Mundo caduco Gabrilândia, Lucas Matoso and Marina Cespe

Starting October 3, Gruta – Espaço de Arte Contemporânea presents Mundo caduco, an exhibition bringing together, for the first time, works by Gabrilândia, Lucas Matoso and Marina Cespe, curated by Daniel Donato. The exhibition brings together three painting practices that explore the juxtaposition, overload and friction between images, texts and matter, taking the relationship between visual signs into a zone of instability.

The exhibition approaches obsolescence as a symptom of a limit in the visual and linguistic regimes that structure contemporary experience. The works draw on distinct repertoires and question the stability of images and signs in the face of the speed of circulation, accumulation and transformation to which they are subjected. In this context, painting ceases to operate solely as a space of representation or contemplation and becomes a field of tension between form and meaning.

The limits of visual and linguistic systems

Researcher in Phenomenology and Aesthetics, Daniel Donato organizes the exhibition around the proximity between practices that place perceptual and visual experience under continuous tension. The curatorial approach does not seek a formal unity among the artists, but rather brings together different ways of constructing and displacing the image.

The proximity between the works reveals different ways of dealing with the accumulation, displacement and loss of stability of visual and linguistic systems. In this context, painting emerges as a field in which images and signs are subjected to new relationships, making visible the limits of the regimes of representation that organize contemporary experience.

Three ways of putting the image under tension

The three artists respond to this question through distinct procedures. Gabrilândia works with pre-existing images, bringing together photographs of landscapes, archaeological objects, memes, images from science books and digital archives. When transferred to the canvas, these references undergo overlays, saturations, pixelations and noise, incorporating into painting the instability inherent to the circulation of images on the internet.

Lucas Matoso focuses on the relationships between verbal and visual signs. Literary fragments, vernacular texts, advertising slogans, films, advertisements, lived experiences and images found on the internet are cut out and reorganized over fields of flat color. The association between these elements displaces their original meanings and transforms the canvas into an archive in permanent reorganization.

Marina Cespe draws on mechanical manuals, technical diagrams and industrial machinery catalogs to construct hybrid figures between body and machine. Components and structures are superimposed in a dense pictorial facture, giving rise to organisms subjected to continuous activity. Without an apparent productive function, these figures accumulate matter and tension until they approach a state of overload and collapse.

In this way, Mundo caduco brings together three ways of thinking about painting in relation to visual systems and linguistic codes that, by failing to present themselves in a stable form, already begin in a process of wear.