Studying Latin American Art Group

Marian Cramer Projects is pleased to present the first solo exhibition by the London based Brazilian artist, Rodrigo Garcia Dutra (Rio de Janeiro, 1981) who is currently in his final year of an MA in Sculpture at the Royal College of Art, London.

Garcia Dutra is interested in the origin of ideas and how form travels in time and space. He also looks into objects overseeing the complex relationship in how we shape aesthetics and how they shape us in return. He sees this changes of paradigm as a cultural projection that mutates values in the course of time. The new aesthetic layer no longer represents the original intentions of its creation.

For his first site-specific show in Amsterdam, Rodrigo Garcia Dutra explores the tension between representation and abstraction in his paintings. He creates an ambiguity between the painterly figurative and the photographic device. The geometric patterns of Moroccan stone pavements are captured, as a stand up snapshot and after being painted resembles aerial views of an abstract landscape. The lexicon of abstraction is embedded then through the painting of real places. The subject is the Jamaa el Fna Square, a market place in Marrakesh’s medina. It remains the main square of Marrakesh and is used by locals and tourists. It’s open 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. During the day it is predominantly occupied by orange juice stalls, youths with chained Barbary apes, water sellers in colourful costumes with traditional leather water-bags and brass cups as well as snake charmers who will pose for photographs for tourists.

The show will also feature his charcoal tracings from the motifs found in a West African Kente cloth. Those works titled TABOM CONCRETO (When in dead night thy fair imperfect shade) were shown in July 2013 in the show ‘Open Cube’, at White Cube Mason’s Yard. He references the Brazilian Constructivism and Neo-Concretism through the European avant-garde myth itself being inspired by the aesthetic of other cultures. Also cites a book on Japanese aesthetics embracing darkness and shadows.

Complementing is a video piece titled ‘Abstract Eruption’ made through overlay of an animation that suggests a breathing of circles and squares over a compilation of found footage of volcano eruptions from youtube.

Rodrigo Garcia Dutra lives and works in London. He holds an MA in Fine Arts from Central Saint Martin’s College of Art and Design, London (2009) and is currently in his final year for a MA in Sculpture at the Royal College of Art, London. In 2010, he was awarded the Fundação Bienal de São Paulo, Programa Brasil Arte Contemporânea. Recent exhibitions include ‘Notes to Self’, Royal College of Art, London (2013); ‘Outras Coisas Visiveis Sobre Papel’, Galerie Leme, São Paulo (2012); ‘Theory of the City or the Possibilities of an A4’, ISCP, New York City, USA  (2011) and ‘17 Ingredients: Measures of Autonomy’, BASH Studios, London (2009).

By appointment until 30th April 2014:

Marian Cramer Projects

Chopinstraat 31

1077 GM Amsterdam

T: +31 (0)6 147 80 171

info@mariancramer.com

www.mariancramer.com

Exhibition: 19^th July – 9^th September

Maddox Arts is proud to present Visual Poetry curated by Gabriela Salgado. An exploration of the interplay between images and words- Visual Poetry presents the foundation for an artistic language where words function as signifiers beyond the images they evoke, inviting us to read, hear, watch and even touch the ‘poem-object’. The progenitors of this movement can be traced to Latin America’s inter-war years when a generation of artists under the influence of the European avant-garde began an inter-media discourse that would span the course of the century, evolving to meet the concerns of each generation.

Poesia Concreta, was a poetry movement founded by the Noigandres group poets Décio Pignatari and the brothers Haroldo and Augusto de Campos in São Paulo in the early 1950s alongside its visual counterpoint, Arte Concreta. In the programmatic opening statement of the catalogue Arte Concreta: Objeto e Objetivo, Décio Pignatari wrote: “Verse having been abolished, Concrete Poetry confronts many of the problems of space and time (movement) that both visual arts and architecture have in common”

By the 1970s, in the midst of military dictatorships imposed on most South American countries, artists began to create strategies of communication that attempted to undermine the controls of oppressive censorship and increase connectivity with the wider art world, creating a network that could be said to serve as an analogical precursor of the internet. ‘Mail art’ became one of the main vehicles for the distribution of artworks in the context of political repression, serving as a ubiquitous platform for subverting the strictures of government and bypassing the printed media and other state controlled circuits. Uruguayan artist Clemente Padín alongside artists from Argentina and Venezuela formed the Asociación Lationamericana de Arte Correo – the group believed in ‘an art from the base upward, without artists’ that manifested in a critique of society, politics and the rigidity of the commercial art world.

