SACRED LOVE, PROFANE LOVE

Paço Imperial - Rio de Janeiro
16 march - 21 may
2016

The tradition present in the history of art has always been a subject of reflection in the production of the artist Gustavo Rezende. The main materials he chooses to develop his works, noble materials such as marble and bronze, for example, so dear to art history, carry this heritage in their use. Moreover, conceptually the artist's work not only deals with the history of art, but reverences it, at the same time deconstructs it, reconstructs into a fragmented universe, immersed in the contemporary, recomposed with irony.

Sculptures, watercolors and animations, among other works by Gustavo Rezende, inhabit the Terreiro of Paço Imperial. The works are embedded in the space, seeking to inhabit it in dialogue with the building's double architecture, between the colonial construction and the expository adaptations that respond to the modern precepts of the Imperial Palace. It is this double also that feeds the work of the artist. If in older works it formally materialized, the exhibition “Sacred Love, Profane Love” brings a cut in which the double does not necessarily present itself as a duplicity of forms. The issue here is the dual relationship in existing, being individual and being in the world, in the complexity of being different and unique and at the same time being the same as others. To relate to the dramas, fables and icons of a personal universe and to face the everyday banal surrounding us.

His sculptures, objects or even watercolors and videos touch each other, sculptural thinking. As Joseph Beuys said, "thinking is sculpting," [1] all manner of dealing with matter is part of thinking. This is how Gustavo builds his world, at the intersection of ideas that take shape between the real of everyday life and the real of the uncertainties, anxieties and desires of the same individual, divided between the outside world and the world that carries with it. It is the realization of the double existence, of constantly insisting on the hard battle of recognizing others in oneself and recognizing oneself in others, of seeking to leave and arrive every day, even if not out of place, of finding the sacred in the profane.

Douglas de Freitas

Curator

[1] “For me, the formation of thought is already sculpture. And, of course, language is sculpture. I move my larynx, I move my mouth, and sound is an elementary form of sculpture. ”(ANTOINE, Jean-Philippe.“ I don't work with symbols. ”Joseph Beuys, the experience and the building of memory. In: Art & Essays, 7 (19), p. 176. Journal of the Graduate Program in Visual Arts - EBA / UFRJ, Rio de Janeiro).