Release

Alan Sierra (b. 1990, Hermosillo, Mexico) lives and works in Mexico City
Kamilla Langeland (b.1989, Kongsvinger, Norway) lives and works in Oslo
Maria Antelman (b. 1971, Athens, Greece) based in New York
Sjur Eide Aas (b.1989, Stavanger, Norway) lives and works in Oslo
Tatiana Grinberg (b. 1967, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil) lives and works in Rio de Janeiro

Cavalo is pleased to present ‘omissíssimo’, a group show with artists Alan Sierra, Kamilla Langeland, Maria Antelman, Sjur Eide Aas and Tatiana Grinberg. The exhibition brings together a set of works that relate to enigmas, myths and mysteries, most of which have not previously been shown in Brazil. Using  mirror games, hybrid bodies, cracks, floating objects, moons, translucent spheres, amulets and natural elements, the works combine to create a supernatural atmosphere.

As the largest palindrome of the Portuguese language, omissíssimo is a superlative for a subject that omits, hides, ceases to manifest. It is an accidentally symmetrical word, barely changed from its Latin origin, with a sound similar to enchantments from fairy tales (a disappearing spell, probably). The concept of a hidden subject is essential in one of the exhibition’s central works. In Cuts [lay inox], by Rio de Janeiro based artist Tatiana Grinberg, holes cut through a steel plate that shatters on to the gallery floor. The shape of the perforations indicates they are caused by extremities of a human body, no longer present. The fragments that land on the floor spill into the  architecture of the space, just as the steel plate was crossed.. Now they reflect the floor, walls, visitors and other works.

Maria Antelman is an artist born in Athens and residing in New York. Her sombre videos evoke ancestral myths by reimagining them in a contemporary context. Eye / I (2018), with it’s phonetically symmetrical title, is a video with only a few frames. Two eyes, always open, touch each other in an anatomically impossible position, displayed in an endless cycle. The artist condenses the story of Narcissus into one sign while also referring to our current culture of constant self-surveillance. In the video installation Sentimental Conversations, Antelman exhibits an intergenerational dialogue between the busts of her mother and son, with lips and eyes replacing the nipples respectively.

Mexican artist Alan Sierra presents a series of drawings in precise lines, with a surrealist aesthetic. His work is usually influenced by dreams and explores allegorical possibilities arising from  ordinary situations. Cut nails can become satellites, open shells become talking eyes. These are comedic exercises in re-presenting the body and mundane objects. Also working with symbolic forms found in everyday life, Norwegian artists Kamilla Langeland and Sjur Eide Aas appropriate materials gathered during  their travels in their own productions and collective works. Their delicate installations use flowers, plants, kitchen utensils and insects, found and modified. Resin spheres that resemble crystal balls, and expanded paintings, are part of these artists’ works.

In times when obscurantist ideas haunt the socio-political field, it seems contradictory to speak of the importance of preserving mystery. But a fundamental quality of the arts is that not everything need to be examined in the light of science, and that there is a difference between knowledge and information. It is an ancient thought that invites you to dive into self-reflective surfaces. Just as one of Delphi’s best known aphorisms ‘know thyself’ can, and should, according to Socrates, be interpreted as ‘Look at thyself’.

Release

Alvaro Seixas opens on November 28th the exhibition ‘The Importance of the Devil’, his second solo show at Cavalo. The Rio de Janeiro based artist known for his critical posture and comical posts that pin curators, gallerists, collectors and art collectives presents new works in the space in Botafogo neighborhood. The title, named after a 1932 essay by the Spanish writer José Bergamin, defends the relevance of the provocative and defiant agent role in the art circuit.

In ‘The Importance of the Devil’ Alvaro presents a repertoire of paintings produced in 2019, with motives ranging from expressionist abstractions to reinterpreted mythological scenes, to cartoon characters and sentences about the art universe. To this end, Seixas evokes from the demons of English romantic poets John Milton and William Blake to the exoticized imagery of Jean-Baptiste Debret, a painter who portrayed the daily life of colonial Brazil.