Lenora de Barros Photopoemas are potent examples of Poesia Concreta’s diversification into other mediums in the second half of the 20^th century. In her photographic polyptych POEMA (1979) she playfully explores the relationship between the acts of writing and the primary organ of communication- the tongue. On a similar tangent León Ferrari uses Braille, the written language for those of impaired vision, and inscribes its characters made of raised dots onto ready-made images, associating touch and vision to images as means to summarise an idea.

In the 21^st century, Glenda León and Iván Capote stand as the frontrunners of a new generation of Cuban artists continuing to build on the legacy of visual poetry. Capote’s deployment of sculptural language utilizes a refined simplicity to wring out a tender poignancy via material tautology and the formal associations between language and image. In Otoño (All Fall) the ‘F’ letter cast in steel has seemingly fallen to the ground leaving the viewer to ruminate on the surviving ‘..ALL’

Marcelo Sahea employs the language of the digital era to produce synthetic visual poems that exist in the interface of VJing, sound, video and performance, incorporating looping and repetition as strategies to propose the viewers a novel relationship with the semantic, aural and visual qualities of poetry. His Poegif series are looped animated words and images inducing a trance-like contemplation that the artist enhances through vocal performance.

Maddox Arts

52 Brook’s Mews
Mayfair
W1K 4ED

T: 02074953101
E: info@maddoxarts.com
W: https://www.maddoxarts.com

Friday 26th April 2013

09.00 – 18.30

Gustave Tuck Lecture Theatre UCL, London

With the participation of Robin Greeley (University of Connecticut) and Erica Segre (University of Cambridge)

https://www.ucl.ac.uk/art-history/events/sabotage-symposium

To sabotage is to disrupt a dynamic, to purposefully or unconsciously ruin or fail a system.  Once primarily a worker’s strategy, sabotage has become a recurring artistic practice in contemporary art and one partaking in the ‘reflexive turn’ of late modernity’s aesthetic practices. From the 1960s onwards, the aesthetic notion of sabotage has been notoriously present in Latin American art as a central mechanism of resistance against censorship and a cultural practice confronting state violence, heterosexual normativity, and neoliberalism.

This one-day symposium examines the uses – and limitations – of sabotage in Latin American contemporary art and attempts to place the notion within a larger reflection on the politics of the image, the aesthetics of violence, the tensions between art and spectacle and the position and responsibility of the artist in the face of political turmoil or systemic injustice.

To register: http://sabotage.eventbrite.com/

Organised with the generous support of UCL Centre for the Study of Contemporary Art and Rainhart Gallery.

The Associação Cultural Videobrasil in partnership with Delfina Foundation and Casa Tomada (São Paulo, Brazil) are pleased to invite applications from visual artists living and working in Brazil and the Middle East, North Africa & South Asia (MENASA) for a three-month artistic residency split between São Paulo and London. The Videobrasil em Contexto Prize (Videobrasil in Context) is focused on artists, under the age of 35, whose practice involves a strong element of research and production. Two artists (one from Brazil and another from MENASA) will be selected to undertake the three-month residencies from mid-September 2012 and produce a new works in response to Videobrasil’s Collection.

The Collection available for each artist are the works that have been part of the Southern Panoramas show each year since 1990, when Videobrasil focused on the geopolitical South.  An overview of this 20+ year selection is available for the applicants through the following URL:  www.videobrasil.org.br/vbonline.

During the residencies, various public platforms will be created for the artists in São Paulo and London.  At the end of the residency, the artists will be asked to prepare a presentation of their projects to be part of the activities of the 30th Anniversary of the International Contemporary Art Festival SESC_Videobrasil in October 2013.

www.videobrasil.org.br
www.casatomada.com.br
www.delfinafoundation.com