Exhibition "Turvo Reflexo", by João Trevisan

A barn on fire. A dream-memory. A foggy atmosphere. Silence and time suspended. The scene is captured in a slow, elongated shot in which the camera gradually approaches. A sequence shot of the character silently crossing the field and coming across the barn completely engulfed in flames, being consumed by the fire. The sound of the cracks in the wood dissolving into flames and the gray smoke enveloping the place and she, waiting, motionless in the face of the inevitable collapse, revering that which is greater than her smallness. The scene, taken from Andrei Tarkovsky's “The Mirror”, reflects his filmic trajectory of visual meditation. Faced with time, transformation and the fragility of life, the flames condense and what remains is the perception of contemplation, of the collision of the internal mental dimension with the external.

Cloudy Reflection It is the in-between, which oscillates between the visible and the hidden, in translucent layers that are completed with each attentive look, the reflective relationship on the veil and the murky capacity. Faced with João Trevisan's material set we are called to wait for the stretching of time, just like the character we do not run to put out the fire, we feel an irrupting calm that evokes a contemplative presence, of the body before the matter, Trevisan sculpts time and hypnotizes like Tarkovsky.

Trevisan operates in the extension of perception, acting in partnership with the material, forges and ambushes his technique and oils his own language. There is a compositional reflection of his work, the image that dissipates and envelops the gaze, that travels through the clarity, the light presents itself as a score, in which each painting emits a vibration. The exhibition allows us to access five series of his production, some still unpublished – Concomitant, Landscapes, Luminous Unit, Monochrome and Intervals. They are compositional acts of a great motif, as in an opera, when they refer to the same universe, in dialogue of pairs and cohesive with the complete piece. The series are intimately interconnected, in 2018 he painted the first Monocrome, the same year he painted the first Interval, this demonstrates the unfolding of his process. It derives from a non-linear and ramified mode, in which there is no center or hierarchy, but paradoxically, everything is central, the dense blocks of color are united by the texture, extending from one another.

In a contemporary world where everything is disposable, instantaneous and compressed, time becomes elongated and to embrace the luminosity of painting is to expand the sensitive. João Trevisan invites us to inhabit the space of silence and contemplation by consolidating painting in the expanded time.

The titles bring us obvious information with curious touches, sometimes more direct, sometimes more playful. In the verses of the works there are some delightful surprises, traces left by the artist, which bring us closer to his presence, as in Intervals, in the mornings, I miss you.

The color gradations vary in thickness, demonstrating greater or lesser opacity, in which deeper layers shine through and interfere with each other. We note the artist's technical skill, in which the colors, even when always used in the same way, are always different, whether the blacks complement or interfere with the covering colors, whether they appear or dissolve, and indicate a co-participation between the oil paint and the velvet created by encaustic.

It uniquely introduces small challenges to the eye, certain intentional irregularities, as in Concomitantes. Subtle shifts, such as a small margin at the beginning of a paragraph, demonstrate a rationality in thinking about the work in a calculated way, but not only that, there is something intuitive in the relationship between the colors, the production process is methodical, from the depth of the frame to the finalization. This game of perception is only created in contact with the witness, who, by noticing slips in the forms, highlights the artist's purposeful strength in his rhythmic chromatic waves.

The canvas is full-bodied, starting with crossed layers of plaster, diluted to the point of thickening, adding body to the process, and then continuing with the addition of ten to twelve layers of black. It overflows the texture and articulates the body of the painting based on the habit of repetition. When dry, it glazes the surface, a diaphanous covering with black, in which the colors subtly become invisible, and with subsequent cleaning, the pictorial body rises to equilibrium. It removes the excess, deposits light, deposits pigment, sculpts the body of the painting by modeling its relationship with the light. It elaborates a process of waxing the painting, in which the grooves are gradually filled with black, making it possible to perceive the residual luminosity coming from the white base, revealing the process of retraction of the pigment with drying, when its particles thicken and come closer together, partially revealing the background.

There is a desire derived from sculpture, from a poetic cycle that emerges from paper, returns to sculptures and erupts in paintings. The lines are handled in the three-dimensional as well as the two-dimensional, his pictorial production rises as a form in the sculptural field. He models fibers of paint, causing a luminous illusion through volume, there is a certain enigmatic aspect of trying to decipher where the color comes from and where the chromatic spark goes. He engenders a repetitive method that borders on Buddhist meditation, repeating the process, repeating the form, repeating the preparation and the layers. The relationship with painting is corporeal, in which the artist's gesture is prolonged and what we see is the murky reflection of Trevisan's outpouring.

The artist is permeated by life outside the studio, and his work is guided by urban contamination. The country's capital, Brasília, is not only his home, but also the place where his painting lives. When dry, the city's landscape reveals an earthy red, the cerrado in its true form, the birthplace of the Pequi and Baru grapes. At times, he sees a less arid air, a more organic and nutritious moment – ​​Trevisan is permeated by these manifestations, he allows himself to be infiltrated.

Perception is in the sensorial field, its practice is completed in the activation of the observer's gaze, which ceases to be external and becomes a constituent part of the projection of colors, the quintessential encounter between the material body and the sensitive body. We are invited to approach and move away from the works, so that Trevisan provides a visual experience of immersion in his universe, an emotional way of being before his contour. The pictorial creation is an attentive conversation between the material and the poetic making; the application of color is as relevant as its choice. The coincidence of opacity with brightness and the encounter of encaustic with the volume of oil reveal how painting preserves traces of the instrument and of the gestural performance with the material; the artist is undoubtedly connected to the whims and aspirations of the material.

A rhythmic pulse in the forms that repeat themselves in the material construction, in the displacements and spaces, in the power of the presence of colors over others. Trevisan's poetics is a flame that spreads through the barn, not as destruction but as a process of dissemination. It becomes coal, soot and the smoke that spreads the environment, dissipates into mist in a subtle way. The trail of fog is a power, what is seen and felt is gradually veiled and transmuted, covering the landscape, interrupting perception and calling for a pause. The surrender of time and the wait for the revelation of what is fleeting to the eye is how we experience Turvo reflexo.

The veiling in the surface’s weave is the mist branching out through the exhibition space, a rhythmic connection that emanates from all the works; the locus of the painting is always revisited, articulated in many other possibilities, which cyclically return and complement each other. As we embark on his poetic practice, we notice nuances, subtleties in the painting’s production that are gradually consolidated in the eyes of those who encounter his geometrical landscapes, and in Turvo Reflexo, we are absorbed in João Trevisan’s luminous and contemplative occupation.

Service
Exhibition | Cloudy Reflection
From May 15th to July 19th
Monday to Friday, 10 am to 19 pm, Saturday, 10 am to 15 pm