From Aug 04 to Sep 21 2018
Opening: August 4, 2018
LURIXS: Contemporary Art is pleased to invite everyone to visit the first individual exhibition of the artist Gustavo Prado in the gallery, available on the 2nd floor until September 15, 2018.
Gustavo Prado lives and works in New York, where he developed his works presented in the exhibition, which takes place on the second floor of the gallery: painting, photography, sculpture and video cohabit in an environment where the industrial materiality of our time is observed through a series of encounters and mismatches - or, as the title of the exhibition suggests, collusion and collisions. Prado presents in this exhibition unpublished works. Using known industrial materials, familiar places and celebrated works of Art History, the artist creates his works from the unexpected. "Gustavo experiences the things he finds in the world guided by his ideas about art, design, city and life", comments the author of the text of the exhibition, Fred Coelho. The spectator is constantly invited to participate actively in the work of Gustavo, which functions as a device for reconnecting the observer with the world and its objects. The materiality then gains a poetic importance and calls the visitor to be part of it: the reflection of its already known concave and convex mirrors; the relief of the pieces of lego, forming a perceptible image only at a distance; the interspersed cars that deceive by resemblance - works that are completed in the one who sees. In Fred's words, "Gustavo releases our gaze to what we can see, even when we do not see." "Collision Collision Collision" will run until September 15, 2018, from Monday to Friday, from 12 a.m. to 8 p.m., and Saturday, from 12 a.m. to 4 p.m. Free and Free.
About the Artist
The work of Gustavo Prado transits between different supports - sculpture, drawing, performance, photography and video - to investigate the many possibilities of space. The artist resides in New York, where he realizes great part of his artistic production. In 2002, the artist begins the series Perceptible, whose production extends until 2011. In it, the phenomenological experience becomes the crucial point of an investigation in environments built with fluorescent lamps, fabric, metal structures and movement sensors, together, form a system that raises several responses from the encounter between the body and space. Already in Trespass (2009), Prado uses a portable mirror to project the intense summer light inside several apartments, exploring the borders of private space. Mirrors are also the main material of the series Measure of Dispersion (2014-2016), in which the artist creates objects from metal structures and several concave mirrors. The work, instead of fixing a single image of what is positioned at the front, ends up reflecting a fragmented body, altering the viewer's perception both of his own image and of the context in which he is inserted. Among the collective exhibitions that the artist participated in, he highlighted Projectos de Arte Contemporânea, at Funarte, Rio de Janeiro, in 2003, and Other Places, at Espaço Cultural das Casa das Onze Janelas, Belém, in 2006. His work was also presented at the Le Carreau du Temple, in Paris, during the Year of Brazil in France, and integrated the program Rumos, Itaú Cultural, as well as exhibitions at the Museum of Modern Art (MAM) in Rio de Janeiro, Rio, among others. Prado has participated in several artistic residency projects at the Lage Park School of Visual Arts and at the New York School of Visual Arts, among other institutions. The artist lives and works in New York.
Familiar Strangers | Fred Coelho
A few years ago, Gustavo began to make, through his Instagram account, an aesthetic experiment. A resident of New York for seven years, the daily commute to his studio in the Harlem region has become a kind of field of visual and conceptual experiments. The series entitled "Turrell of Harlem" (a work in hashtag) set the tone for a poetic course whose presentation presented at Lurixs provides a synthesis planned by the artist himself. In all the works, we have the mark of a group of worries that unfold in diverse fronts. Initially, a journey in which the history of art (ie, the archive, the tradition) and the unexpected of the present time produce a powerful set of ideas in each planned work. Here nothing is gratuitous or excessive. In them, Gustavo is observing the industrial materiality of our time through a network of meetings and disagreements - or, in the words that call the exhibition, of collusions and collisions.
