Machine Juice
Bitu Cassundé
Marcelo Gandhi sees himself as a romantic of the moment and in the urgency of the present manages the challenge of exploring the improbable. The artist discusses within his poetic universe issues that reflect on post-colonial positions, orbiting in a micro-political gesture, in which the projection of life contaminates its visibility in a complex net of paradoxes: Arab, artist, freak, gay, indigenous, Latino, Afro-descendent. It results in a greater visual radicalism in his work, which liquefies itself in its proposition and drains in the bordering zone between art and life. These convey the idea of a wild and scientific thought and feed themselves in fusion and rupture entropy.
Indexes of a marginal nature are evident in his artistic practice, provoking ebullition in narratives quite antagonistic, disconcerting and disparate. His works, while equations, are attempts to see and give visibility to the monstrous and fascinating character of his racial impurity and his world vision, chaotic, automatic, pop. A striking data that emerges in his process is exactly the dimension of the drawings that initiate in small dimensions, delicate, in a more subjective order. Nowadays, they acquire a new structure and are contaminated by axes of Marcel Duchamp?s universe of toy art and ready made, by comic books, cinema and occultism. Impossible not to mention also direct influences such as Walt Disney, Jeff Koons, Playmobil dolls, Farnese de Andrade, Louise Bourgeois, H.R. Giger, Andy Warhol, Basquiat and etc.
In the exhibition Suco de Máquina (Machine Juice) at Roberto Alban Art Gallery, Gandhi presents a series of drawings in large dimensions and also an animation, which comes from the artist?s need to put drawing in other experimentation and tension fields, subverted from its common place.
This need is reflected more intensively in his work, since his move from Parnamirim (Rio Grande do Norte) to São Paulo. Living in this megalopolis has provided him with a more intense creation process due to a higher circulation and exchange with other artists. In face of this scenery, Gandhi got in contact with the Axial Project of Electronic Music and Video Mapping, coordinated by the researcher Felipe Julian. This project carried out a concert of Live Image Music, using images generated by other artists in a collaborative work. A drawing by Gandhi was among the ones chosen to participate in this concert. As it was Julian himself the one that brought movement to this drawing, the animation kept and even highlighted the layers and juxtapositions of the original drawing, besides revealing an architectonical and structural character enlarging, thus, spatial and temporal issues with the city, the transience and the repetition present in the pulsation of the BPM (beats per minute).
The artist also presents in the exhibition objects (toys) as if they were totems, true post-industrial gods. The conceptual and formal relations reflect their playful, mysterious relation with life and death. To the artist, thinking and making objects is a magical action to influence the world and find in these objects a kind of anchor for troubled seas.