Godard. It is where Berliner reads, writes and draws. I look at the shelves. There are many books on artists he admires: Luc Tuymans, Brice Marden, Marlene Dumas, David Hockney, Eric Fischl, Richard Deacon, Luiz Zerbini, Paul McCarthy... On the desk I notice some of Berliner's reading: "The Human Condition", by Hannah Arendt, and "One-Way Street", by Walter Benjamin. It was in this space, the studio, that my dialogue with Berliner mainly took place. Over a little more than a year, I made six visits there, staying for many hours, in order to follow the conception of some of the canvases he presented in the Prêmio CNI-Sesi Marcantonio Vilaça 2009/10 exhibition.
But if I dwell on the studio, it is for a reason other than simply describing this ultimately predictable place of contact with an artist. Being an apartment Berliner adapted for his use, the studio preserved some aspects of a domestic setting, such as the anteroom with the sofa, the kitchen with the coffee machine and the office with the bookcase and computer. He also received me there as in his own home, with the courtesies of a good host. On each visit, however, there was something unsettling that kept me from becoming familiar with the studio.
As on the second visit, when I arrived at the apartment and found laid out on the floor a kind of installation in which the xaxim (which had earlier seemed to me merely the remains of a plant pot) had become the head of a wolf, whose body was formed by two wooden rods and the garden shears. I began to suspect that little of what was there, however ordinary the object, served any practical, everyday purpose: the plants and pots were not there to decorate the house, the chair would not serve as a seat, a roll of carpet was not meant for redecorating the place. Not to mention that Berliner also began accumulating the most outlandish objects in the apartment, such as a splint for broken legs; a human torso mannequin used in medical training; surgical scissors; dog masks hanging from a retro lamp; a wheelchair, etc.
Contrary to what I expected, the studio was not just a space adapted for the craft of painting and centered on building the canvas, but served as a space for archiving and handling various strange instruments, a workshop for producing objects and "sets", a laboratory for the metamorphosis of things. For me, spending time with Berliner involved a series of displacements. First, a geographical displacement, with successive trips to Rio, which turned each visit into a process of recapping the creative processes the artist had gone through, in order to fill the gaps created by physical and temporal distance. Also a professional displacement, because, being a journalist and editor, used to the speed and volatility of press processes, for the first time I had to follow "over the long term" the work of a visual artist, trying to understand his path, and not merely report a single episode of his experience. Finally, an intellectual displacement, since, having devoted myself in my journalistic work mainly to the forms, narratives and procedures of literature and cinema, I now had to face a very different aesthetic regime, that of the visual arts, alongside an artist who has followed a quite atypical path in the context of Brazilian production.
At our very first meeting, Berliner told me: "My work identifies with yours, because I also edit. I am also an editor." When I heard these words, I thought at first that they were just a kind way of establishing a basis of conviviality with me, or perhaps a way of reassuring me, anxious as I was about treading on unfamiliar ground. Only later, following his process of conceiving and executing the works, did I understand what he meant when he referred to his own painting as an act of "editing" - I will come back to this later.
It must be said from the outset that this article stems from the rewriting and, ultimately, the editing of a diary I kept during the time I spent with the artist, written in a language close to me, that of reportage, and without the pretension of creating a critical apparatus - an interpretation - of Berliner's complex work. If this text helps the reader approach the artist's works with interest, it will have served its purpose.
PAINTING WITHOUT NOSTALGIA
Eduardo Berliner was born in Rio de Janeiro in 1978. He graduated in Visual Communication from PUC, specializing in industrial design. In that field, he devoted himself to type design. He created three typefaces: Muggia, Fórmica and Pollen - the latter developed during his master's in typography at the University of Reading, in Great Britain, in 2003. "Before, my scale was the micro; now, on the canvases, it is the macro and the micro," he says.
