ARTE ATUAL PROGRAM 2016-2017

"Instituto Tomie Ohtake created the Arte Atual (Current Art) program in 2013, an experimental platform for presenting the researches of young artists, in which, through a question posed by the Curating and Research Department, a group of artists is invited to create a new project. In its sixth edition, named Fábula, frisson, melancolia. (Fable, frisson, melancholy.), curators Paulo Miyada and Carolina de Angelis brought together Marcelo Cipis, Pedro Wirz and Tiago Tebet, catalysts for the imagery and sensibilities of our present time. In varied aesthetics, they echo parts of fables, frisson and melancholy: the mysterious - legends, myths - that overflow on the nature apprehended by humanity; the collective realization in the stages of spectacle; and inertia, disillusionment or impulses that are never realized.""Each artist is aligned with a certain field of fables that cross through ordinary landscapes - urban, rural or the ones present in the collective imaginary. As artificers, they go beyond given forms and symbols, creating new and captivating images. In contrast with our current reality, however, they still reveal gaps, mismatches with this world that has become specialized with consuming dreams or selling them as decadents parodies of itself"", the curators state."

Pedro Wirz, in a time when values and meanings are inverted, he turns to atavistic reminiscences. He takes up his own childhood, his roots, the folklore and the stories told around the campfire… entire myths, geographies and psychologies that were built due to the possibility of fantasy. Wirz presents a dark room that instigates the audience to explore the forest - evoked by the crackling of the sticks on the ground - and to find a ciranda sculpture (ciranda dance) composed by small characters. There are two sculptures in the installation, a small bronze piece on the ground that evokes the ciranda – depicting people involved in a type of square dance, and a large one, made of rammed earth, or taipa (a vernacular construction technique in Brazil), rolled on the wall. A large amount of soil creates labyrinths on the floor; dried wax and tree trunks present textures; wood gains the most varied shapes. Dealing with bronze, a recurrent material in his work, reminds us a traditional sculpting technique.

Marcelo Cipis presents the video that was originally created for the 1991 São Paulo Biennale, together with a large 2.5mx6m painting that reproduces the backdrop used in the video. Furthermore, there are ten paintings that emphasize the clatter and the unfinished, characteristics rarely seen in the artist's work, but which are present in pieces from different periods and even more so in recent times. They depict a media environment, inhabited by promises of happiness and well-being. With affection, the artist imagined the face of a kind corporatism, in apparently unpretentious humorous images.

The 1991 video, which promotes the “Cipis Transworld, Art, Industry & Commerce” company, points to a world in which technology and market would live harmoniously together with art and creativity. Time, however, reveals the anguish behind laughter - the discontent that begins, resumes and provokes short-circuits in a previously clear and precise trace. Paintings and drawings show indecision and procedural uncertainty.

Tiago Tebet presents a set of around 15 new paintings. The artist also wanders in search of a different imaginary, aspects of reality that feed new imageries, but his territory is the big city. In it, he found a different architecture from the one taught in universities and reproduced by developers that are hungry for new businesses. Not science, nor business, the architecture that interests him is the know-how passed on from generation to generation. The vernacular: cement, plaster, painting, texture, color, adornment. Everything is processed and intensified in the artist's studio.

White canvases show typical patterns from house painting techniques. Stones, plaster and a mixture of sand and glue come together with a scraping procedure to reveal surprising vibrant gradients. In this set of paintings, however, there isn't a celebratory atmosphere: something rough insists on increasing the gravity of each one of the works.

Aleta Valente

In this work, the artist problematizes the issue of abortion through a channel open to discussion on the subject. The artist brings about in her work many latent themes in social networks, channels in which Aleta develops an important part of her production. In the room she invites the public to enter in contact if they wish to talk about abortion by means of a banner with her phone number. The line, as a kind of S.O.S., works 24 hours."

Daniel Jablonski

"Fwd: Sorry for the delay" has as its central axis the correspondence via e-mail, a fundamental tool in contemporary communication. Starting from a quotation from Ricardo Piglia on the character of "debt" that all correspondence carries, the artist's proposal is that the public send him via e-mail all the conversations "lost" or interrupted, for any reason whatsoever, for him to forward, giving some continuity to these. Such conversations would be displayed in the room through paperwork, indicating the original sender, the artist, and the recipient.