If art history and the streets are these vectors of invention of the new from possible collisions in the production of "family strangers," it is because Gustavo believes that it is not about producing new forms or claiming a personal style. Everything is loose on the air platform. It is about colliding things in creating intervals, small offsets
whose gaps (between eye and reflection, between concrete and glass, between consumption and nature) allow the emergence of new senses for the look - his and ours. In "Turrell of Harlem", for example, the reference to the North American artist (James Turrell), celebrated for its experiences with lights, colors and spaces, is articulated outside the museum with the brick landscape of a historical building of the new neighborhood -orquino. After more than three hundred photos recorded during four years (2013-2017), the repetition of the emptiness between buildings displaces the physical reference (space) in favor of the playful fluctuation of light (time). Vain gains density when we retain Turrell's reference in our eyes. Doubling the artist's commitment to stress institutional exhibition spaces, Gustavo's research makes us see in the everyday landscape what art simulates.
This process of approaching by edges, of rubbing surfaces, can also be seen in his metallic sculptures, from the series called Measure of Dispersion. In the title, Gustavo again privileges these overlaps whose contacts activate a friction. The measure of dispersion, that is, the calculation of what is lost, can be extended to situations in which multiple mirrors (the measure) cause the dismantling of the gaze dispersal). Whatever perspective we approach, we automatically lose it. In the mirroring of the world, what we look at somehow looks beyond us. Its polished materials, impeccable, make, again, the file indicates a minimalism in each piece. But here the collision and the interval settles: its materials are automotive, ordinary industrial products, displaced to a type of presentation whose finish eludes and senses the senses.
And when the history of art, rather than reference, is the very materiality to apply a method of collusion and collusion? When using the classic canvas of José Ribera, "Martyrdom of San Felipe" (1629), Gustavo performs his solemn religious scene and indicates that something there, in his vision, does not fulfill the expected. It is when the saint's eyes waver in a scene of abandonment and loneliness. His naturalistic condition as a man of the people, moreover, is shaved by the modern grid that defines the montage - as baroque as the motif of painting - made by thousands of pieces of lego. The overlap - again, the collision - between sacred iconography and the playful surface transforms martyrdom without redemption and, citing the artist himself, interrupts the possibility of a conviction. His desire to rub these materials only reinforces this quest by intervals that expand our readings. If there is something "minimal" in the work of Gustavo Prado are his strategies. A minimum whose effectiveness often reaches maximum strength. Whether in video, photography, sculptures or canvas, we see in this exhibition the look of a collector of material "traumas" and semantic breaches. Their work, seen together, draws attention to something central in our day: failure. His eyes look for veins in which, rather than the resemblance, what you see are symbolic familiarities. Approximations. Without needing to clean edges, without claiming formal purity, Gustavo experiences the things he finds in the world guided by his ideas about art, design, city, life. As in their beaten cars, every minimal difference only increases the illusion of being the same. A trajectory in which his works, like reflections, do not guarantee the unity of the image and disperse the world in simultaneities and differences. In noticing failure, Gustavo releases our gaze to what we can see, even when we do not see it.
Fred Coelho has a degree in History from the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro (1994-1999), a Master's Degree in Social History from the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro (1999-2001) and a PhD in Brazilian Literature from PUC-Rio (2004-2008). Studied for a year at New York University (2006). Between 2001 and 2009 he was a researcher at the Núcleo de Estudos Musicais (NUM) at Cândido Mendes University and a researcher at NELIM (Núcleo de Estudos de Literatura e Música) at PUC-Rio between 2009 and 2012. He has experience in History, Literature and Arts Brazilian cultural history, Brazilian critical thinking, popular music, memory and cultural practices, archive and literature, visual arts and literature, Brazilian Modernism, Tropicalism, Hélio Oiticica, and marginal culture . He has published several books, articles and organized works. In addition, he worked as a researcher and copywriter for documentaries, TV series, electronic sites, publishers and cultural institutions. Between 2008 and 2010 he was a collaborator in the coordination of courses at the Contemporary Thinking Center in Rio de Janeiro. In 2009 he became assistant curator of visual arts at the Museum of Modern Art of Rio de Janeiro (MAM-RJ), where he stayed until July 2011 working with Luiz Camillo Osório. Since August 2014, he is Assistant Professor of Literature and Performing Arts and Post-Graduation in Literature, Culture and Contemporaneity (PPGLCC) of the Department of Letters of PUC-Rio. He is currently coordinator of the post-graduation lato-sensu Training of the Writer (Department of Letters PUC-Rio / CCE) and Co-coordinator of the PPGLCC.