Fabricio Lopez: Jungle

Starting on August 6th, Galeria Marília Razuk presents Selva (Jungle), solo exhibition by Fabrício Lopez. The show has a text signed by José Augusto Ribeiro and brings to the public large-sized woodcuts and serigraphs produced during the period of social isolation imposed by the pandemic.

An artist's notebook is sometimes his portable studio. It is a kind of incubator for great ideas. The works with charcoal on wood and the large serigraphs created by Fabrício Lopez and exhibited in Selva, were born from the drawings created during the isolation period imposed by the pandemic. They are dreamlike images and also of everyday observations where, in common, the color black predominates - like a mourning.

Selva brings a scenario of urgencies in works that express the intensity of elements, lines, figures, and suggestions of figures. Not to be overlooked, among the main characteristics of his work is the distension of the limits of printmaking. 

According to José Augusto Ribeiro, artistic director of the gallery and author of the text that accompanies the show, "these are inquietudes that are presented in the scale of the works, denoting the public vocation and the will of comprehensiveness of this production. And these are not works that are necessarily large in size, nor are they among the largest ever made by the artist. But they are large works, due to the proportions in which the relationships between image, support, and architecture take place," he says. 

Fabrício's work is often referenced by the expansion of woodcut prints to a mural scale; by reworking and presenting large format matrixes as the final support for the work; or even by incorporating, in these experiments, the materials, tools, processes, and repertoires of other languages of the visual arts - drawing, painting, collage, relief, photography, installation - and of other manifestations - cinema, comics, literature. 

Through one of these experiences, the artist arrived at the series of reliefs that gives the show its title, Selva. "In these works, Fabrício presents for the first time a work with painting and carving on wooden plates (in sizes standardized by the trade) that have not been used before as a matrix - and that were, therefore, attacked from the outset to be as they are presented now," Ribeiro says. "The 'jungle' here is a vastness of various planes, with operations that begin with markings made with charcoal, followed by watery nankin distributed with a rolling pin and brush, and then by cuts in the support made with a gouge. In the result, contrasts emerge: between blacks with different densities, from the charcoal and the more and less liquefied inks; between all the blacks and the rawness of the wood; between what comes from drawing, what comes from painting, and what comes from carving, at the same time imbricated and in constant negotiations," concludes the curator.