Curatorial Text for Karla Osorio Gallery Booth – ArPa Fair 2023
BODY, MEMORY, LANDSCAPE
Carollina Lauriano

Recognizing the relationships between body and landscape, subject and nature, individual and space as a relevant theme to address current issues related to sensitivities and contemporary perceptions of the world around us, for its participation in this edition of ArPA, Karla Osorio Gallery establishes a dialogue between the artists Matheus Marques Abu, Paulo Lobo, and Selva de Carvalho. By delving into the research of each artist, we observe that, in common, they all trace a conceptual approach that considers the relationships between body, memory, and landscape as a human relationship with each other and with the environment around them. And these relationships can be observed more directly or subjectively in the body of work created by the three artists for the art fair. Designed to respect the dialogues, but also the individualities of each artist, the booth can be understood in these three acts that permeate the intersections between the works of both artists: body, memory, and landscape. Although each artist is here as a major representative of one of these elements, this does not mean that the others do not permeate their works, on the contrary. It is from observing these relationships that the works gain greater strength, individually and collectively.

Body
Selva de Carvalho is the name/double/body created by Stephanie de Carvalho Klabin. And this data is important for understanding the work created by the artist and that composes the installative proposition presented at the booth. In it, Selva creates a possibility for us to think about the possibilities of transit between bodies, creating hybrid relationships between body memory and landscape, whether internal or external. Indeed, it is at this threshold that the artist’s work is established, as we perceive in “Beloved Ex-Beasts,” a series of 108 drawings in ink, dry pastel, oily stick, and water-soluble pencil where the artist composes figures that emerge from the relationship between memory, dream, unconsciousness, mythology, femininity, seeking healing relationships for a body in transformation. As we deal with these internal beasts as a place of appeasement, Selva invites us to put our bodies in motion, expanding our perceptions in relation to ourselves and our surroundings. And it is in this expansion of the body that Selva, furthermore, expands her work to other materialities, giving a greater dimension to the body, now in relation to architecture and space. This movement of occupation allows us to think about an idea of shared and interchangeable bodies, which remain in a constant state of adaptation as a form of learning. As we dress these other bodies that the artist proposes, we enter a state of exchange, where something is always taken and something is left behind. For Selva, dressing what is strange to us, what repels us, what puts us on alert, is exactly where we find a place of freedom for our bodies. It is from this discomfort that places of empowerment are created.

Memory
Matheus Marques Abu develops independent research on ancestry, spirituality, and the African diaspora in Brazil, putting into perspective colonial history and its reverberations in the daily lives of racialized people. For the young artist, painting emerged as a creative possibility during the pandemic and established itself as research during a trip to Salvador, where he came into contact with a set of African ancestral symbols known as “adinkra.” The adinkras are sets of symbols brought by the Akan people from West Africa – a region understood as Ghana – which represent ideas expressed in proverbs, and are one of several African writing systems, a fact that contradicts the notion that African knowledge is limited to oral tradition alone. Brought to Brazil by enslaved people, these ideograms were mainly carved into gates and windows in imperial Brazil by enslaved blacksmiths, composing a sophisticated form of communication and resistance to subalternity. To rescue this language through his works is immediately to challenge dominant regimes of visibility and the canon of Eurocentric history (including art history), shedding light on an alternative history invisible to the eyes of the colonial mind. Thus, by incorporating these elements into his painting, Abu claims, not only for himself but for a social group, a place of reinscription of new subjectivities in history, as we can especially notice in the painting “15 Minutes After Midnight.” In it, the central figure gestures contemplation and relaxation while reading a book. Here, knowledge is transformed into an act of freedom. Racial literacy as a rescue of ancestral memories and origins capable of transforming individual and collective perspectives, seeking a new imaginary of the black body in society. In the painting, Abu no longer places the black body on alert, bringing the dogs as this guarding element, allowing this social group to seek their prosperity while something watches over this moment.

Landscape
With multidisciplinary research, Paulo Lobo starts from his relationship with the support of painting to enter and explore the fields of sculpture, literature, video, action, and photography within their joint construction potential and the political possibility of contact between them. In 2020, with his move to Itatiba (interior of São Paulo), he began to construct a new mode of work: outdoors, exploring large scales, shapes, and expanded interactions in the search for other limits. In this sense, the landscape began to act not only as a subject but as the very materiality of the work. As we observe in the set of sculptures presented by the artist, which stem from his careful observation of the transformation of the surroundings of his studio. The sculptures continue the thought that guided the development of a large-format painting that the artist performed outdoors and which remains on display in the space, permanently undergoing the action of nature, seeking to think about the relationships between impermanence and regeneration and the possible fables about the physical and spiritual myths that govern the organicity of a forest, as well as human action to think about its expansion and/or destruction. “Forest Builders” is the name of this painting, which also names the series of sculptures developed from deforestation woods found and collected by Paulo around his studio. By resignifying these logs – which possibly made way for yet another construction – carving from them beings that gesture between figuration and abstraction, it is as if the artist constructs a kind of denunciatory requiem about human action on nature, while also freeing these spirits as a form of protection. The painting that composes Paulo Lobo’s presentation also pictorially evokes these relationships between the physical and the spiritual that involve looking at a forest. The swift gesture can contain within it both the presence of the wind and invisible energies to our eyes, but which can be perceived in presences beyond physicality.

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By placing these distinctly different perspectives of knowledge and gestures in relation, the proposal here is to focus on a retake of awareness of ourselves and everything that surrounds us as a greater form of individual understanding and the creation of a collective future that contemplates a society that respects all existences in their plurality and diversities, seeking a balance between reason, spirit, and nature.