MON holds exhibition by contemporary artist Barrão
The exhibition "Teia à Toa" presents a cross-section of the production of the carioca artist Barrão over the last 20 years. Held by the Oscar Niemeyer Museum (MON), the exhibition will be inaugurated on July 10 at 7pm in Room 3.
Curated by Luiza Mello, it brings together around 70 works in multicolored ceramics, monochrome sculptures in resin and bronze, watercolors and installations. This is the artist's first solo exhibition in Curitiba.
"By bringing exhibitions like Barrão's to the public, MON stands out as one of the most important spaces for contemporary art in Brazil," says the Secretary of State for Culture, Luciana Casagrande Pereira. For her, Barrão's exhibition invites us to see beauty, meaning and poetry where before there was only discard. "It is this transformative power of art that we want to stimulate more and more, bringing the public closer to thought-provoking and meaningful experiences," she says.
"Draughtsman, painter, sculptor and multimedia artist, Barrão reuses everyday objects and scrap metal, giving them new meanings. Intuitive, he reconfigures broken or damaged utilitarian objects, turning them into surprising and creative works," explains MON director Juliana Vosnika.
"The result is almost an allusion to life, to the imponderable that often destroys predictions and leaves us only the possibility of adaptation," she says. "Barrão instigates by inverting the original meaning of the objects with humor, irony and poetry," says Juliana.
The curator says that over more than four decades, Barrão has developed a language marked by intuition and transformation in the combination of everyday elements - recognizable objects taken from our domestic and urban universe. "In his studio, shelves house pieces from different origins - accumulated and organized by criteria that are as intuitive as they are enigmatic. From these fragments come hybrid sculptures that defy functions and styles, always shot through with humor and irony," he says.
She explains that the title of the exhibition is an invitation to walk through a forest of shapes and colors where everything is connected by invisible threads. "Like spiders weaving their webs in the air, Barrão works by combining pre-existing objects and pieces of objects - broken and glued ceramics, objects molded and fused to other materials, pieces of objects organized into improbable compositions," says Luiza. "Resin, bronze, china: each element carries the memory of what was and now presents itself as part of something bigger."
Barrão highlights the watercolors in the show which, despite being two-dimensional, suggest the sculptural. "They have a lot to do with the work I do, with the search for a relationship between objects," he says.
According to the artist, all his work is built from a world that already exists. "They are objects that had other functions and were already here when I arrived, but now they are associated with others and take on new meaning," he summarizes. "They transform".
The artist
Barrão (Rio de Janeiro, 1959). He lives and works in Rio de Janeiro.
Drawer, painter, sculptor, multimedia artist. Self-taught, he began his artistic career with the Six Hands Group, 1983-1991, formed with Ricardo Basbaum and Alexandre Dacosta. The group develops video activities, live paintings, musical shows and performances and promotes the Improviso de Pintura e Música project in streets, public squares, colleges, etc. The first exhibition by the three artists took place in 1983 at Circo Voador in Rio de Janeiro. This year, Barrão is taking part in the Arte na Rua I and Pintura! Pintura!, both in the same city. In 1984, he had his first solo show, Televisões, at Galeria Contemporânea, and took part in the group show Como Vai Você, Geração 80?, held at Escola de Artes Visuais do Parque Lage - EAV/Parque Lage, in Jardim Botânico, Rio de Janeiro. He was awarded the Brasília Plastic Arts Prize at the Brasília Art Museum in 1990. With Sandra Kogut, he directed the videos 7 Horas de Sono and A Geladeira. He also makes electronic vignettes for television, set design work and record covers. Together with artist Luiz Zerbini, video and film editor Sérgio Mekler and music producer Chico Neves, he created the Chelpa Ferro group in 1995, which works with sculpture, technological installations and electronic music.