The scale of his drawings could also be called "micro": made in pencil, pen, watercolor, pastel and even oil, they fill the sketchbooks piled in one of the studio rooms. Berliner began drawing as a child. "Everything I've done in my life has been guided by drawing," he says. He rarely leaves home without a sketchbook, which for him is like a visual diary he carries everywhere. With an exceptional line, he records in them everything that catches his attention: objects, animals, plants, landscapes and urban situations, scenes from films and TV programs. In the sketchbooks he also makes small collages with clippings from magazines and newspapers, and notes passages from books he is reading. In one of the sketchbooks I read this sentence by Slavoj Žižek: "The image is certainly in my eye, but I, I am also in the image" (from the book "The Parallax View").
The sketchbooks do not simply contain sketches of works, as if they had been filled only with exercises or drafts of works to be made later in another medium - painting. Berliner shows me a group of drawings based on geographical atlases, with images of volcanoes and geological diagrams describing the Earth's interior. In another small sketchbook he gathered several portraits of dogs. A series of micro-watercolors depicts a clove of garlic. These are meticulous, rigorous, almost obsessive works. "These are drawings of pure observation; they demand great silence on my part," says the artist.
In 1998, Berliner took his first art and drawing course with Charles Watson, a Scottish artist who has lived and taught in Brazil since the late 1970s. He later joined a study group at Watson's studio, where participants discussed their ongoing projects. Berliner was still focused on creating objects and drawings. "Until then, I didn't consider the possibility of using that medium, painting, perhaps because of the weight of tradition," he says. But it was during the work of that group that he made his first oil painting. His misgivings about painting began to dissipate, and Berliner gradually concentrated his artistic activity on it. Further courses with Watson took place in 1999 and 2003. Today, the artist teaches at his former teacher's studio.
Watson was one of the names Berliner mentioned most during our time together, which shows the admiration and respect he has for his teacher. But the artist never referred to Watson as someone who taught him to paint. "He awakened me to the complexity of creative processes, which was even more important to me," he once said. "No one ever taught me any painting technique. However, I was lucky to spend time with two other artists, my friends, Lucia Laguna and Cadu [Carlos Eduardo Felix da Costa], who from the start of my work as an artist and painter made criticisms that were important to my development." His first solo exhibition took place in 2005, at Galeria Laura Marsiaj, in Rio, with three drawings in oil and graphite on paper, two other drawings (one with merbromin on cotton and another with toothpaste on a pillow) and objects, including a cotton rabbit dressed in a straitjacket.
Berliner has no fetishistic or nostalgic feeling toward painting. For him, it is a mode of expression without privileges, on the same level as other artistic activities. "This leveling stimulated the emergence of a multiplicity of ways of approaching painting. It became contaminated by other forms of expression and other areas of knowledge. That's why in our time it's not strange to see figurative or abstract painting, or painting affected by installation, sculptural or performance practices."
THE REWORKING OF OBJECTS
Besides his sketchbook, Berliner always carries a Canon G9 camera when he leaves home. He photographs incessantly but, unlike his drawings, his photos have no aesthetic intention. It is as if they were merely documents, primary references that will serve as the basis for later work on canvas.
He photographs not only situations and landscapes, but also images from films - such as a scene from Godard's "For Ever Mozart", which became the reference for the painting "Pântano" [Swamp] (2010), with its figures depicted almost as silhouettes, in a sinister contrast of black and blue.
He also accumulates a collection of photos taken from magazines and sent by relatives, showing people in ordinary, domestic poses, but in which his observation diagnoses something deeply uncanny - a feeling Freud defined thus: "that class of the frightening which leads back to what is known of old and long familiar" ("The Uncanny", Companhia das Letras, p. 331). For example, a trivial scene in which a woman, seated in an armchair, suddenly lifts a dog up so that the animal's head covers her own face. This image, photographed by Berliner in his own home, resulted in a deeply disturbing canvas, "Mulher e Cachorro" [Woman and Dog] (2009) - one of Berliner's works acquired by Saatchi (he is the first Brazilian to have works in the London gallery's collection).
