calendario eventi  :: 

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23/6/2014

Two exhibitions

White Cube, Sao Paulo

Daniel de Paula
objetos de mobilidade, ações de permanência

White Cube São Paulo is pleased to present a solo exhibition by Daniel de Paula as part of the Inside the White Cube programme. The exhibition will include sculptures and a group of triptychs all of which develop the ideas suggested by the show's title, ‘objetos de mobilidade, ações de permanência’ (objects of mobility, actions of permanence).

The first work encountered when entering Gallery II, is Crux (2014), a public lamppost laid across the gallery floor. Unexpected and playfully incongruous, it has been removed from its urban context, brought inside into the gallery and set on its side, like a felled tree. The lamppost’s light is controlled by a photosensitive cell, so that it fades to nothing when the natural light disappears, in a witty subversion of its original function. This waning of light, which is dictated by external conditions, invests the sculpture with animate characteristics as if, like the natural world, it is controlled by the cycle of night and day.

The sentence ‘objetos de mobilidade, ações de permanência’, from which the show takes its title, is written out in neon, installed in the gallery alongside the lamppost. Both sculptures use light – harnessing its allure of warmth and security – to draw the viewer into the space and work to subvert the functions commonly associated to each object. Neon signs are mostly associated with adverting, whereas here the sign is brought inside and controlled by a motion sensor which responds to any detectable movement. The neon switches off with movement and only comes on again once the movement has stopped, thereby demanding that the viewer stands stationary, contemplative, in order to illuminate the work.

De Paula’s series of nine triptychs each comprised of a book or magazine, a photograph of the artist reading the aforementioned publication, and a typewritten text on graph paper, collectively function as a record of a solitary and private activity, here undertaken by the artist in a public area. Described by the artist as ‘readings’, the first one took place in February 2013, when the artist read Hélio Oiticica’s ‘Aspiro ao Grande Labirinto’, from cover to cover while walking the streets of Paris. De Paula thereby created a situation where two very different cultures intersected; through the actions of the artist, the medium of literature, the geographical constraints of the city and the passage of time. All of which was recorded through a single photograph and very short explanatory text. For this exhibition de Paula has selected a varied group of locations and reading matter, such as in Towards dialogue, through fire (2014), which records his reading of ‘Letters 1964-74’ by Lygia Clark and Hélio Oiticica, whilst sitting by an open fire, and Towards Dematerialization (2014), which involved de Paula reading ‘Six Years. The Dematerialization of the Art Object’ by Lucy Lippard, once he was out at sea, out of sight of land.

Daniel de Paula was born in 1987 to Brazilian immigrants in Boston, USA. The family relocated to Brazil where de Paula was educated. He currently lives and works between São Paulo and Itapevi.

De Paula graduated from Fundação Armando Alvares Penteado [FAAP] with a BA in Art (2012), and his work has been exhibited at Maisterravalbuena Gallery, Madrid (2014); ‘Onsite’, Temporary Arts Project, Southend-on-Sea (2014); ‘Open Cube’, White Cube Mason’s Yard, London (2013); Pivô Gallery, São Paulo (2012); Paço das Artes, São Paulo (2012); Centro Cultural São Paulo (2011); and Instituto Tomie Ohtake, São Paulo (2010). De Paula was recipient of a scholarship at the Programa Independente da Escola São Paulo (2014); resident at the Cité Internationale des Arts, Paris (2013) and at Casa Tomada, São Paulo (2012). He won the acquisition award at the Programa de Exposições do Centro Cultural São Paulo (2011), awarded at the exhibition EDP nas Artes at Instituto Tomie Ohtake curated by Agnaldo Farias, São Paulo (2010).

