Gabriella Garcia

Through paintings, sculptures, installations, works on various supports, the artist Gabriella Garcia reflects on relationships that show the play of opposing pairs: the solid and the ethereal, the volume and the two-dimensional plane, the condensed and the volatile, the past and the present. An unprecedented synthesis of this research will be presented in its first solo show at Galeria Lume.

In the first space of the exhibition, the representation of drapery – movement of fabrics and their folds – in the gaps between paintings and sculptures create abstractions and new perspectives. In the second, located in Lume’s central room, everything connects and each work exists through the other, in a room whose walls are painted with mineral pigment. The relationship with the representation and its surroundings remains, and the artist materializes the painting and paints the material through various supports such as minerals, reproductions of classical images in plaster, canvases, silks and marble.

The artist brings to the public 29 works, paintings, installations and sculptures, loaded with symbols from the history of classical art, and in which she shares her questions and reflections on the hegemonic thinking that hovered in previous centuries. At the beginning of his career, his artistic process brought the use of collage as a driving force and today it carries its influences, as well as the scenic arts. Not by chance, the exhibition is organized in two acts and, open to multiple readings, has different and complementary perspectives in critical texts signed by four curators: Carollina Lauriano, Guilherme Teixeira, Ode and Paulo Kassab Jr.

Exhibition “This dream can never happen”, by Gabriella Garcia, at Galeria Lume, from 17th July to 26th September 2021.

| T09 | EP37 | 2021 | L |

In the Mira do Arte1: Gabriella Garcia.
Directed by: Gisele Kato

Gabriella Garcia is a self-taught artist, whose practice ranges between sculpture, painting and installations. With a process that she initially took as collage as a driving force, Gabriella’s work comprises not only the place where she is, but also what it derives from. Cropped figures take the space from works where plaster, fabric, polyurethane, vacuum, metals, minerals, among others, dialogue in the construction of unique pieces that have, in their compositions, magnetism as a tonic. The images in the artist’s constructions, whether bi- or three-dimensional, work as if in a continuous effort of fusion: an incessant search for assimilation of materials that, in their essence, bring in their materiality a unique reality and tangibility. The works put to the test a vivid exercise in the confrontation between gesture and nature; manipulation and relationship, creating a game where what is understood as terrain is the unique possibility that the artistic gesture has to make brutality, lightness.

It is six in the morning. The clock on the street announces it. Sixteenth of May, two thousand twenty-one, fifteen degrees. The news shouts that the country accounts for 435,823 deaths and 15,625,218 cases of COVID 19, according to the assessment of the press vehicle consortium – a partnership established between the main media groups in the country, which arose due to delays and data manipulation by the Ministry of Health in Brazil.

If three years ago the word “Fake” was among the most written and replicated, today it is used as a government strategy in news that are the envy of the most inventive screenwriters and that intend to draw attention away from the daily extermination of Brazilians; however, the fable is not a dilemma now. The photographs of the universe are fake or collages of thousands of invented color images. The calendar is a convention for counting time, just like the forms of representation of a territory on a relief map, a photograph or a globe.

Chloroquine, penis-shaped baby bottle, flat earth, Portuguese explorer, Treaty of Tordesillas, Princess Isabel. “History is fiction.” The “First Mass in Brazil” is fiction, both in the letter by Pero Vaz de Caminha and on the canvas by Victor Meirelles. The one who holds the power tells, writes, discloses, even dictates some mythical facts as historical. The faces on the money bills denounce: reality is socially constructed.

Abuse and manipulation of the truth in a despicable, reckless and sordid way omits, rejects and distorts the value of deception. Not of this politician’s hoax, but of reverie, illusion, poetry. Nonetheless, it insists, leaks through the cracks, crosses borders, folds, and makes the everyday object useless to give it new uses, other perspectives. To the photographs that are born with a documentary aura, the artist denies, exposes the verse, the negative, this ghost that is not the image but its passage.

“Amarelinha” no longer promises heaven, a paradise sold in installments in government slogans or entrances to neo-Pentecostal churches. First of all, character comes, or there is the risk of losing the turn.

Real FAKE does not intend to deceive the viewer, but, against all news lies, to honor poetic fantasy and show that, in fact, we can find in imagination and art a stimulus “to think of a more sensible world, to cultivate the chimera of being able to relieve -if not to destroy- the injustices that spread and the inequalities that weigh (or should weigh) like a stone in our conscience.”1

Paulo Kassab Jr.

1. Nuccio Ordine, “The Usefulness of the Useless.”