For Painters, a site-specific and collaborative installation, exhibited for the first time in São Paulo (2014), I visit construction sites in the vicinity of the exhibition space and I invite workers to collaborate on the creation of an artwork. For the installation in Brasilia (2017), the five painters who were invited were given six shades of paint, which could be mixed, to paint over the strips of wall assigned to them. I tried to interfere as little as possible in the choices of these professionals, who signed their work.
One of them, Lourival Lima Oliveira (who had prepared the walls of Espaço Marcantonio Vilaça for the exhibition), chose not to paint over one of his strips, assuming it as part of his own work.
To attain the neutrality of the exhibition space, a place removed from time that gives exhibited works the aura of historical importance, it is necessary not only to erase any hint of the outside world, but also the mechanisms and processes that constitute the white cube as a real space. In order for the supposed magic of eternity to occur, the countless workers involved in designing and setting up an exhibition are concealed, causing it to appear as the sole creative work of the artist, and sometimes of the curator.
There is no room for the art handlers, producers, cleaning professionals, construction workers and wall painters in the room they helped create.
One of them, Lourival Lima Oliveira (who had prepared the walls of Espaço Marcantonio Vilaça for the exhibition), chose not to paint over one of his strips, assuming it as part of his own work.
To attain the neutrality of the exhibition space, a place removed from time that gives exhibited works the aura of historical importance, it is necessary not only to erase any hint of the outside world, but also the mechanisms and processes that constitute the white cube as a real space. In order for the supposed magic of eternity to occur, the countless workers involved in designing and setting up an exhibition are concealed, causing it to appear as the sole creative work of the artist, and sometimes of the curator.
There is no room for the art handlers, producers, cleaning professionals, construction workers and wall painters in the room they helped create.
Experience 2
Espaço Cultural Marcantonio Vilaça, Brasília, 2017.
25 strips (9 measuring 65 x 60 cm and 16 measuring 185 x 60 cm). Painters: Claudio Ramos de Lima, Uerlio Moura da Silva, Lourival Lima Oliveira, José Arimatéia e Luis Ribeiro de Assis.
For the first time, in 2017, the painters’ birthplace was added below their names, an important information for understanding, from a socioeconomic point of view, the invisibility of these professionals. Most of these workers were born in the North and Northeast of Brazil.
Espaço Cultural Marcantonio Vilaça, Brasília, 2017.
25 strips (9 measuring 65 x 60 cm and 16 measuring 185 x 60 cm). Painters: Claudio Ramos de Lima, Uerlio Moura da Silva, Lourival Lima Oliveira, José Arimatéia e Luis Ribeiro de Assis.
For the first time, in 2017, the painters’ birthplace was added below their names, an important information for understanding, from a socioeconomic point of view, the invisibility of these professionals. Most of these workers were born in the North and Northeast of Brazil.
1. Michel Gomes / 2. Edmundo de Maced / 3. Paulo Marque / 4. Douglas Ferreira e Anderson de Souz / 5. Edinaldo da Silva (Nino), Ricardo Alves e Luiz Sant / 6. Rogerio Rodrigues / 7. Jessé Ferreira.
Experience 1.
Blau, São Paulo, BR.