"Excessive" exhibition

Marcelo Guarnieri Gallery | Sao Paulo is pleased to announce excess, second solo show by the artist from Rio de Janeiro Victor Mattina in the city. The exhibition, which brings together ten new paintings and a diptych, is accompanied by the poem “The Monster”, by Flávio Morgado.

In “Desmesura”, Mattina explores, through painting, the quality of monstrous representation and the condition of freedom under which the figure of the monster resides. His compositions are constructed from fragmented visions, figures, stains, anthropomorphic creatures and unlikely associations, as if we were faced with a world that, although guided by the same symbols that make up ours, operates under a different logic. It is on this threshold between the recognizable and the absurd that Mattina’s paintings are sustained, and it is in this impossibility of categorizing his figures, as in “Capital amanhece sob um novo sol” or his strange encounters, as in “Missa para raio catódicos”, that the artist sees a potential emancipation of the image. Although he bases his practice on figurative painting, Victor Mattina does not use it as a tool for transparent representation; on the contrary, it is his mastery of the technique that allows him to bring figuration closer to the implausible. “In 'Ka's Arteriogram' there is a somewhat baroque scene with bodies piled up in the foreground, in front of a kind of temple. It is a painting of indices, alluding to an idea of ​​antiquity without ever saying where or about whom.”, observes the artist.

The poem “The Monster,” by Flávio Morgado, which accompanies the exhibition, is divided into six parts, in dialogue with the montage of “Elegia I” and “Elegia II,” paintings that are over 4 meters long each, also divided into six parts. The poem explores some aspects of Mattina’s paintings – dimension, correspondence, making, technique, scale, palette – structural aspects that would point to a more categorical analysis of the work, but which, through poetic language, are freed from definitiveness, overflowing their limits. In “excess,” text and image recognize each other by refusing the functions they should perform in a normative world. Together, they create a kind of visual limbo. As Morgado writes in the first part of the poem: “a pile of bones, an inhospitable landscape / that welcomes us, the hand of strangeness / marks midnight in the conscience and / six canvases declaim, in the echo of their creation, / a great verse of exile.”

In dialogue with the exhibition “desmesura”, by Victor Mattina, a set of works by Marcello Grassmann (1925-2013), Oswaldo Goeldi (1895-1961), Guima (1927-1993) and Iberê Camargo (1914-1994), Brazilian artists who, through engraving and painting, also explored the monstrous dimension of figurative representation, will be presented on the Gallery’s mezzanine.

Service
Exhibition | excess
From October 04th to November 08th
Monday and Friday from 10am to 19pm Saturdays from 10am to 17pm