Statement 2019
Transcription of the statement for the 21st Biennial
Having a degree in architecture and urbanism, understanding architecture through ruins is for me a way of inverting the architect’s work process of designing, building and inhabiting. This inversion is the principle behind the construction of other poetics based on architecture. The ruined interiors that interest me are those that do not offer immediate answers about how they were used in the past. Such inaccuracy regarding their function makes them suitable spaces to be occupied in various ways.
Therefore, addressing rupture and permanence in the Brazilian history is an important conceptual theme in my artistic practice, as in the works Percorrer Tempos e Ver as Mesmas Coisas and Uma cor para cada erro cometido. The use of historical reference points is a way of bringing past and present closer, inciting confrontation and comparison and, above all, taking a stance regarding historically consolidated values of Brazilian society. The images that I relate to these facts result from a survey carried out in centuries-old institutions, religious cults, waste in urban spaces, among others. Regarding the process, the phase of recording images follows a documentary dynamic, then the artistic experience is consolidated with painting, which involves the manipulation of such “documents,” among them photographs, paintings, drawings and architectural elements.
Considering also the medium of painting in relation to shows such as the 21st Biennial, some cases require working on a smaller scale, demanding a distant and close gaze, even on large canvases, for the construction of the narrative to materialize. An example of this procedure can be observed in the work O Golpe, a Prisão e Outras Manobras Incompatíveis com a Democracia (2018), which required portraying in detail the scene of President Lula’s last speech before his arrest for the image not to lose the symbolic importance it conveys.