Sem Título (Novos Relevos)

VALDIRLEI DIAS NUNES

From Nov 21 2013 to Jan 31 2014

LURIXS: Arte Contemporânea is pleased to present, from November 21st 2013 to guests, and from November 22nd to the general public, Valdirlei Dias Nunes' Sem título (Novos Relevos). The exhibition will feature 8 reliefs in acrylic enamel on MDF and polished brass, produced especially for this exhibition. This is the artist's first exhibition both in Rio de Janeiro, as well as at the gallery, which started representing him in the beginning of the year.

Emerging in the São Paulo art scene in the early 1990s, Dias Nunes has been developing a unique and consistent work over the past two decades. Working mainly with painting and drawing, his production distances itself from any previous category. The artist created a precise and rigorous visual vocabulary, that seeks in minimalism its primary means of articulation. Prioritising a exceptional, detailed finish, his subtle lines and unfussy works and its sensual surfaces express an elegant, even sumptuous, solitude.

From his early paintings, his works have always been executed with great precision, using an economic palette of colours. These works, though undeniably representative, already suggested the flow from figuration to abstraction that would characterise his later works. From the late 1990s, abstraction seemed to contaminate the materiality of objects. The paragon of previous figures is now replaced by the preciousness of the material in his Reliefs, the first completely abstract work of the artist.

At a first glance, the viewer recognises that while the dimensions of each of the Reliefs are similar, each piece is different, unique. The works shall then be examined closely, carefully, as the appreciation of the relationship of individual work with the collective, the singular with the complete series, is obtained only through the recognition of the specificity of each element. A sense of order is thus grasped, favoring a free individualisation over the structural uniformity, where each work retains its autonomy and identity.

 

About the artist

Working at the intersection of two- and three-dimensions, Valdirlei Dias Nunes produces paintings about sculpture. Refl ective of his interest in geometry and his affi nity for modern architecture, Dias Nunes’s paintings are spare and minimalistic. He translates the iconic structures and shapes of Minimalism – including the bar, the line, and the cube – into two-dimensions, painting boxes, beams, and rods on white canvases. Through his work, he pushes painting towards sculpture and sculpture towards painting, exploring the fluidity of the boundary between these two disciplines.

 

New reliefs | Fernando Cocchiarale

Now exhibited for the first time in Rio de Janeiro, Valdirlei Dias Nunes' recent Reliefs are produced from two elements: MDF pictorial planes painted in white matt lacquer and polished brass bars, embedded in these planes. At first sight these works seem to be updated developments of the issues of abstract-geometric art (Concretism and Neoconcretism), whose peak in Brazil occurred in the 1950s of the last century.

This entry, however, not only reduces the artist's works to the formal self-reference claimed by the founder of concretism, Theo Van Doesburg, but also associates them with questions of the contemporary production repertoire, refractory to all forms of formalism ( in which the ultimate goal of artistic activity is consumed in the production of entirely plastic-visual forms). Therefore, the alternative way to the strict interpretation of the silent formal order of the Valdirlei Reliefs is that of its overcoming by the semantic way, that is, of the articulation of the visual syntax of the works, with related verbal meanings, situated outside its strict scope.

In a text published in the introductory issue of the magazine Art Concret, which was published in Paris in 1930, Van Doesburg states: "The painting must be entirely constructed with purely plastic elements, that is, plans and colors. has no meaning other than himself. "

The concise statement of the founder of Concrete Art, however, is unmistakable: the painting system must only focus on its own elements, eliminating any intersection it may share with other arts, in a rigorous process of semantic debugging. However, if from the morphological point of view it is plausible to approach the Reliefs by the formal cleaning characteristic of the geometric-constructive abstraction, we cannot say the same about the radical essentialism of the conceptual precepts that underlie it. Nunes, avowedly, never considered himself abstract and never guided his work from these precepts. But this does not mean that this attitude of the artist has been taken by fidelity to the iconic representation, historical antipode of the abstractionism.

The constellation of works and series in which the Reliefs are inscribed goes back to the wooden box on which Nunes painted oil in 2002, the rings and knots of the raw wood. There is the ratification of the material of the support (wooden box) by means of the pictorial representation of the wood of which the box is made, entangled in an ambiguous plot that resists the classification by the simultaneously self-referential discourse (since the real wood refers to the act of painting) and representational (since the representation of the wood in natura refers us to a material semantized by human life, from wood to furniture, from objects to constructions).

Both the 2002 box and several other colored pencil drawings "in which wood and brass are represented with almost abstract economics" outline the constellation formed by their work of the last ten years. Deliberately ambiguous and intermediate, since their status oscillates between abstract-concrete self-reference and iconic representation, these works contribute to a non-formalist understanding and neither does a narrative of the Reliefs of Valdirlei Dias Nunes.

They differ from previous works in which the frame is the field of contradictory hybrid purity of their drawings and paintings. The brass bars that rip the field into which they come to create the Reliefs (from outside the frame boundaries) can be taken as vectors of the hybridization of self-reference and representation that subtly traverse their poetic strategy.

 

Fernando Cocchiarale is an artist, critic, curator and art professor. Lives and works in Rio de Janeiro. At the beginning of 2016, after 9 years, returned to Museu de Arte Moderna do Rio de Janeiro (MAM/RJ) as it’s chief-curator. He had already held this position between 2001 and 2007.