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12/8/2015

Two Exhibition

Galeria Leme, Sao Paulo

Alexandre Brandão Chão

Galeria Leme presents "Chão" (Ground), Alexandre Brandão's second solo exhibition in the gallery, where the artist presents a new series of works, continuing his exploration and fascination with the phenomenology of raw materials and their almost alchemical transmutation.

If, in earlier works, Alexandre Brandão studied the elusive nature of light and the sculptural capabilities of materials such as sugar, stone, ink and charcoal. In "Chão" he deepens his direct rapport with the raw materials that come, literally or conceptually, from the ground/earth.

Through an empirical approach and the use of trial-and-error processes, the artist progressively reached a technical dominion over these materials. Flirting with tools and methods from an artisan production (sensitive to the transformation of matter, its drying times and changes in consistency and color) Alexandre Brandão develops a practice that often gets close to a proto-science, combining utopia, physical and chemical processes with a strong empiricism and intuition.

The refusal of the methodical rationalism of scientific processes has a visible reverberation in the predominant forms features in the exhibition. In which prevail rounded and sinuous forms, with imperfections that comes from the artist's very hands. Human traces imprinted through techniques and practices that connect themselves to a memory that took refuge in gestures and habits, in skills passed by unspoken traditions and in a self-knowledge inherent to the body.

But the artist does not stop in the transformation of raw materials into sculptural objects. The exercise elaborated by Alexandre Brandão questions the very nature of matter, decomposing it and then giving it a new identity, a second-nature. His starting point is what many consider the final object. Instead of beginning with clay and mix it with water, the artist starts from the brick, destroying it and then reordering its remains to give them a new identity. He also starts from the glass, only to withdraw its fundamental characteristic, transparency, reconfiguring it with an opaque skin made of glazing putty, where the traces of his fingers are engraved.

Alexandre replicates, to the scale of his hands, a cyclical process that departs from a rational order, moving towards a temporary disorder, and culminating in a reorganization and reconfiguration of the matter.

During this process of cyclic redundancy, energy expenditure and manual work, the craftsman/homo-faber suddenly turns into an artist/homo-ludens, creating crossbred artifacts, which both speak of their own construction and disappearance.

These objects and devices, despite, sharing with us the same physical universe, bear within themselves an extremely volatile and unstable appearance of a draft. They are elements that are not enclosed in their forms, but point to something beyond them. Objects in a "vague state," that move between a lost functionality and a re-functionalization that momentarily escapes our comprehension.

Their understanding requires the suspension of our beliefs and theories, an attitude that is contrary to the preformatted knowledge of the things in the world. Thinking is not only apprehending reality through reason, but also reflecting about the perceptive universe that appears to our senses. It is in this sense, a return to the Ground, to the origin. Back to a horizontal plan of timeless knowledge that unites us without differences and exclusions.

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Felipe Cama: Sul X North

Galeria Leme presents Felipe Cama's third solo exhibition in the gallery. In “Sul X North” the artist deepens his interest in the digital image, continuing his examination of its ambiguous status as a matrix of visual experience as well as its modes of diffusion, circulation, reproduction and consumption.

In this new series, the computer-internet binomial remains the central axis of the work, both from an instrumental point of view and also as a source of raw material for the work. The exhibition is not only about the possibilities and limitations of the nature of digital and electronic media, but also questions the problem of representation of images from art history through these same channels.

To better articulate this parallel between two forms of image production and presentation, Felipe Cama focuses, on the one hand, on the work of travelling artist Marianne North (1830-1890), and on the other, the artist appropriates several photos from anonymous tourists, posted on the internet.

North, an English naturalist and botanist, was a pioneer woman for her time. A travelling artist, she began her excursions in 1871, first going to Canada, United States and Jamaica, and finally living in Brazil for a year, where she worked in a cabin inside the forest. The artist made numerous paintings depicting the landscape of nineteenth century Rio de Janeiro, carefully representing the vegetation and the landscape, which gradually underwent changes made by the human settlements.

Despite the alterations of the landscape, over more than two centuries, the artist was so accurate in her choice of images, that today we can very often find the same angles on the photos of many tourists who passed by Rio de Janeiro.

Though they have completely different ontologies, both ways of recording reality, when encountered on the Internet, are presented as digital files, quickly circulated on the network and available for consumption. Even unique works, such as paintings, end up being stripped of their materiality to move through the system in the form of digitalized images. So, they are not distinguishable from the prosaic photos taken today, and are also consumed as a substitute for the genuine experience of being in front of a canvas or admiring a beautiful landscape.

Image: Lagoa Rodrigo de Freitas, Perto do Rio, 2010-2015

Opening: August 13, 7pm

Galeria Leme
Av. Valdemar Ferreira, 130
Mon - Fri 10am to 7pm, Sat 10am to 5pm

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