[open the box] Marepe

Marepe’s drawings are almost childish, like kiddies’ singsongs.

They are sparkling in their colour, spilt on the paper like stains and fine like hair.

His sculpture is something else: powerful and assertive and with the scale of a building, or a street or a beach. Sometimes it has walls, doors, tyres and chairs, bottles of rum, umbrellas. Sometimes they look like bits of a shanty, kids and bar-room chats.

Not the drawings. Particularly these, sequins and bright shining things covering the surface, playful like games. In other series Marepe’s drawings are stamps, multiplying signs, carousels. An apparently childish game that ends up being something else runs through all this, sometimes something very serious, political and active.

Not these. They are fragile, put together, enchanting and impossible to reproduce in the improbability of their colours and their vibration.

They are drawings that one likes, or one doesn’t, but which accept being told for liking, like sweets.

Susan Sontag wrote in 1964 that there was no need for hermeneutics of Works of art anymore. What we did need was an erotics. It is that erotics that these drawings aim at, because their vibration echoes on the surface of the skin, like a breath.

Biography
Marepe was born in 1970 in Bahia, Brazil, where he lives and works. He studied Visual Arts at the Universidade Federal da Bahia, in Salvador. He exhibited for the first time in 1990. In 1996 he participated in the 3rd Salão de Artes Plásticas at the Museu de Arte Moderna da Bahia, receiving the Acquisition prize. His works, which are connected to the popular traditions of the north- east of Brazil, started to circulate around some Brazilian and foreign galleries, with the following exhibitions of note: Centre Georges Pompidou (Paris, 2005), Barbican Art Gallery and The Bronx Museum of the Arts (London and New York, 2006), Museu de Arte Moderna de São Paulo (2007), Tate Modern (London, 2007), Fundação Calouste Gulbenkian (Lisbon, 2008), P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center, Museum of Modern Art (Long Island City, 2004) and the Pavilhão Branco do Museu da Cidade (Lisbon, 2009). He also participated at the São Paulo Biennial (2002, 2006) and the Sydney Biennial (2006).

Bibliography
Tropicália. A revolution in Brazilian culture (cat.), São Paulo, Cosac Naify, 2005.
Alien nation (cat.), London, Institute of Contemporary Arts, 2006.