"Wandering" exhibition

Marcelo Muschetta He is a walking artist. The walk is performative and investigative and allows new readings about what space and place are based on conceptual “twists”. The artist who incorporates the act of walking into his practice has always been present at the seams of art history. Artists such as Richard Long, Hamish Fulton and Francis Alÿs created works that transformed landscapes (urban or natural) or the way of observing them from their walks.

Throughout his career, Moscheta carried out expeditions to the most diverse places on the globe, including the Arctic, Atacama and Brittany. His works relate to the conceptualist tradition of walking in the most diverse ways, from intervention in landscapes to transposing the experience of being in places through works linked to documentation. Living in Portugal since 2021 to carry out his doctoral research, Moscheta established yet another form of movement based on the immigrant's constant state of transit, constantly being reminded that he does not belong there. This set of experiences and experiments informs a series of new works in his new exhibition at Vermelho. Titled Wandering, the exhibition deals with spatial, temporal and bureaucratic displacements.

In Portugal, Moscheta had contact with some of the oldest megalithic monuments in Europe. Interested in rocks as poetic representations of a permanent history, Moscheta reflected on the experience of witnessing one of these monuments, the Dolmen da Arca, located in the municipality of Viseu, through the installation 1:1 (Dolmen), which occupies the main room of the exhibition. Dolmens are large structures that were used as tombs. Because they act as a kind of shelter, their structures protect the body while climbing. The installation, made from a frottage (or decal) of the Dolmen, lays out the monument, allowing the public to move around its landmark. Thus, Moscheta brings his skin inserted in this landscape closer to the “skin” of the stone. The work serves as an icon and index, as a map and footprint.

On his walks, Moscheta collects rocks, fossils, documents and a myriad of elements. It is part of this material that forms the series autopoiesis (2024) where elements from different expeditions are articulated in procedures characteristic of conceptualism, such as the intervention and combination of elements, the articulation of texts as images, the use of documentation and the contextualization of components. In biology and philosophy, the term Autopoiesis describes systems that are capable of creating and maintaining themselves from themselves.

Em Substance (2024), Moscheta inserts a salt rock into a photograph taken on one of his expeditions to a salt cave in Colombia. The work, at the same time, documents and transports his being in the cave.

On the Serie Parable (2024), Moscheta proposes another temporal displacement based on a photograph taken by his father during a collection at Horto Florestal de Maringá (São Paulo) in 1981. A botanist by profession, his father recorded the son of a colleague playing with a wooden stick. doda, a tool traditionally used in agriculture, especially in Brazil, to shake or hit fruit trees in order to knock down the fruit. Moscheta elaborates on the moment of playful learning recorded in the photograph to create compositions where teaching and freedom come together.

Questions about the nature of time are also on the agenda Deposition (2024). Moscheta's series of paintings are made from the sedimentation of limestone from coccoliths. These masses of calcium carbonate are produced by algae as a form of protection. When the algae dies, the coccoliths are released into the marine environment.

Moscheta produces washes with limestone powder from coccoliths to paint surfaces prepared with acrylic plaster. The image of the paintings resembles blurred bones, proposing a multiple path between materials. The paintings are arranged in a device reminiscent of artifact exhibits. The temporal and material game of Deposition raises questions about the nature of creation and destruction in art.

These project paths, negotiations, documents, samples and proofs, attribute another type of path to construction works. Wandering, one that can make us think about the postal art of the 1960s and 1970s, which had the exchange of documents as a fundamental part of the work. A displacement that occurs by correspondence.

Marcelo Moscheta's various walks and works present themselves as a logbook of his journeys, where issues that touch on aesthetics, ethics and art history are discussed in the history of man's movements and settlements in the world; in its ways of being and thinking about spaces, and in the forms of domination it exercises over the world.

Service
Exhibition | Wandering
From July 31st to September 28th
Monday to Friday from 10:19 to 11:17, Saturday from XNUMX:XNUMX to XNUMX:XNUMX