Kaira M. Cabañas

• previews January 2015

  Piero Manzoni

  Piero Manzoni’s influence is as broad as his career was short. This exhibition will include approximately thirty works spanning 1958 to 1963, six of the artist’s eight years of output (he died in 1963 at the age of twenty-nine). In addition to his Dada-inflected works, such as Merda d’artista (Artist’s Shit), 1961, the show will highlight the artist’s expansion of the monochrome paradigm and his proto-Conceptualist gestures. Like his peers the Nouveaux Réalistes and the Group Zero artists, Manzoni attacked the notion of the expressive subject. Accompanied by a

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  print December 2014

  Amadeo Luciano Lorenzato

  “He doesn’t belong to cliques / He paints what he feels like painting / Amen.” Amadeo Luciano Lorenzato (1900–1995) wrote this prayer on the reverse side of an untitled painting from 1948. And indeed, Lorenzato was an artist who just seemed to follow his heart, with little regard for conventions of genre or style. This exhibition of the self-taught painter’s work, curated by artists Alexandre da Cunha and Rivane Neuenschwander, included an assortment of: still lifes, rural and semi-urban landscapes, as well as fully abstract compositions. The two works that opened the show announced that the

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  print October 2014

  “ZERO”

  Arriving in São Paulo after stops in two other regional centers in Brazil, “ZERO” opened with a darkened gallery featuring three works by Otto Piene, in which volumetric forms housing electronic lamps cast a dance of light and shadow on the surrounding walls, owing to their static and rotating perforated surfaces. As a curatorial statement, this selection of work (which included the artist’s well-known Light Ballet, 1961) affirmed Piene’s statement in the first issue of ZERO, the official magazine of the eponymous Düsseldorf-based group, which he founded with Heinz Mack in 1958. He explains that

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  print Summer 2014

  Artur Barrio

  Nine photographs offer minute visual variations on the same location: a marshy environment inhabited by things both natural and man-made. Given the images’ tight framing, we see no horizon line, only the water’s surface, unbroken except for a boat, a pail, and ducks swimming among the reeds. Subtle shifts in framing are matched by a shift in color: The four images in the top row are black-and-white in tone (though they are color prints), while the remaining five, hung below, display a less limited range of hues. A string was stretched between the two sets of images, with the spool from which it

• previews January 2014

  “Zero”

  This exhibition is the first in Brazil to showcase work by the Düsseldorf-based Group Zero, a movement founded by Heinz Mack and Otto Piene in 1958 and later joined by Günther Uecker. The initial trio expanded to become a loosely knit circle of international collaborators who explored changing notions of the material and immaterial through the use of natural elements, including fire and air, and recourse to technological developments such as television. The works on view will include Lucio Fontana and Yves Klein’s challenges to painting’s conventional support

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  print December 2013

  Matheus Rocha Pitta

  Using space normally left unoccupied best describes the strategy at the heart of Matheus Rocha Pitta’s recent exhibition “Nau,” whose title is an archaic Portuguese word for ship. Rather than deploy the existing architecture to display his work, the artist installed scaffolding topped off with a plywood floor in Galeria Progetti’s atrium space, creating a surface level with the building’s second floor. Viewers had to climb some stairs to this provisional viewing platform in order to access twelve framed photographs, each ten by seven-and-a-half inches and taken with a cell phone. All of them

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  print November 2013

  Abraham Palatnik

  To stand “before a painting without emptying the idea of sculpture”: This is the crux of Abraham Palatnik’s work as described by Felipe Scovino in the forthcoming catalogue for the artist’s recent exhibition in Rio. With this in mind, one can conceive the ways in which Palatnik’s “Objetos Cinéticos” (Kinetic Objects) expand on modernist transformations in the relation between the two mediums. Begun in 1964, the ongoing series uses metal filaments to support colorful abstract forms that are put in motion via motors and electromagnets. Aware of the painted mobiles of Alexander Calder (who exhibited

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  previews September 2013

  18th Contemporary Art Festival SESC_Videobrasil: 30 Years In Review & Southern Panoramas

  Since its inception in 1983, Videobrasil has grown to become a vital showcase for artistic production from the global South. Approximately every two years, curators select works from a pool of open-call submissions. Though initially limited to video and other time-based art, the festival’s scope expanded in 2011 to include all media, from artists’ books to installation. The ninety-four participants this year will run the gamut, with contributions from Peru’s Maya Watanabe and Brazil’s own Rodrigo Garcia Dutra, among

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  print Summer 2013

  Laercio Redondo

  With his exhibition “Contos sem Reis” (Tales with No Kings), Laercio Redondo examined the history and symbols of Brazilian national identity in order to suggest not only what these exclude from official memory but also how such competing memories might have purchase on our understanding of the present. On entering the main hall of Casa Fran.a-Brasil (CFB), one first saw a scaffold-like structure built from thin wooden rods. This work, Ponto Cego (Blind Spot), 2013, nearly forty feet long and thirteen feet high, which Redondo produced with his longtime collaborator and the exhibition’s architect,

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  print March 2013

  Waltercio Caldas

  IT IS NOTORIOUSLY DIFFICULT to translate an encounter with Waltercio Caldas’s work into words. As soon as one attempts to articulate the effects of his production, one betrays one’s own experience and thus the work’s force. This very difficulty, however, is a consequence of the investigation into perception that is at the core of his endeavor. As the artist once explained, “It is the nature of the art object to preserve its destiny as hypothesis.” It follows that his works are like open experiments, but rather than providing an answer, they hold all verifiable visual truths at bay.

  The retrospective

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  print December 2012

  the 30th São Paulo Bienal

  “LANGUAGE IS ALWAYS A STATE OF EXHIBITION.” The line perfectly encapsulates one of the dominant aesthetic strategies on view in the Thirtieth São Paulo Bienal. Taken from Alejandro Cesarco’s video Methodology, 2011, one of the most thoughtful among the three thousand works exhibited, it is part of a conversation that revolves around the fundamental absences—of the self from language, of language from the other—often structuring narrative, time, and social relationships. In this sense, it responds to the core motif conceived for the biennial. With his call for “The Imminence of Poetics,”