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Till China and Africa Meet-Sutilezas” Brazil Contemporary Art Exhibition
Aug 03 - Sep 02, 2012

Press Release

“Till China and Africa Meet-Sutilezas” Brazil Contemporary Art Exhibition

Till China and Africa Meet and Configured Scents are the exhibitions selected by Luiz Monforte to present some aspects of contemporary Brazilian art to the audience of People’s Republic of China.

Till China and Africa Meet is a collection of photographies that comprisesapproximately 700 images printed through the “gum bichromate printing” process,wherein the photosensitive emulsions and their pigments are applied by hand onto the surface of paper. Traditionally, a print made with the gum bichromate printing process requires only four layers of emulsion. In the case of Luiz Monforte’s works, the number of layers on a given image may reach 80 (eighty) prints. It consists of a slow process in which the artist imagines he can“control time”. All images presented herein are one of a kind. Even though the negatives has been printed several times, it is a search for multifaceted personality of a single photographic record that bears on its significance and essence an ancient history of the act of printing, and this is the point of
convergence in which China and Africa meet.


This collection, inspired on the fragment of the poem “As I walked out one evening”by W. H. Auden, served as a pretext to celebrate the sixtieth anniversary of the artist. It starts with a great mask that invites the public to the ticket office of a circus, or a palace of mirrors, or the stage of a large theater,
where behind the many layers of curtains one can see the intense dialogue that the artist maintain with his tools and constructive processes, reaffirming what James LaVilla-Havellin, more than three decades ago, has detected and predicted in his works: “a conversation stalked by Kurt Schwiters, Marcel Duchamp and Joseph Cornell”, conversation with which Robert Rauschenberg and Henri Matisse are not unrelated. And if in appearance such dialogues seem disparate in time and space, they eventually find a powerful and poetic meaning in the Brazilianness that Monforte imprints in the images of this collection, in which the last volute, caresses us with the harmonic sonority from a music of tones and modulations “moving toward a magical place, full of music and laughter”.


Configured Scents constitutes a vigorous expression on the paths taken by Brazilian contemporary art, in which the work of José Spaniol, André Coelho, Ana Claudia Rodrigues and Tatiana Blass, all linked to UNESP, Universidade Estadual Paulista (São Paulo State University) and its Instituto de Artes (Arts Institute) are exhibited.


To the People’s Republic of China’s audience is destined the appreciation of this
effort brought to them as a palpable possibility of cooperation among men.

 

CURATOR:Luiz Monforte

PRESENTED BY: Sun Yongzeng

EXHIBITION DIRECTOR:Dai Zhuoqun

ASSISTANT CURATOR:Xie Jinyuan、Lin Tao

PROJECT COOPERATION：Liu Chenya,Wu Ling 

ORGANIZER: White Box Museum Of Art

OPENING: August 3, 2012, 4p.m.

DATES: August 3, 2012 – September 2, 2012

MUSEUM OPENING HOURS: 10:00 - 18:00, Tuesday - Sunday

VENUE: WHITE BOX MUSEUM OF ART, 798 Art Dist., NO.2
Jiu Xianqiao Road, Chaoyang Dist., Beijing, China

CONTACT US: +86-10-5978 4801

FOR MORE INFORMATION PLEASE VISIT OUR WEBSITE:
www.798whitebox.com







 
 

Curator Article

TILL CHINA AND AFRICA MEET·SUTILEZAS

CURTAOR: Luiz Monforte
Oscar Niemeyer, the architect who projected Brasilia, Antonio Bandeira the painter, João Cabral de Melo Netto, the poet, Juliana Carneiro da Cunha, the actress, and Caetano Veloso, the composer, are some names of international recognition, whose talent and work outline some of the finest traits of a high cultural tradition as diverse as the immense territory of the still young country called Brazil.
Belonging to this restricted sphere but still hidden by the force of the stereotyped and exotic image through which the country was projected throughout decades, lies an endless chain of talents which at the measure of the pace of its emergence brings us fresh provocative and stimulating visual discourses through which seems to emerge a potentially new combinations of metaphorical articulations or at least these are the ideas that comes up to one’s mind when looking at the present exhibition: A special selection of works by Luiz Monforte belonging to the collectionTill China and Africa meet  and Subtleties, a selection of works by Brazilian Contemporary artists with which, Monforte is sharing the noble spaces of the White Box Museum of Art.
In common the works of this group of artists cannot be linked by the traditional trap of the style or the expressive atmosphere of its visual eloquence. Its first and easily recognizable link resides in the fact that all of them are somehow connected with the Arts Institute of Unesp – Universidade Estadual Paulista, - one of the the most relevant educational institutions in Latin America.
The works of two of their teachers, Jose Spaniol and Luiz Monforte, are presented alongside the works of their former students Tatiana Blass, Ana Claudia Rodrigues, Andre Coelho, Fernando Forte and Vinicius Almeida; affording us a chance to evaluate the results and forces of both sides of the "battleground". Yes, the confrontation of ideas as seen in the context of a constructive process is permanently cultivated by these artists and also, affords them a refined personality trace. 
Other links between the artists and works reunited here are the international recognition represented by the several exhibitions they were invited to participate as well as the awards with which their works have been distinguished in events such as the Ljubliana International Biennial of Graphic Arts, Prague´s International Triennial of Graphic Arts and São Paulo´s International Biennial of Visual Arts, to mention just a few.  
More than the sum of its parts the ideology which conducts this "camerata" is QUALITY: quality of their craftsmanship, the quality of its "tuned sounds", liberty, and fraternity and the consciousness of a sense of elegance which can only be delineated and described by the audience. Judgments and categorization, as well as compartmentalization, here talking specially of poetry is an idea which belongs to the past century. Nowadays, as prophesized by Gertrude Stein, a cleverer, sensible and flexible chain of perceptions is requested when the aim comes to the appreciation of Art.
 


Artist:

    Luiz MonforteJosé SpaniolTatiana BlassVinicius AlmeidaAna Claudia RodriguesFernando ForteAndré Leite Coelho

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