This year, SP-Arte, the largest art fair in the Southern Hemisphere, reaches its 20th edition. The event, which brings together artists and galleries from all over the world, takes place from April 03 to 07 at the Biennial Pavilion in Ibirapuera.
The art scene in Brazil is moving ever faster towards a reinvention in the way in which it is consumed. If before this space was frequented only by journalists, buyers, artists and art critics, today we find countless other categories of professions similar to it. This effect, I believe, was due to the ability to access and viralize that works of art and artists can have on social networks. And that's just a reflection of art surfing the Network Dilemma.
In an interview with Canal Brasil, actress Denise Fraga said the following sentence: “Art exists to fertilize human soil.” This reflection makes us realize how powerful art can be. The ability to make us reflect, feel, and touch our emotions in some way is a unique function that few things in the world can perform. When this effect spreads with the advancement of technology, through the internet, we begin to find artists capturing messages in the collective unconscious and transforming them into art.
Artists with decolonial narratives and ancient and environmental rescue, such as Matheus Ribs from Rio, handicrafts and pieces produced by indigenous peoples - as made by the Kamayurá, Mehinaku and Waujá ethnic groups and exhibited on the lower floor of SP-Arte, works of art with sensory effects, and so on. All this range of possibilities of what art can be is a breath for those who appreciate it and who, before, did not know how to understand it.
For this edition, our research at the fair was a bit more focused. We are looking for artists who are relating art and technology. We found a few - and the ones we found were accurate in their creations.
Carlos Cruz-Diez
The first and most awaited by all was Carlos Cruz-Díez Caracas, considered one of the leading exponents of contemporary art.
Carlos Cruz-Diéz is a contemporary color theorist and his artistic purpose is based on four chromatic conditions: subtractive, additive, inductive, and reflective. The development of his plastic reflection expanded the possibility of understanding about color, demonstrating that the perception of the chromatic phenomenon is not associated with form. In his works, he demonstrates that color, when interacting with the spectator, becomes an autonomous event capable of invading space without the use of form, without anecdotes, devoid of symbols.
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Physichromie (1959) is a structure designed to reveal certain circumstances and conditions related to color, changing according to the observer's movement and the intensity of the light, and thus project color into space to create an evolutionary situation of additive, reflective, and subtractive color.
A Physichromie acts as a “light trap” in a space where a series of colored frames interact; frames that transform, generating new ranges of colors not present in the support. Thus, the color fills the confined space between the vertical sheets - light modulators - that cover the entire work. In addition, due to the effects of the observer or the light source, they create a series of color variations, similar to those observed in the real space of the landscape.
Dan Flavin
Following the line of the enigmatic and innovative who transform light with art, we have Dan Flavin, a great lover of light and was known for using fluorescent light to explore colors and space, reflecting a minimalist style for over three decades.
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By declaring that a fluorescent light tube could stand up as a work of art, Flavin courageously challenged art history, where there was no longer a theoretical separation between art and everyday life. Its only reference is reality, context, and spectator perception. Flavin pioneered the use of light in modernist art.
Alexandre Mazza
Alexandre Mazza's works have as their central point the research of the eye. It is mainly through the objects that the artist confronts his spectators with visual games: with what one sees and what one believes to see, with what is there and what one imagines to be. According to curator Bernardo Mosqueira: “One of Alexandre's great interests is faith in the image, the courage to believe in what we see, but which is beyond one's own physiological capacity to see.
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Nominated for the 2012 Pipa prize, the artist has already presented his works in exhibitions at the Rio de Janeiro Museum of Modern Art (MAM RJ), the Hélio Oiticica Arts Center, the Rio de Janeiro Cultural Fund, and others. His works are in several private and public collections, such as the one at MAM RJ and the Rio Art Museum (MAR).
Rodrigo Cass
In Sensitive Geometry, Rodrigo Cass makes the spectator walk towards the imaginary in a different way: following the perception of chaos. Through a video projection on tempera, linen and acrylic, a continuous looping of a lamp being broken on a wall is passed. From the beginning, with the entire bulb, to the end, with the bulb in pieces. Thus allowing us to have a greater perception of finitude, that everything has a beginning, a middle, and an end. And that even after the end, if there is a new beginning.
Rodrigo Cass graduated in Visual Arts from Faculdade Santa Marcelina (São Paulo, SP) in 2006. In 2010 he was selected for the Pampulha Stock Exchange (Belo Horizonte, MG) and in 2013 for the Exhibition Program of the São Paulo Cultural Center (SP). His work has been exhibited at the Tomie Ohtake Institute, São Paulo, SP (2015); Musée d'Art Contemporain de Lyon, France (2014); Astrup Fearnley Museet, Norway (2013); The Jewish Museum, USA (2013); Centre for Contemporary Art, Israel (2008); Medellín Artes Digitales, Colombia (2008); among other museums and institutions.
Pascal Dombis
In Post-Digital Surface (T2), the artist presents two lenticular prints in aluminum composite, which move according to the individual's position, thus generating a sense of confrontation and discomfort. The archetype of heat and cold is also brought into play through the colors used by Dombis.
Dombis' digital and post-digital works generate the chaotic and the irrational based on the inseparable rationality of computational algorithms, extrapolating them through excessive repetition combined with the impostable factor of randomness, which ends up invading the boundaries of the unknown and the unthinkable.
This is exemplary in his explorations of fractal geometry, in which repetitive patterns, lines that fold, and curves that rectify give way to virtual spaces that act mysteriously on the viewer's sensitivity.
