CWith the art circuit closed to the public due to Covid-19, the exhibition space gave way to lives and other proposals that swarm on the internet. Showing now is thinking about the present and the future, exchanging ideas, knowledge, content. This path taken by Lost In Translation, a The first virtual exhibition of the gallery A Gentil Carioca, is fluid, utopian, with total freedom of inquiry.
Marcio Botner, artist and one of the gallery's owners, wants to understand the moment and conceptually ally himself with artists, intellectuals, gallery owners to face this journey. The exhibition can be understood as something that has yet to happen, as the project Desire, Laura Lima, that's in her head, half in suspension, as she says. “If I can do it, it will be a job with people. When I think about this project, I remember Dennis Oppenheim drawing on the wall and his son simultaneously doing the same drawing on his back.” The space age profoundly marked the artistic imagination, not only in cinema. Desire includes an astronaut floating without gravity, with the body skewed when viewed from the ground, as in NASA images, with the crew member outside the spacecraft. Laura wants to connect with outer space and promote the observation of her drawings, made on the web, from the earth.
Breathing and meditation intertwine in the work of Maria Laet, an artist who works with silence as a measure of her time. The collective highlights an immersive sound installation, in addition to the film/work The measure of voice, who thinks the space and time of the voice. With a calm personality, she builds a physical-psychic dynamics of movement and immobility, close to the models of oriental culture. Eight voices reverberate from the inside out of eight clay pots – arranged in a circle and buried to the surface – creating continuous sounds and monitoring breathing. Maria Laet makes poetry without text.
The relevant issue of rap music video Litany of the Dead, de Hair, are the fragments of ideas that form a living sociological archive of an unequal, racist and indifferent Brazil. This is one of the best Hair works that music, records and interprets a poem by Gerardo Mello Mourão, father of the artist Tunga, created for the project Light with Darkness, with record, show and exhibition.
From a poetic perspective, the performance Silent Walk in Venice, Vivian Caccuri, explores various ways of perceiving a city. Twenty people who don't know each other walk together in silence for eight hours. Such an operation, without conversations, causes changes in the participants' perception of the territory where they circulate. Their silence filters the surrounding sound, mixed with an array of voices and different noises. The project has already been presented in Rio de Janeiro and this change in topography has added new symbolic and imagetic territories to it.
Proximity and affection surround the universe of Maxwell Alexander, that too he is taken to the other shores by the challenging everyday life of the place where he lives and works. He has a studio in the Rocinha community, frequented by friends, critics and museum directors. Known for his large-format, colorful and material paintings in Lost in Translation he proposes a clean installation, with few objects, contaminated by constant elements in the familiar landscape. A Capri blue plastic tarpaulin pool, often seen on the slabs of the community's houses, and several Romeo model mirrors. The installation is interactive, with the participation of the public, who are invited to go barefoot and walk through the waters of this mythical project, with a narrative built from the artist's experimentation.
Possible ideas revolve around the design of Rodrigo Torres that sutures time, extended by isolation, with a manufactured and therapeutic production that mixes reflection, religion and art. necklace of the hours it is a kind of rosary or meditation string that also refers to the artist's past, when he was religious and saw prayer as a moment of introspection. Each bead is made with clay and paper for rolling marijuana, life size of a regular necklace. "If transformed into an installation, it will be about 30 meters high, adaptable to the gallery space.”
Urbanism, territory and spatial transformation remain on the agenda of Jarbas Lopes. your project O Inaugural Section MAM, Rio Janeiro is an evolutionary version of the original 2001 proposal, air bike path, "raised bike lanes from the ground” and confirms art as an agent for rethinking cities. Different proposal from the bike paths that cut through cities all over the world, air bike path proposes the playful use of the bicycle, in a suspended track, becoming more than a transport, a pleasant moment of leisure.
The concept of inclusion of art in the city is much broader than one might imagine. João Mode chose the center of Rio de Janeiro to intervene with the project extenders, which involves five long ropes that connect over the skylight of A Gentil Carioca and are tied to some neighboring buildings, close to the Saara open-air market. The artist's work consists of materials that can infiltrate the city and to provoke people's perception of situations that are not revealed in the urban fabric.
The virtual exhibition option is here to stay and Márcio Botner comments that the initiative had a positive response not only from artists, but also from critics and intellectuals. With the gallery website under maintenance, the viewing rooms are available in this link.
