Exhibition "EMPTY BETWEEN", by Carlos Fajardo

A Marcelo Guarnieri Gallery is pleased to present “VOID BETWEEN", the artist's third solo exhibition Charles Fajardo at the gallery's headquarters in São Paulo. The exhibition brings together a collection of twenty-four recent and previously unseen drawings and five sculptures crafted from glass, corten steel, polished steel, and fabric, exploring the relationship between absence and presence through the transparencies of the materials, the intervals between surfaces, and the whiteness of the paper. In “VAZIO ENTRE” (EMPTY BETWEEN), Fajardo continues the investigation he has been developing for six decades on the spatial relationships between the body, the object, and architecture, carried out on this occasion through a dialogue between art and quantum thought.

In 1966, Carlos Fajardo produced "Neutral," a work that would become fundamental to the development of his artistic and philosophical thought. Composed of two transparent cubes, one made of acrylic and the other formed only by a line that crosses each of the six surfaces of the first, the piece is delivered to the buyer as an instruction guide for assembly. In "Neutral," it is possible to observe the genesis of some interests that would become more complex over more than fifty years of the artist's activity: the elaboration of the work established by the relationship between the observer and the object, drawing as a mode of thought, and works as carriers of ideas that transcend the artist's manual craft.

In “VAZIO ENTRE” (EMPTY BETWEEN), the memory of “Neutral” resurfaces in stainless steel, materializing a three-cubic-meter sculpture that welcomes the visitor into the space. The cube, formed by eight edges, maintains a portion of its existence in the virtual realm, completed in twelve edges only by the eyes of the beholder. Now it reaches the scale of the human body, and what passes through it is us, functioning as a kind of portal that provides access to the exhibition. Sixty years later, Fajardo remains faithful to the discussions raised by phenomenology, but just as time has advanced, the artist's philosophical repertoire has expanded, approaching reflections on the composition and behavior of matter through the fundamentals of quantum physics. By rejecting the conception of a fixed and fully determined matter, this perspective evokes a microscopic level in which phenomena are described in terms of probabilities, interactions, and correlations, and in which observation integrates the conditions of manifestation of what is observed. Based on the understanding that physical reality is understood as relational and dependent on the interactions that actualize it, the word "empty" ceases to be synonymous with absence, and the word "between" acquires new density, activating a mode of perception less focused on the interval between fixed objects and more attentive to the relationships that constitute it.

Thus, what Fajardo proposes in this exhibition is a living and relational experience. On the side walls, works are displayed that explore, through chromatic variation, the transition between the second and third dimensions. To the left, a cerulean blue square fills the peripheral vision of those entering, evoking the idea of ​​transcendence in its relation to the history of modern art and its use in the representation of atmospheres, celestial and aquatic compositions. Then, a series of twenty-four drawings in charcoal and dry pastel oscillates between red, yellow, blue, and black, revealing, through the friction of the pigment on the surface of the paper, the reticular structure of the fiber. The lines, articulated to the edges of the A4 paper and marked by short and precise gestures, collectively form a sequence that comes alive through the visitor's movement as they traverse the space.

On the opposite side of the room, pieces in glass, corten steel, and fabric are distributed, exploring the relationship between planes through obliquity, a condition that can reveal an ethical stance manifested in openness to others. When placed against the wall, supporting each other, the glass plates, disparate in form and degree of transparency, generate, through their reflections, the illusion of a multiplication of planes around the viewer. These works, which dialogue with previous series by the artist and reveal his interest in Renaissance perspective as a structure of the Western gaze, take on a new dimension when confronted with the works in corten steel and fabric that share the same wall. These other pieces reveal emptiness not through transparency, but through opacity, inviting the viewer to traverse it through the interstices of the fold: sometimes through the hardness of the corten steel, sometimes through the malleability of the fabric.

Service
Exhibition | VOID BETWEEN
From March 07th to April 11th
Monday to Friday, from 10 am to 19 pm, Saturday, from 10 am to 17 pm.