Images of animals appear frequently in Berliner's painting, sometimes in seemingly trivial situations, as in "Cobertor" [Blanket] (2009), in which a black cat watches over a girl's sleep; sometimes in almost dreamlike situations, as in "Serrote" [Handsaw] (2009), in which a woman saws the shell of a giant tortoise.
Besides drawings and photos, there is also the development of objects, a significant part of the artist's creative process. At the beginning of his career, besides drawing, work with objects occupied much of Berliner's attention. As part of his final project for his Visual Communication degree, in 2000, he created an installation using twenty toy rabbits whose plush he removed, as well as the product packaging, which the artist redesigned. Today, objects are collected, reassembled or built in order to be reproduced in the paintings. Thus, Berliner prefers to create a simulacrum of a shrike's beak (a type of bird) himself, using various materials (plastic, wood, etc.), rather than reproduce it directly on the canvas from a zoology book.
The search for a particular object, or its construction, sometimes involves acquiring knowledge about the artifact itself - its characteristics, varieties, materials and forms. I discover, for example, on the studio table a book that teaches how to make masks. In other words, much of what one sees in the paintings is not strictly imaginary or reproduced secondhand from another image. It first goes through a material reworking by the artist. Even the most enigmatic objects in the canvases have a concrete basis, such as the playground slide topped by the sculpture of a child's head, like a wooden sphinx (in "Imóvel" [Immobile], 2009). The child's head was originally a small decorative detail of a chair, which the artist copied in a drawing. The slide was photographed by him in a park. The hanging quarters of meat came from a butcher's shop next to the studio. And two of the children were taken from the book on mask-making. These details reveal, in Berliner's painting, its intrinsic aspect of montage, or editing, or even collage of heterogeneous elements, captured through different media (drawing, photography or video) or concretely produced by the artist before becoming pictorial figuration. "Even starting from a mental image, I look for something in the world that helps me visualize it. In this attempt to create a model in the world for something I imagined, I handle objects, make drawings, create collages and take photos. For me, painting begins long before touching the surface of the canvas. The very process of materializing mental images is already part of the narrative of the painting, expressing my dialogue with matter," he explains.
THE CONSTRUCTION OF ENTERRO
Let us try to follow how this editing and montage of elements took place in one particular canvas, "Enterro" [Burial] (2009, 250 x 250 cm), which shows a man wearing a wolf mask, holding a shovel over a mound of sand, while one boy watches him and another clings to his leg, on the right side of the canvas.
This painting took at least five months to produce. At first, Berliner had a mental image of a wolf, an archetype from children's stories, which he decided to materialize in the painting in the form of a mask. The artist tried to make it in other materials before finally settling on xaxim, a plant fiber that also served to form the snout and ears. Berliner added a welding tool to the object, as if the wolf were carrying a mechanical device in its mouth. He used the tool's own packaging to make the yellow and black eyes, and made the protruding teeth from the stems of those small plastic tags used to label plants in a flowerbed.
There were also some objects the artist had collected in his studio, like parts of a mechanism he would need to develop, of a problem he would have to solve: the splint for broken legs (which had been used by his mother), another mask used by children (which he turned inside out, revealing its white back) and a green plant with a firm texture and elongated form. Living with these objects, far from creating familiarity, heightened Berliner's unease about what to do with these things, which, stripped of their practical use, nonetheless retained for the artist an enigmatic symbolic intensity.
The sight of a mound of sand at a construction site, with a shovel stuck in it, on a lot next to the studio gave him the "key": he would paint a burial. Before making the canvas, Berliner then concretely staged a "scene" in which a construction worker (but it could have been the artist himself), wearing the wolf mask, would hold the shovel over the mound of sand, on top of which the inside-out mask would be placed. Beside the mound, the leg splint would be placed, with the elongated plant stuck inside it. Just as he was about to photograph the scene, something unexpected happened. A boy walked into the (photographic) frame from the right to look at the wolf-man. The hand that appears in the same right-hand corner is the child's nanny's. "If chance intervenes in what I'm doing, I don't try to avoid it; but if I've noticed it, it's no longer chance," says the artist, who therefore kept the boy in the photo that served as the basis for the canvas. The child clinging to the man's feet was added later, from a family photo with a similar situation. The artist later added a small female figure digging over the black hole of the grave, based on an image he also saw in the film "For Ever Mozart".
