PENSIONE SEGUSO

“Loneliness shows the original, the beauty

bold and surprising, poetry.

But loneliness also shows the reverse side,

the disproportionate, the absurd and the illicit.”

Death in Venice, Thomas Mann

 

It was in the 1990s that artist Gustavo Rezende spent a season in the city of Venice, surrounded by water, art and history. For an entire autumn he lived in the Zattere neighborhood, where the Pensione Seguso is located, and there he developed ideas and projects. There he developed a platonic love for the Italian city that he occasionally visited, platonic in the true sense imposed by the Greek philosopher, who described love as the way that leads us to know the essence of things, the pure forms that exist in the world of ideas. Thirty years passed before Rezende returned to the place of his creative crime. In a restaurant next to the Pensione Seguso, he began to take photographs with his cell phone for an evening. Thus was born the series that gives the title to this exhibition at Verve Galeria, the artist's first in the space that will represent him on the São Paulo circuit.

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The exhibition highlights the changes that occurred in his production between these two periods, also invading the physical space around the guesthouse and the transformation of the region, including as a multicultural society. The Venetians and Rezende's own face and silhouette, which are replicated in other of his acclaimed series, including works featured in this same exhibition, are removed from the scene, to be replaced by the faces of other people who now live and work in the city. The solitude in the gaze of these characters remains there – not as a synonym for sadness, but as self-absorbed, almost delirious and encompassed in this tourist destination that personifies the transit of people from all over the world.

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Through these captured images, the artist finds a new style to be developed. Using metal sheets, he creates stenciled profiles that appear on the gallery walls in six human elements, like spontaneous portraits. The old city is revisited through contemporary forms, in a pop genre used on urban walls as a way of contrasting the old and the new.

Contemplation and absorbed gaze are the links that structure the exhibition, in a connection between the three-dimensional (or tending toward the three-dimensional, as in Relevo Laguna) and the two-dimensional. Its iconic characters, often named Maxwell, also appear introspective in their own universe, be it virtual, when staring at the screen of a cell phone, or even in historical forms, as in Maxwell coming, a sculpture that reminds us of the elongated surrealist bodies created by Giacometti. The reflective gaze hovers both over the works, productions resulting from almost two pandemic years in which we were forced to live off our memories in a cloistered manner, and over the spectator, who now finds himself back in public spaces, still under surveillance, but with a certain power of interaction.

 

The investigation of the everyday universe, one of the striking features of Rezende's work, is still present in a meticulous study that articulates a particular geography with human experience. There is an interesting encounter between the techniques and narratives employed by the artist, who develops a place where the various references that make up his work, such as the history of art, literature and cinema, are invoked, creating an ambiance. Another interesting factor that adds to the creation of the exhibition environment is the presence of water: both the water that surrounds the city of Venice and the water that reflects the very image of Rezende's characters, in narcissistic positions that are lost when they find their reflection. It is in this distracted solitude that the two opposites live, the beauty and the absurdity of life and art.