Inside the White Cube provides a platform for exploring new developments in international contemporary art, across a range of practices and media. This will be the first Inside the White Cube exhibition at White Cube São Paulo.
Daniel de Paula and White Cube would like to thank:

Adriano Pedrosa
Ana Paula Cohen
Bruno Baptistelli
Bruno Garibaldi
Charbel Boutros
Christopher Mendes
Edson Mendes
Eduardo Ortega
Eliane Senna
Fernanda Lopes
Frederico Filippi
José Fujocka
Leeward Wang
Leonardo Padilha
Liliana Angrisani
Maíra Dietrich
Maria Ângela Atallah
Marilia Furman
Marcos Moraes
Paulo Miyada
Paulo Pjota
Pedro Valente
Pietro Ghiurghi
Raphael Escobar
Rodrigo Sadi
Rubens Mano
Sári Ember
Tainá Azeredo
Thiago Hattnher
Verena Lombardi
Valdemar da Silva

The team from AES Eletropaulo:

Adriano Barbosa
Élia do Santos
Fernando Monteiro
Julio Cesar de Mello
Leandro Dias
Roberto Podesta
Valdemar de Araújo
Wellington Lopes
Weslley Correia

Installation staff:

Nicholas Petrus
Pablo Vilar
Sandro Torquetti

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Gary Hume
Lions and Unicorns

White Cube São Paulo is pleased to present ‘Lions and Unicorns’, an exhibition of new paintings, collage and sculpture by Gary Hume. This will be Hume’s first major solo presentation in Brazil since he represented Britain at the XXIII Bienal de São Paulo (1996).

Hume’s career began in the 1980s, when he received critical acclaim for his hard-edged, abstract ‘Door’ paintings. Since then he has developed a highly personal language in paintings made with ordinary, household gloss paint, and strikingly elemental sculptures, favouring forms which appear familiar but remain resolutely abstract and hard to decipher.

Hume’s new ‘Unicorn’ paintings use architectonic motifs that derive from bunting – celebratory strings of colourful, triangular flags that are used for decoration. But, as with all of the artist’s work, an innocuous starting point becomes a springboard for exploring compositional limits, and the malleable ground between figuration and abstraction. In these works, a restricted palette of alluring and unsettling pastel colours such as Calamine pink, peach, mauve and aquamarine has been applied thickly, used as both a tonal and a drawing device, since the edges of each area of colour creates a shallow sculptural relief that adds to the texture of the surface as well as to the painting’s overall composition. Triangular shapes, often in mismatched pairs, intrude into the picture plane and are occasionally punctuated by a tiny, single black dot or a loose grid. In some works the dots read like eyes, pushing these geometric paintings into a more figurative arena, while in others, circular cell-like forms are pushed to the edge of the canvas, or floating egg shapes at the top of a large rectangle, recall something more natural or biological.

The sense of disrupted compositional harmony is continued in Hume’s new collage works, which use a series of found, black and white photographs. The photographs, which are all staged to suggest that they are studio portraits, are of young children in the 1960s, the same decade in which the artist was born. While they could represent a parallel childhood to that of the artist, their highly orchestrated poses and props makes them seem as if they actually derive from an earlier, more formal time. The photographs have been cut at strategic points, either diagonally, vertically or horizontally, and then re-mounted onto foiled paper and inverted or turned 90º. Since stripes of the mirrored paper appear through the gaps or fissures in the image, both figure and fantasy is disrupted, as if this ‘mirror’ of childhood has been broken, its image of perfection destroyed, further removed from the sense of being a historical record by having been inverted.

Hume’s new painted marble sculptures follow on from his earlier series of marble ‘Snowmen’ which, the artist suggests, can be read as three-dimensional rendering of a child’s drawing of a snowman, with two balls placed one on top of the other. In these works, which Hume has called ‘Mums and Dads’, he has used three hand-formed marble spheres, painted in a similar range of pastel colours to the paintings and has placed the largest ball at the top, once again inverting the image. Although perfectly poised – and, like the earlier snowman works a ‘perfect’ sculptural form since they are viewable from 360 degrees – they appear imbalanced, as if the form is about to fall and having to work against gravity to keep its place.

In another group, Hume has used the repetitive, colourful forms of bunting, to create works that have a more sinister edge. Connected to the wall, the fading colours of the bunting, with their sharp triangular form create a teeth-like pattern, monstrously enlarged and removed from their original, celebratory purpose. The fourth one, painted in yellow, then takes on the form of the crown, as if another element of the paraphernalia of a Birthday party.

White Cube São Paulo
Rua Agostinho Rodrigues Filho 550 - Vila Mariana - São Paulo
Opening times
Tuesday – Saturday 11am – 7pm

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