We see that, among the "dialogues" the artist created with the different materials, the one with plant matter stood out. It involved molding the xaxim and creating a device for the elongated plant, but he also included in the figuration a group of tiny pots in the right-hand corner of the canvas - from another photo taken by the artist - and that mysterious flowering of branches on the face of the boy clinging to the wolf-man's foot (like Jack and the Beanstalk, Berliner tells me). The viewer will also notice, as regards the pictorial matter itself, that green tones dominate much of the painting, as if the plant element "permeated" the entire lower part of the canvas.
This laborious montage is also a meticulous "fabulation", in which the concrete meets the imaginary, the fantastic joins the banal, and chance mingles with what was carefully planned. But what is this canvas "fabulating"? "The paintings don't have a single subject. They bring together various things that are affecting me," says Berliner, leaving the journalist at the mercy of his own speculations.
REALISTS AND SURREALISTS
I believe an interpretation of the artist's themes would deserve a separate article, devoted mainly to that, able to analyze at length and with relevance his unsettling figurations, his fabulations and his obsessions, such as animals, particularly dogs (and the wolf is part of the canine family); plants (decorative plants with their imposing form, but also the ever-present open fields); children (as privileged protagonists); masks (and the consequent concealment of human faces); and also hybridisms (between man and child, man and beast, man and plant, beast and plant, etc.), the world of childhood (fairy tales, toys and phantasmatic projections) and the staging of settings (including the reappropriation and transfiguration of other everyday "sets": building entrances, office lobbies, real estate models, etc.).
Here I would only like to point out, in "Enterro", the echo of two great works of 19th-century realist painting. One is "A Burial at Ornans" (1849), by Gustave Courbet; the other, "The Angelus" (1857 - 1859), by Millet. I am struck, for example, that in Courbet's painting, dominated by the black of austere clothing, there is a man near the grave whose right-leg gaiter stands out in strong contrasting white, while his left leg is practically hidden. The image of this leg, as if it had been amputated, echoes in Berliner's "Enterro" in the figure of the leg splint, likewise covered in white paint. Nor does it seem mere chance to me that the crouching boy in Berliner's painting is placed in almost the same position as the dog in Courbet's painting. Or that the basket in Millet's canvas (which, in the interpretive frenzy surrounding this painting, has been seen as a baby's coffin) reverberates in Berliner's work in the two masks and the doll's body placed on the mound of sand. Analogies like this can be made in abundance and tend to become a kind of mania. That is not my aim. My intention here is only to highlight the interest and esteem Berliner has for the 19th-century realist painters, such as Courbet and Manet, whom he studies diligently, but also Millet and Daumier. This discovery was one of the things that most surprised me in my first contacts with the artist, whose painting I imagined to be in dialogue mainly with contemporaries such as Paula Rego and Peter Doig, to name the most obvious, or some 20th-century figures such as James Ensor and Chaïm Soutine. I was also surprised that he was not interested in the Surrealists.
His work, however, is not so far from Surrealism - which deserves to be reassessed by current criticism, in order to rescue this movement from the trivialization to which it has been relegated, to the point of becoming a taboo among artists themselves. And a critic armed with a psychoanalytic arsenal could, although this task has also fallen into disuse, undertake a very fruitful reading of the unconscious content latent in Berliner's paintings.
