A gallery dedicated to contemporary art opens in Salvador
Installed in a 1.500 square meter house, designed specially to host contemporary art exhibitions, the Roberto Alban Art Gallery opens on April 18 ““Aproximações contemporâneas” (Contemporary Approaches), with works by nine artists
Opening: April 18th, 2013 at 8:00pm until June 1st, 2013
Founded in Salvador, the Roberto Alban Art Gallery opens on April 18 in a 1.500 square meter space, especially designed to host contemporary art exhibitions, with a main room with eight meter headroom and an outdoor terrace. The opening exhibition “Aproximações contemporâneas” reunites paintings, sculptures, objects and photos, a total of 18 works by the artists Alexandre Mury, Elizabeth Jobim, Gabriela Machado, Luiz Hermano, Maria Lynch, Paulo Whitaker, Raul Mourão, Vinícius S. A. and Willyams Martins.
“Aproximações contemporâneas” reflects the purpose of turning the gallery into a pole of Brazilian contemporary art, with the circulation of works by artists from different cities of the country and also of the production of artists from Bahia. From São Paulo, the paintings on paper by Paulo Whitaker (1958) and the sculptural objects by the artist from Ceará Luiz Hermano (1954). In exhibition also the paintings by the artists from Rio Elizabeth Jobim (1957), Maria Lynch (1984), and by Gabriela Machado (1960), who was born in Santa Catarina and lives in Rio, the kinetic sculptures by Raul Mourão (1967), artist that divides himself between Rio and New York, and the photos by Alexandre Mury (1976). From Salvador, the objects by Vinícius S. A. (1983) and the collages by Willyams Martins.
Paulo Venancio Filho, philosopher and professor of the Fine Arts School of UFRJ, writes the exhibition’s catalogue text “the Brazilian artistic contemporaneity is more and more characterized by diversity, multiplicity and heterogeneity, a result of the recent and growing expansion process of the artistic languages that among us already constitutes a tradition that distinguishes us in the global context”.
ARTISTS AND WORKS
Alexandre Mury displays the photos “Dr Gachet” and “Cristo Redentor”, both of 2011, within his poetics in which he inserts his own figure in iconic works. “My interest is in the pleasure of experiencing art. My poetics is in the gesture, it’s not only my figure, as model, that is part of the performance. My art is in giving myself body and soul.”
Elizabeth Jobim presents two paintings in oil on canvas, with the title “Mineral”, of 2012. “My work comes from that moment when we look at things, in the way we see them, but also from how we build our vision through a kind of geometry that organizes our perception of the spatiality of things and the world.”
By Gabriela Machado there are “Chocalho II” and “Chocalho III”, two large format paintings, 2m x 1,68m, of 2012, in acrylic on linen. “My work today is characterized by the use of a paint that emerges, lots of oil, as if building a path through fluidity, constantly. Like in nature, it seems that everything is repeated and multiplied and thus renovated. Sometimes I think that the canvas is alive. They are brush strokes that bundle and create a kind of ragged bouquet, a very fresh paint that seems to breathe. The colors in my work vibrate and, at the same time they aggregate, they get loose. It’s all a continuous process.”
Luiz Hermano shows two wall sculptures, made in 2012: “Trapézio”, with chromed resin and wire, and “Oitavos”, with capacitors, wire and resin. “Hermano’s work process is analogue to the mining process, which extracts from a huge volume of earth and trinkets what is most precious and rare. As if it was necessary to sift mountains to find diamonds or to dig in the depths of the mangroves to reach the crabs. However, the value of his work is obviously not in the ordinary material used, but in the ambiguous net of relations and shapes in which natural and artificial or artisanal and industrial are nor clearly opposed”, writes the philosopher and critic Cauê Alves.
Maria Lynch presents the large format paintings “Aposta” and “Arqueologia”, in oil and acrylic on canvas, made in 2012. “From the excess around the feminine and the ludic universe, I exterminate all traces of the masculine world, which is a way to highlight its presence in face of such absence. The anguish and anxiety are never solved, these are the areas where my work is created, there’s a repulse for reality. I recreate a fiction, an allegory, an excess together with fragments of the imaginary. The deletion of the feminine identity is more than the desire of not being present in the world, but the desire to hide it. Thus I restitute a certain world, sublimating the real in a particular logic. Abstract and erotic, between the pleasure and the guilty, in these paradoxes, I find freedom for the immanence, for the celebration of the delirium, of the dreamlike catharsis and the graphic difference.”
