VANDERLEI LOPES: 7 FALLS
Opening:
June 14th, 11AM
For his first individual showing at the Galeria Marília Razuk, artist Vanderlei Lopes will present "7 Quedas”, an exhibition comprising seven works. The opening will be on June 4th, from 11 am, and will run until July 2nd.
Vanderlei Lopes will occupy the gallery’s physical space with previously unseen works. In addition to a video, works made from bronze, water, gold, lead and terracotta – materials dear to sculpture – reveal a return to his thoughts and reflections on this language. The title, “7 Quedas” [“7 Falls”], refer to gravity on one hand, to the weight or suspension that he employs, whilst on the other, it alludes to the Christian meaning, to the falls on the via crucis, a theme present in Western art since the Pre-Renaissance.
The artist explains: “All the works are placed horizontally on the floor and require that visitors look vertically, up or down. This crossing is something that resonates in almost all the works through the presence, even if virtually, of the archaic symbol of the cross. Thus, they produce visibility and question the compositional situation itself, the appearance of the works in the exhibition space”.
This exhibition is built on a kind of unfolding of his previous drawings – composed of lines bifurcating to create rhizomes or waterfalls and made using gunpowder burnt on paper, with the resulting residues accumulating inside the frame.
For the artist, this interest in lines that bifurcate, expand or retract, echoes the feeling of transformation, of being transitory – themes that recur in his work. “This led me to think about Gothic architecture, especially the cathedrals of the period which, despite being built out of insanely heavy blocks of stone, were the manifestation of constructing the diaphanous, the accessional, the search for God. Whether inside or outside them, the eye won’t maintain its gaze level, it is swept upwards by the interplay of the lines of columns that fork until they dissolve into perfectly fine columns. This applied architecture is of interest to my work because of its sense of collective construction in detriment to the construction of a single individual, and because they have spanned as much as three or four centuries, passing by several generations, to be finished”, he concludes.
In “7 Quedas”, this sense of the transitory and of appearing that Lopes works with becomes more “real”, in detriment to the representational character of his earlier works. The artist links symbols taken from the history of art, or from reality, inverts them and, in addition to employing polished bronze, fills them with water, thus imbuing them with the ability to produce reciprocal reflections and echoes within the gallery. In this manner, he proposes an inflection in the public’s relationship with space and time, in the understanding of their reality, of their metaphysics and spirituality.
Press information: Larissa Marques (+55 11) 3871-3030, ext. 204