It falls to me here only to close this report by addressing one last aspect of the artist's work: his concern that painting should offer a different "temporality", both from the standpoint of creation and of observation, entirely different from the speed with which the hegemonic media proliferate their images, and with which these are consumed. "Painting requires a temporality different from the ephemeral rhythm of images disseminated through the media. The process of painting asks for a different time, both from the one who paints and from the one who looks at the work," says the artist. Berliner assigns to painting the role of restoring a strong, undistracted gaze on the world, on things and on the work of art itself. In other times, such a demand would have been treated in the realm of pedagogy. Today it perhaps belongs to the sphere of politics.
Alcino Leite Neto
A pintura inquietante de Eduardo Berliner
Interview
ALCINO LEITE INTERVIEWS EDUARDO BERLINER
ALN You have been drawing for many years, you have also made art projects with objects and even did a performance, but only recently decided to devote yourself mainly to painting. What led you to concentrate on this activity? In your view, what is the place of painting in art today and what does it mean for our time?
EB Trying to deal with a single problem through different paths is a practice that has been with me since the last two years of my graphic design degree, when I began using tools specific to that field to develop personal projects.
My final project consisted of a book, for which I created a narrative linking text and drawing, each affecting the other. One offshoot of that project was the development of a series of objects. I removed the plush from twenty rabbits and redesigned their packaging. The work was presented as a performance, in which the rabbits were spread across the exhibition space. Removing the rabbits' skins was an attempt to deal with questions analogous to those I was developing in the book. Around that time, alongside university, I began studying art and drawing with Charles Watson. Later I began attending a weekly study group at his studio, where we discussed ongoing projects. I was drawing and developing objects.
Color came gradually into the drawings when I used oil pastel. I used oil on canvas for the first time during an exercise proposed to the group. Until then I hadn't considered the possibility of using that medium, perhaps because of the weight of tradition. After that first exercise, the fear went away. I kept painting on my own. Little by little I realized I was concentrating most of my efforts in that direction.
I think painting today occupies the same place in art as any other form of artistic expression. This leveling stimulated the emergence of a multiplicity of ways of approaching painting. It became contaminated by other forms of expression and other areas of knowledge. That's why in our time it's not strange to see figurative or abstract painting, or painting affected by installation, sculptural or performance practices.
I would also say that painting requires a temporality different from the ephemeral rhythm of images disseminated through the media. The process of painting asks for a different time, both from the one who paints and from the one who looks at the work.
In my case, painting helps me establish a primordial relationship with the physicality of the world. When for some reason I have to go a few days without painting or drawing, I feel as if I were walking on sponges. My sense of friction with my surroundings diminishes, as if I couldn't really touch (and see) things, which painting allows me to do.
ALN Before making a painting, you work with various resources and languages - photographs, sculptures, installations, collages, objects, debris, etc. In other words, the painting is the synthetic result of a series of earlier interventions by other languages on things, on the "referents". It arises from a set of challenges you set yourself even before starting the canvas. Why do you prefer not to appropriate objects and beings directly in the painting?
EB After working through a series of starting points I find interesting, I spend some time not knowing what to paint. Sometimes my interest is guided by something that happened in my most recent canvases; at other times it can change dramatically, guided by some kind of perception about my surroundings - things in the world or events relating to human relationships.
While I think about what I'm going to do, I naturally end up handling things. Handling things is a form of thinking complementary to the process of drawing and photography (I always carry my sketchbook and my camera).
I often take apart or break things while handling them. On those occasions, I have the chance to notice something I hadn't noticed before. I don't see it as destruction, but as something new. From the collapse of materials and the attempts to continue the work, something emerges that I couldn't have foreseen. In this process, other ideas and other challenges appear.
Every day I am affected by small events. For example, a sick pigeon hidden in a recess in the sidewalk. It's not just the pigeon that interests me. The whole context matters: the animal's appearance, the light, the colors and my state of mind at that moment...
The other day I noticed a wheelchair behind a potted plant inside a bank branch. I asked the manager if I could photograph it, and the answer was no, for security reasons. So I decided to recreate the bank interior in my studio. I bought a gray carpet imitating the bank's granite floor, a potted plant, a wheelchair and a chrome trash can. While setting up the scene, I realized that the feeling that had led me to try to recreate it was no longer the same, so I kept working until something affected me again.
