The first solo exhibition of Matheus Abu in São Paulo, Ocean-Desert, continues in Karla Osorio Gallery Until July 28th. Curated by Victor GorgulhoThe exhibition presents more than ten previously unseen paintings from a new series created by the young Rio de Janeiro artist, who is making a name for himself on the national and international scene. In short, the artist's research reflects on the Atlantic Ocean as a symbolic space for the production of memory, a medium that carries and resonates with Afro-Brazilian ancestry. Abu's works seek to recover the possible fragments of this living history, which traverses and reproduces itself in the bodies that descend from the African diaspora.
In the artist's words, "painting thus becomes a space for sensitive excavation, where colonial time is not in the past, but in continuous friction with the present."
About the exhibition
According to curator Victor Gorgulho, "the works continue Abu's visual research, known for his paintings on different scales, and the artist performs a kind of simulation of a cut – or the construction of a fissure, even a hole – in the central axis of these works.
These fissures, in the artist's vocabulary, are materials and matter from an endless visual lexicon he has architected, as they simultaneously evoke issues linked to the colonial imaginary. The title "OCEANO-DESERTO" (Ocean-Desert), in turn, triggers, above all, precisely this second semantic instance of Matheus's production: the ocean is both the place of humanity's deep and mysterious waters and also a kind of desert-like, inhospitable terrain, where the encounter with water results in a third matter, still unknown to us; at least touched and experienced by Matheus Abu's works.
Service
Exhibition | Ocean-Desert
From May 26th to July 28th
Monday, 14 PM to 19 PM; Tuesday to Friday, 10 AM to 19 PM; Saturdays, 10 AM to 17 PM.