Raquel Nava (in partnership with Cila MacDowell)

The artists seek to propose to the public telepathic exercises, in which two people must be directly involved: one as a broadcaster, the other as a receiver. There are three different exercises, which use instructions present on a table, arranged in the exhibition space. The ultimate goal is to try and understand the limits of the possibility of this communication by comparing images received and sent by participants.

Henrique Cesar

The work "Informer" is an interactive website in which the public can contribute by sending documents such as texts, images and videos. This platform is a kind of archive containing both the artist's references and those who wish to participate. From the documents, Henrique Cesar formulates relations that are not necessarily linear or have an explicit meaning."

Renata Cruz

The work of Renata Cruz investigates the dimensions of listening and exchange, using drawing as a medium. At a table, the artist will always leave papers and pencils ready so that the public can draw drawings from her invitation to observe the city. Cruz will be present on several days of the exhibition to make exchanges on these visions of the urban space with the visitors. Throughout the exhibition, a mural containing the drawings of this dialogue will be constructed.

Lia Chaia

Jorge Soledar

João Castilho

Manuela Eichner

Multiple, Manuela Eichner's production (Arroio do Tigre, 1984) ranges from videos and performances to collaborative workshops, through the development of prints, pieces of graphic design and illustrations. In these different fronts, it systematically resorts to the principles of collage, rupture and shuffling of the spatial, contextual and semantic unit of images from different sources. Overtaking the edges of a medium and widening its frame until it matches the entire space is a latent strategy in Eichner's latest proposals.

The experiments performed on her ‘Monstera’ projects extrapolate the plan to invade space with three-dimensional collages in which the images of bodies and tangled objects gain an immersive scale. The presence of this hybrid mass, strange and monstrous in its convergence of printed materials, plants and objects, challenges the viewer and his assumptions about body, space and nature.

Ana Mazzei

The work of Ana Mazzei (São Paulo, 1980) reflects the structures that establish and delimit the space of representation and staging. The reference to the performing arts is recurrent, emerging in videos that evoke scenic devices and small felt models that evoke Greco-Roman theaters, for example. In other works, this reflection is transposed into the scope of painting, analyzing its formal, semantic and symbolic structures, from the perspective to the framing. Recently, Mazzei has turned to the attitudes of the bodies that inhabit the space of representation.

Garabandal, Marat and Ascension compose a series of pieces of furniture that allow the visitor to shore up his body in order to approach the unnatural poses of celebrated figures painted by artists such as Jacques-Louis David or Giotto. The bodies supported by the devices freeze gestures, transposing the social and symbolic conventions of the history of art to the actuality of the exhibition space.

Renata De Bonis

In many of her projects, Renata De Bonis (São Paulo, 1984) evokes places she has visited on trips. Attentive to what is in the natural and remote environments, she seeks to restore or translate something of its unique presence in sound installations, drawings and collections of objects. The Annotations series from Caspar David Friedrich is the first materialization of a research into the sublime landscapes consecrated by this German romantic painter of the first half of the nineteenth century.

De Bonis, who always admired him, traveled to Europe to map, locate and visit several of the scenarios in which he had made his paintings. Instead of focusing on the timeless immensity of landscapes, she captured the sounds of the environments, the part that existed only as projected imagination on the framed visual. The sound tracks recorded in Friedrich's locations, then, became the substrate for this synesthetic sound installation.

Márcia Beatriz Granero

Since 2010, Márcia Beatriz Granero (São paulo, 1982) develops videos that weave short narratives starring Jaque Jolene, a fictional character interpreted by herself. This anachronistic figure appears in several urban contexts and, more recently, has been seen in explorations of the exhibition spaces of São Paulo. After repeated visits and a research on the place, the artist elaborates a script of actions, without speech, that assimilates the syntax of the classic cinema - in the frames, sound tracks and principles of assembly; and in the gestures and expressions of staging. Fiction is the medium the artist encountered in colliding elements of the history and functioning of institutions with the obsessions of her person. In Lacuna, it is Instituto Tomie Ohtake that receives a visit from Jaque Jolene. In the fragmentary narrative, the sound space is as important as the staged actions, and the imagery presence of the building imposes itself on its dynamics of use.

Claudia Briza

In her videos and photographs, Claudia Briza (São Paulo, 1965) acts in incomplete scenarios, rearrangements of remains of sceneries from the backstage of the audiovisual field. It thus reveals the artificiality of the stage props, costumes and effects of light and movement, while unveiling and diverting the mechanisms that enable the spectator's projection and empathy by characters and cinematographic narratives. In the videos ‘The Egg of the Serpent’ and ‘The Hour of the Wolf’, the artist enters and leaves the frame, in front of projections of segments of filmmaker Ingmar Bergman’s classics, interacting with the speeches and actions that are unfolding in the film.