I also realized I could do other things that wouldn't be allowed in the bank, such as mouth-to-mouth resuscitation and cardiac massage on a test dummy used by medical students. I added other elements to the scene, including one of those dummies, probably because I had recently seen a man carrying one in his arms at night.
When the set was ready, I thought I might have created something independent, with a force of its own, which at the same time allowed me to photograph and manipulate the bank setting and invent another space, a hybrid one (neither bank nor hospital), somewhat strange but not imaginary, since it was based on observations and, more than that, on the actual recreation of the space with the elements that belong to it. But I'm still not sure how to proceed. I think there is enormous potential in trying to deal with the gaps left by pieces of information I can't fully relate.
ALN Even though you mask, deform, metamorphose and even erase "characters" and other elements in your paintings, your canvases remain within the register of figurative painting. Moreover, you seem to have great confidence in the pictorial representation of settings, scenes or situations in which the weight of figuration is crucial, even if they result in disturbing images in which the familiar and the strange, the natural and the absurd, violence and lyricism are blurred. Why is figuration important to your work? How do the "themes" of your canvases arise and how do you develop them?
EB The importance of figuration is related to the development of narratives based on observation of the world and on my personal universe. However, these narratives don't have a precise message. They have no beginning, middle and end. They can arise from mental images or from the strangeness something I've seen causes me.
Even starting from a mental image, however, I look for something in the world that helps me visualize it. In this attempt to create a model in the world for something I imagined, I handle objects, make drawings, create collages and take photos. For me, painting begins long before touching the surface of the canvas. The very process of materializing mental images is already part of the narrative of the painting, expressing my dialogue with matter.
Sometimes the process of painting a picture can be extremely slow, confused, drawn-out and full of changes of direction. At other times, the work develops precisely, quickly and vigorously. The rhythm of the work can change a great deal within a single painting. Doubt, fatigue, impatience, precision, brutality and delicacy - all of this accumulates on the surface of the canvas.
In the painting Enterro, for example, some of the objects depicted were the result of joining fragments, things or pieces of things that I gathered over months and reorganized, guided by the sensitivity of my eyes and hands, by the origin of the objects and their materials: a leg splint previously used by my mother, a model of knee bones, a skull mask and a plant.
For me, they are all symbols of finitude: the gradual process of aging shown by the loss of strength and resilience of the limbs, my own finitude perceived through my parents' aging... I kept these objects arranged in a corner of the studio. I thought of them as a kind of still life. Guided by another interest, the strangeness I feel before walls covered with photographs of landscapes inside architectural spaces, I began to imagine wild animals hunting in these places, and that led me to develop a wolf mask made of xaxim.
Later, I saw the opportunity to bring this mask together with the other objects in a staged situation in a small street next to my studio. What caught my attention there was a mound of sand with a shovel stuck in it, to be used for mixing cement. The whole atmosphere interested me: the colors, the light and the possibility of using the mound of sand in a scene about a burial.
While I was photographing, unexpected events, such as a boy who decided to take a closer look at the "wolf", brought reality and familiarity to a directed and initially absurd situation. The photos taken that day served as the starting point for the painting.
What do I intend with this work? I'm not sure, but I believe that, during the painting process, my very personal, seemingly absurd or fantastic starting points may turn into images carrying a broad evocative force, in which others may perhaps find a little of themselves.