Paulo Whitaker presents the paintings “Disco Inferno” and “Sem Título”, in mixed technique on paper, produced in 2012. “The unrestrained use of color is new. My pallet had always been very limited to avoid seduction through colors. Now I take advantage of a huge choice of strange colors. The process is all very evident, the rough way of using the stencil gives the chance to notice the phases of the painting, the exact moment where and when each decision is made. Fresh paint, dry paint, juxtaposition, superposition. The result now is less graphic, more pictorial, less silent, and more affirmative; an attempt to leave the work fresh, creating new problems to be solved. I have been thinking and working the shapes and the constructions too; more elaborated, more intricate. So that one day I can walk backwards again. Clean, simplify. My painting is not anthropophagic, doesn’t look for simulacrums, it has no connection with the new media, it isn’t self referring, it doesn’t search for gender relations and it isn’t action painting.”
Raul Mourão is represented by the kinetic sculptures 66’51’’+ 52’25”, of 2010, and Sem título”, of 2011, both in 1020 steel with synthetic resin. “In the beginning, it was like when you are in an unknown house, there’s this fear of touching something that can break or of moving a piece of furniture. But from the moment you touch one of the edges, the inert house won’t stop anymore, because it’s impossible not to give way to the temptation of starting the lazy and graceful coming and going of these objects. Testing the weight that is light and giving movement to the inanimate. The rough steel is covered in sensuality and its unexpected lightness is transformed in a swing, a cozy and casual coming and going. Thus, like you, visitors will touch everything, until each sculpture ceases its movement and goes back to the inert darkness of the closed room.”
The works of Vinícius S.A. in the exhibition are “Sorria, você está sendo filmado II”, in stainless steel, glass, digital photography, acrylon and silicon, and “Panoptico”, in iron, glass, digital photography, cloth, acrylon and silicon, both of 2013. “I propose a work where the spectator can penetrate, get spatially involved in the work, interacting and enjoying art.” “Campo Grande I” and “Campo Grande II” by Willyams Martins, both in voile and polyester resin, applied on mural surface, made in 2013, are also part of the exhibition. “The concept of graffiti skins is a procedure that I carry out to remove images from the walls. It’s a scalp, a pastiche, but at the same time a technique that I use to move the tattooed skin of the city now in another context, that can be seen from up close, where I transform them in a polysemic net of meanings.”
ROBERTO ALBAN ART GALLERY Founded in 1989 in the district of Graça in Salvador, the new Roberto Alban Art Gallery, in Ondina, is installed in a 1.500 square meter space, especially designed by the architecture office Foguel, Reis e Sá to host contemporary art exhibitions, with a main room with eight meter headroom and an outdoor terrace.
The Roberto Alban Art Gallery represents important names of the Brazilian contemporary art such as Raul Mourão, Maria Linch, Elizabeth Jobim, Gabriela Machado, Paulo Whitaker, Luiz Hermano, Alexandre Mury, Alvaro Seixas, Rodrigo Sassi, Liliane Dardot, Marcius Kaoru, Fernando Lucchesi and Vinicius S. A. and Willyams Martins from Bahia.
The gallery also offers its patrons a collection of works by artists such as Cristina Canalle, Frans Krajcberg, José Bento, Luis Tomasello, Marcelo Solá, Mario Cravo Neto, Pierre Verger, Renata Egreja, Sebastião Salgado, Vik Muniz, Voltaire Fraga and Waltercio Caldas.
Roberto Alban Art Gallery
Opening: April 18th 2013, at 8:00pm
Until June 1
Mondays to Fridays, from 10:00am to 1:00pm, and from 2:00pm to 7:00pm
Saturdays from 10:00am to 1:00pm
Free entrance
Rua Senta Pua, 01, Ondina, Salvador
Cep 40170.180 – Bahia, Brazil
55 71 3241.3509 | 3326.5633 | 9981.8305
www.robertoalbangaleria.com.br
More information: CW&A Comunicação
Claudia Noronha / Marcos Noronha / Beatriz Caillaux
Phone: +55 21 2286 7926 and +55 21 3285 8687
claudia@cwea.com.br / marcos@cwea.com.br /
beatriz@cwea.com.br