If, in principle, there is a clear separation between the projection and her body, in the video, the artist integrates a same imagery field with the film of which it appropriates. In ‘The joy was always a hurry’, Briza imitates the gestures of Carmen Miranda, incarnation in the eyes of world of the tropical and joyous Brazil - that ended up succumbing to the imaginary force of her character.

Patrícia Araujo

The conflict with other individuals and with their surroundings guides several of the interventions filmed, photographed or performed by Patrícia Araujo (Fortaleza, 1987). In some actions, it is a vulnerable and passive body, which suffers when merges with the landscape. In others, it tries to compete with the immeasurable or seeks to sustain a fragile balance when there are many eventualities that can overthrow it.

In Abalo (Shock), the artist presents a constellation of records that unfold her Wild Answer project, in which she fixes street posters with names of geological accidents on the walls of some establishments in Fortaleza or São Paulo that are about to be destroyed. In this unprecedented installation, the shock that can be compared to the real estate dynamics is also associated with the tests of sharp approximation and abrupt shock in performance actions and archival materials.

Ana Elisa Egreja

With realistic principles, Ana Elisa Egreja's paintings seduce and deceived the eye into a familiar illusory game just like a circus magician during a show. In today's art, her meticulous pictorial technique is commonly associated with historical moments of art until the nineteenth century or even considered to be a little tacky, a little nostalgic of painting classes for dilettantes, with a common, banal, almost vulgar taste in the way you taste colors, textures and lights.

In her recent production of small-format works (studies of contemporary still lifes), the artist is aware of the strangeness she promotes, offering herself and the public concentrated opportunities of pleasure and doubt. Unable to resolve the encounter with these works by a separation between high and low culture, good and bad painting, art and spectacle, the viewer finds himself disarmed by exuberant bromeliads, printed towels, popular ceramics, anachronistic skulls, unexpected eggplants, delicate flowers - all represented as chromatic suggestions deformed by the "fantasy" glass reticles, as the industry would name these cheap materials.

Cabelo

Without pedestal, without noble materials, without protection in virtuous intentions or in the intellectual solemnity, Cabelo experiments the art like low dynamics, next to the prosaic and the spontaneous one. With a work that can both evoke secularized and delirious ritual forms, and join the marginal poetry of everyday life’s poetic experience, the artist sometimes defines himself as a seismograph of his time, an instrument to capture fragments of ideas, sounds and sentences around them, arranging them into small notes. Among videos, stills, fabrics and serigraphs, the engine of this room is the drawing, the most delicate part of his work, that articulates the perception of the surroundings with the free ramblings and associations of thought.

When drawing with brush and ink, converge calligraphy, annotation, scribble and movement; born there figures who have something of ideogram, calligram, hieroglyph and petroglyph. Magnified and multiplied by screen printing in vibrant colors on equally colored fabrics, the drawings make, from the wall or the cave, scores of rhythms of repetition and movement. In the video, the process is reversed: the camera slides over the surface of any objects that reflect traces of electronic lights; images and traces appear as if the camera were in a trance and was a vehicle for the emergence of the drawing.

Julia Kater

It is possible to learn much about language functioning by observing how it fails - either because it is still immature or because it has become dysfunctional. It's what makes the recent production of Julia Kater, who besides being an artist acts as a pedagogue. 'Free designs on imposed themes' present fragments of a collection of clouds, trees, suns and houses designed by children of literacy age. Learning to read and write does not only mean increasing cognitive processes and motor skills. The collection edited by the artist evidences, in a sagacious visual chain, the schematic character of the "literate drawing" that is formed when children, compelled to mean something, repeat prefabricated schematic forms.

In Breu, the recorded images present, in a non-linear assembly, the semi-artisan process of asphalting a rectangle drawn arbitrarily in the middle of a wasteland. The sound brings a circular text that abounds in adverbial phrases of manner (right and wrong, mainly), without defining any clear object. Inspired by the discourse of a patient fixed in the narrative of a history of rectitude and disarray of something she could not enunciate directly, the text constructs the discourse in an endless cycle, on which the ideas of progression and evolution do not apply.