Education
2000 - Degree in Industrial Design/Visual Communication, Pontifícia Universidade Católica do Rio de Janeiro - PUC/RJ
2003 - Master's in Typography, University of Reading, UK
Awards
2011 - Pipa Prize, Brazil - finalist
2009 - Prêmio CNI SESI Marcantonio Vilaça, Brazil
Collections
Coleção Gilberto Chateaubriand/MAM-RJ, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil
Coleção Banco Itaú S.A., São Paulo, Brazil
The Saatchi Gallery, London, UK
Bob and Renee Drake, Wassenaar, The Netherlands
Patricia Phelps de Cisneros, New York, USA
Estrellita B. Brodsky, New York, USA
Museu de Arte Moderna de São Paulo, São Paulo, Brazil
Museu de Arte do Rio de Janeiro, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil
Solo Exhibitions
2013 - Centro Cultural Banco do Brasil-Rio de Janeiro, Sala A Contemporânea, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil
2010 - Casa Triângulo, São Paulo, Brazil
2008 - Galeria Durex, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil
2005 - Galeria Laura Marsiaj/ Anexo, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil
Group Exhibitions
2012 - 30th São Paulo Biennial, curated by Luis Pérez-Oramas, São Paulo, Brazil
2012 - Nova Pintura [New Painting], curated by Rejane Cintrão, Torre Santander, São Paulo, Brazil
2011 - Os Dez Primeiros Anos [The First Ten Years], curated by Agnaldo Farias and Tiago Mesquita, Instituto Tomie Ohtake, São Paulo, Brazil
2011 - Prêmio Pipa 2011 Finalists, Museu de Arte Moderna, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil
2011 - 6th VentoSul - Curitiba Biennial, Museu Oscar Niemeyer, Curitiba, Brazil
2011 - Como o Tempo Passa Quando a Gente se Diverte [Time Flies When You're Having Fun], curated by Josué Mattos, Casa Triângulo, São Paulo, Brazil
2010 - Se a pintura morreu o MAM é um céu! [If Painting Is Dead, MAM Is Heaven!], curated by Luiz Camillo Osorio, Museu de Arte Moderna, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil
2010 - Prêmio CNI-SESI Marcantonio Vilaça, Museu de Arte de Santa Catarina, Florianópolis, Brazil
2010 - Prêmio CNI-SESI Marcantonio Vilaça, Galeria Juvenal Antunes, Rio Branco, Brazil
2010 - Prêmio CNI-SESI Marcantonio Vilaça, Museu de Arte Moderna da Bahia, Salvador, Brazil
2010 - Prêmio CNI-SESI Marcantonio Vilaça, Centro Cultural da Universidade Federal de Goiás, Goiânia, Brazil
2010 - Prêmio CNI-SESI Marcantonio Vilaça, Museu de Arte Contemporânea, Ibirapuera, São Paulo, Brazil
2010 - Prêmio CNI-SESI Marcantonio Vilaça, Museu Histórico Nacional, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil
2010 - Edições [Editions], Casa Triângulo, São Paulo, Brazil
2009 - Investigações Pictóricas [Pictorial Investigations], curated by Daniela Labra, Museu de Arte Contemporânea, Niterói, Brazil
2009 - The Portrait Show, Galeria Durex, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil
2008 - Desenhos em todos os sentidos [Drawings in Every Sense], SESC Petrópolis, Teresópolis and Nova Friburgo, Brazil
2008 - 15th Bahia Salon, Museu de Arte Moderna da Bahia, Salvador, Brazil
2008 - Estranha Coletiva [Strange Group Show], Galeria Durex, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil
2007 - Novas Aquisições da Coleção Gilberto Chateaubriand [New Acquisitions of the Gilberto Chateaubriand Collection], Museu de Arte Moderna, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil
2007 - Cloro Forte Jamaica, Espaço Repercussivo, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil
2006 - 27th São Paulo Biennial - guest artist in the work of Mabe Bethônico, São Paulo, Brazil
2005 - 30th Ribeirão Preto Art Salon, Ribeirão Preto, São Paulo, Brazil
2004 - Posições 2004 [Positions 2004], Parque Lage, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil
2004 - Dobra [Fold], Centre d’Art Contemporain de la Ferme du Buisson, Paris, France
2001 - Rio Trajetórias [Rio Trajectories], Funarte, Rio de Janeiro
Source: Casa Triângulo
