Alvaro Seixas’s “literary art” in Salvador for the first time
The Rio-born artist exhibits abstracts images related to poetry and literature at Robert Alban Galeria
The romantic poetry and the subversive character that mark the works of artists such as Lord Byron, Marquis de Sade and Álvares de Azevedo are behind the exhibition that the Rio-born artist Alvaro Seixas presents in Salvador from March 23rd, opening the 2017 exhibition season of Roberto Alban Galeria, in Ondina. Seixas’s work is among the most representative and expressive ones of the Brazilian contemporary art, a production marked by abstract images, gestural or, as he prefers, by a “literary abstraction”. The exhibition is open to the public from March 24th to April 23rd, from 10:00am to 7:00pm.
The exhibition O Coxo, o Sádico e o Poeta (The Lame, the Sadist and the Poet), is Alvaro Seixas’s first solo show in Salvador. His work, however, is known nationally. Doctor of Visual Arts from the School of Fine Arts at the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro, he has become one of the most relevant artists of his generation. In 2015, he was the youngest artist to be nominated for one of the most important Brazilian awards for visual arts: the Marcantonio Vilaça Award. Besides, his works are present in important private collections and some were recently acquired by the MAR (Museu de Arte do Rio – Rio Museum of Art) and the Alex Katz Foundation, in the United States. Among his recent exhibitions the highlight is the 10th Mercosul Biennial (Porto Alegre, 2015).
“The series of paintings that I’ll present in Salvador may be “conceptualized” as abstract, gestural and other familiar terms, but I like to think of something new, the “literary abstraction”, since my way of painting started to admit not only elements of the visual arts vocabulary, but also of literature and poetry, specially of Byron’s romantic poetry and Sade’s literature: their contradictions, fantasies and subversive character”, explains Alvaro Seixas.
Seixas believes the academy is very much integrated to his way of working because “it should be a pulsating space, precisely to avoid the risk of reproducing a new “academicism”, in other words, full of rules of how a contemporary artist should be (…) I always try to “pull the rug from under myself” when I’m teaching classes or painting a picture: I consider perplexity a commendable objective of the artistic doing, on a canvas or in the ambit of a university”.
In this way, for the exhibition at Roberto Alban Galeria, Seixas says that he searched for inspiration in the persona and work of an artist that is not very discussed in the Brazilian universities of plastic arts: Lord Byron. “When we read one of Byron’s poems generally the background color is something to be deciphered or invented. When I propose to decipher a complex work like “Don Juan”, in color fields and scrawls, I’m playing with the way the spectator or observer deals with painting in contrast with poetry”, explains Seixas.
Alvaro Seixas’s canvas that will be exhibited in Salvador attracts attention for the way the artist uses colors, which emerge in a vivid way, to “create visual and theoretical contrasts, working also to seduce and confound the spectator”. In this chromatic profusion, the artist establishes a rich dialogue between traditional materials, such as oil paint, the neon spray paints and precast metallic structures. “The neon spray is an industrial palette of recent times, increasingly popular. It’s the paint I find in the hardware store next to my atelier as well as in a cool street wear shop in Botafogo and Leblon. Blending these universes: Prussian blue and neon pink, for example, is making a metaphorical and narrative game with the materials – the matter has its own story to tell and mixing this story with the lives of such impressive characters like, Byron, Azevedo and Sade seemed to me like a great and captivating challenge.”
The exhibition’s presentation text was written by the critic and curator Felipe Scovino, who highlights that the thinking character of Alvaro Seixas’s work is translated in his ability to work jointly the narrative of the three poets chosen: Lord Byron (the lame), Sade (the sadist) and Álvares de Azevedo (the poet). “These characters and their motivations presently contaminate and feed Alvaro Seixas’s work”, says Scovino, who considers that the artist “is not afraid of ridicule, because he ridicules himself first and foremost. It’s through this atmosphere and characters that have desire, in their more diverse ambitions, love, libido and passion violently expressed that his exhibition goes on.”
Exhibition: O Coxo, o Sádico e o Poeta / Alvaro Seixas
Opening: March 23th 2017, at 8:00pm
Opening hours: March 24th to April 23rd (Monday to Friday, 10:00am to 7:00pm; Saturday 10:0 to 1:00pm)
Where: Roberto Alban Galeria
Address: Rua Senta Pua, 53, Ondina Tel. 3243-3982/ 3326-5633
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