Seixas continues his research on installational painting, choosing unusual layouts of works in space. This time the artist uses new features in his production, such as graphic prints on paper, fabrics, and photographic backgrounds, expanding and contradicting his title as a painter. The dynamics of digital images of smartphones are, alongside the tradition of painting, their source of inspiration.

In his homonymous text, the poet José Bergamin praises the ambiguity. This is also a central theme of Alvaro’s new production, exercising its irony by satirizing the art system and from it reflecting on figures of power, morality, and the dimension of the figures of martyr and traitor. “How to be popular and pop being unpopular, that is, betraying the medium?” The artist wonders. ‘How to oppose the art system within that system itself? How to criticize and flirt with the system being one of its agents?

In a time of global political instability, Seixas’s slogans, tragic, romantic, angry and nihilistic texts attempt to bring down deified works of Brazilian and world art.

24 hrs at Atelier Kvalnes presents ‘Last Rites’, the first solo show in Norway by Brazilian artist Thiago Martins de Melo, curated by Felipe R Pena, opening on 28th of August. Thiago builds complex narratives in his colourful paintings, sculptures and animations. The artist discourses on Brazil’s brutal colonial past in a deeply symbolic way, full of intricate images of outsider characters and historical episodes. Martins de Melo’s large paintings relate to the Latin-American Muralist tradition although subverting it with sculpture and the use of contemporary devices such as at screen TVs.

The work by Thiago reflects on his own upbringing in the Northeast of Brazil, a complex region commonly associated with an arid landscape and bloody territorial disputes, making evident the usage of bodies as political tools of immediate disposal. ‘Last Rites’ is also a chance to discuss the current political scenario of the world’s fifth largest country, where the rise of ultraconservatism elected a deeply anti-democratic president. This urgency on relating to the latests events serves as warnings for the changes on Amazon deforestation, cultural policies and social security dismantlement.

On the occasion Thiago will show several paintings and ‘Rasga Mortalha’, his most recent stop-motion animation finished this year. The video composed of more than 3000 drawings narrates a tale of development reaching previously untouched vegetation and the battles that follow it starts. As Thiago points out: “It portrays the end of Brazil, more specifically the end of the Brazilian soul as we know it. It is based on the theories of Jungian psychologist Roberto Gambini. Ever since I began in art, the subject of death is tackled some way or the other in my works. As I see it, in Brazil we are at the end of a cycle because of the unprecedented political crisis. My painting deals with this civilizational death we are going through, this ‘necropolitics’.”

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24hrs 2019 is the fourth exhibition in a series of solo shows by international contemporary artists in AK Dolven’s Studio, Atelier Kvalnes

Thiago Martins de Melo works and lives between São Luis do Maranhão and Campinas, Brazil. He participated in several group exhibitions, such as ‘Queermuseu – Cartografias da diferença na América Latina’, Santander Cultural, Porto Alegre (2017); ‘6° Prêmio Marcantonio Vilaça’, MuBE – Museu Brasileiro da Escultura e Ecologia, São Paulo (2017); ‘Soft Power. Arte Brasil’, Kunsthal Kade, Amersfoort (2016); ‘Dakar Biennale’, Dakar, (2016); ‘Histórias da Infância’, MASP – Museu de Arte de São Paulo, São Paulo, Brazil (2016); ‘Entre-temps… Brusquement, et ensuite’, 12e Biennale de Lyon, Lyon, France (2013); ‘Imagine Brazil’, Astrup Fearnley Museet, Oslo (2013); Convite à Viagem – Rumos Artes Visuais, Paço Imperial, Rio de Janeiro (2012); To be with art is all we ask, Astrup Fearnley Museet, Oslo (2012); Dos Percursos e das Poesias, Museu de Arte Contemporânea do Ceará, Fortaleza (2012).

