Study group

SPArte/Specific

(Un)exploit the space

Twelve artists are undertaking a poetic invasion at the Pavilhão da Bienal. The modernist lines that have come from the sketch-board of Oscar Niemeyer and which continue to be the privileged site of the history of art, through São Paulo’s Bienal, become support and inspiration for works ephemeral in duration, but far in reach.

Narratives modelled on experimentation can be seen in architecture, spreading over railings, hiding and mimicking staircases, appearing to be spilled on the verticality of columns, vigorously filling panels. In the words of the young Henrique de França, one of the participating artists, “Horizontal lines, empty spaces, unfinished figures, free strokes; these are signs that, overall, refer to the fragility of memory itself, of history itself. In a reading that relates to a narrative, the horizon line is the line of time. And the empty spaces, the mistakes and the uncontrolled scribbles perhaps say more than the complete and figurative points that merge with them. (...)

Laura Gorski invents a new place through permanent marker and acrylic paint. The figures of the Aerial Roots series are based on photographic images where the absence of material is greater. Such empty spaces, usually captured during journeys, generate a new landscape, in black and white, which takes advantage of the construction and provides a new poetic to the space, dialoguing with the light, with the focus of the observer, with formal references. The strangeness of the dislocated landscape provokes a sensation similar to that when facing an insect of great proportions, made with adhesive vinyl, by Jerôme Florent. Derived from the artist’s woodcarving exploration, the animal belonging to a fantastic universe may awaken a somewhat atavistic fear, or take whoever looks at it to another place, to the far corners of imagination. (...)

by Mario Gioia

Excerpts from the text of Mario Gioia, about the artworks of Site Specific Ateliê Fidalga in SP Arte, São Paulo, SP, Brazil, in 2010.

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Site-Specific of SP-Arte/2010

In the next edition of SP Arte, Ateliê Fidalga will bring together a site-specific exhibition with works from 12 artists. It will be an intervention in a specific place –the very locus of the fair – and for a limited time, the five days of its performance. Result of an invitation to Ateliê Fidalga, the proposal is to have visual elements that establish a dialogue with the SP-Arte performance space. This temporary aesthetical occupation will take place on the internal access ramp between the first and second floor – a compulsory passageway for the visitors to the Fair. It relates to the aesthetical appropriation of an immediate space, a contemporary proposal for working with the space, and which seeks to incorporate it into the artistic production exposed by art galleries. The site-specific display does not simply propose to make another pictorial or plastic representation, but to incorporate the very environment into the works already conventionally accepted as art, and also to make this environment an integrated platform of artistic expression.

Within a rich environment of diverse artistic production – more than two thousand works in the 2010 edition – the specific-site exhibition is an SP-Arte proposal which points to a dissolution of the static limits of galleries with the actual building where it is displayed, that is the Pavilhão Cecillio Matarazzo. Disordering formal limits. Not leaving the architectural space as a mere passive depository of the so-called works of art. Going beyond the framing of a standard canvas and incorporating the architecture of the space, not only as a platform, but also as an aesthetic work in itself. Going beyond the traditional frames and extending beyond the boundary of what has conventionally de-limited artwork. This is the proposal that Ateliê Fidalga has accepted as an aesthetic challenge, together with the participating artists of its space, and in synchronization with the contemporary production of visual art.

http://feirasparte.blogspot.com.br/2010/04/site-specifc.html