Germano Dushá

Rasga mortalha: o vulto branco da coruja no céu do Norte traz no rastro o grito estridente. Quem viu e ouviu, já sabe: a morte logo vem. Suindara apavora o olho, dói o ouvido, implacável agouro, corta o pano do febril. Carrega consigo o signo da morte. Neste chão aqui, então, deve ser o anúncio das caravelas, dos caveirões. Da brutal desigualdade. Da varredura do contraditório. Do anti-intelectualismo salivante, do conservadorismo medieval, dos massacres organizados. De tudo aquilo que pretende erradicar as formas de vida. No entanto, o que oprime deve aguardar seu contraponto. Leis injustas devem esperar as desobediências, e as forças que submetem devem esperar corpos insubmissos. É das insurgências e reinsurgências que virá o golpe principal, messiânico, radical.

Rasga mortalha é o vetor metafórico para pensar e transcender uma visão fatalista da história do Brasil. Numa narrativa tão carregada quanto cortante, a fúria cosmológica que surge dos desenhos, pinturas e esculturas funde acontecimentos históricos com memórias e imaginações pessoais para repensar os fatos, redistribuir os papéis e deslocar os protagonismos. A epistemologia humana se dobra, fazendo emergir novos atores, ou melhor, tornando possível que assumam seus devidos lugares, conforme correm os desejos.

Com o pulso da tradição popular o artista contorce os séculos, atracando-os entre si, comprimindo-os até se banharem com as cores mais fortes uns dos outros, de modo a confundirem-se numa voragem enlouquecida, que faz rodopiar “as raças todas, todas as paixões, o tumulto dos impérios, a guerra dos apetites e dos ódios, a destruição recíproca dos seres e das coisas.” Ao som de tambores e fuzis, muitos gestos jorram para dar conta da violência material que desnuda a crueza da vida, mas também da ascese espiritual que aponta para o infinito. Quilombolas, índios, sertanejos, favelados, homossexuais, transexuais, artistas e todos aqueles que não encontram espaço num projeto único de Estado-nação sofrem com contínuas investidas genocidas, mas firmam ponto comum na energia universal que mobiliza as lutas do povo, as escolas da rua, as práticas da selva, os esoterismos cotidianos, os gêneros e sexualidades desviantes, sempre prontos para vir à tona de diferentes formas, em diferentes lugares e a qualquer instante. Há combate, mas há, também, potência para se viver livremente; arte, comunidade, ritual xamânico, festa, torso descoberto, transa com beijo, com abraço, com mijo. O devir-animal e a antropofagia do sujeito que virou onça, do mestiço que virou índio, e que agora saboreia uma perna, depois um pé, um braço. Do homem barbudo com seios e vagina, da mulher com seios e pênis, se comendo um ao outro. Carnes deliciosas.

Momento ético decisivo: “Esta homenagem é uma atitude anárquica contra todos os tipos de forças armadas: polícia, exército etc. (…) pois reflete uma revolta individual contra cada tipo de condicionamento social. Em outras palavras: violência é justificada como sentido de revolta, mas nunca como o de opressão.”

As referências são muitas. Da poesia de Gonçalves Dias ao gesto de Tuíra Kayapó, de Canudos e Contestado às ocupações urbanas, do messianismo de Glauber Rocha ao conceito de necropolítica do camaronês Achille Mbembe, da mitologia Tupinambá à atual luta do povo Gamela no Maranhão, da literatura de cordel às guerrilhas armadas nas selvas latino-americanas, da memória de Dina do Araguaia às metamorfoses do Subcomandante Marcos. Num só tiro vamos da pedra à democracia, das bandeiras à Brasília, do militarismo aos transes esotéricos, das células do cérebro ao olho do cu. Powermix, godzilla, megazord. Faz barulho enquanto anda. Urra sempre que fala. Os olhos reviram, respira fundo, usa todo o corpo, forçando a garganta num grito mais alto que o da coruja para recitar o verso atribuído a Lampião: “Meu rifle atira cantando/ em compasso assustador / Enquanto o rifle trabalha / minha voz longe se espalha / zombando do próprio horror”. Ou do que canta I-Juca-Pirama: “Meu canto de morte, / Guerreiros, ouvi: / Sou filho das selvas, / nas selvas cresci, / Guerreiros, descendo / Da tribo Tupi”.

A morte como morte e a morte como vida. Nenhum sangue escorre em vão: morre um, nascem dois. É a morte que irriga o chão.