“… every green is transparent, and trembles in the wind.”
In this world, there is nothing that cannot be touched, understood, and expanded by the force of what we have come to call art. It’s as if this force, upon touching any subject, leaps over the fences of its limits and says, “Come! This is still your territory!” It is this particular characteristic that makes art and thought dance together through the ages, and one of the most valuable aspects of this relationship is the immanent and transcendent dynamism with which art poses problems, generating new experiences from singular objects. When successful, these objects assume an aura of enigma, being both their foundation and their living expansive force.
Taking this brief reflection as a premise, we inaugurate the project VERDE, with our gaze fixed on the capacity of art to be an autonomous language. Thus, far beyond representing an idea, illustrating certain currents of thought, or even being taken as a kind of banner of current trends, art summons ideas, dissolving in the forges of its creative womb all existing conceptual frameworks and recreating them from itself. It is, therefore, a force of transformation and multiplication of the world.
In “The Life of Plants – A Metaphysics of Mixture,” Emanuele Coccia shoots a precise arrow: “The brain is not a human organ, but a segment of matter that holds knowledge and understanding. (…) Essentially, it is not about making the intellect a separate organ, but making it coincide with matter.” Thus, we see the figure of those who make art as those who are capable of articulating in their full potential the many faculties of this “organ of the world,” the mind, orchestrating in their creation reason, imagination, dreaming, analysis, praxis, driving force, perception, emotions, spirit, etc.
Perhaps, for this reason, the arts are so generous with thought. Perhaps, for this reason as well, it is prudent not to reduce them to thoughts, or to superimpose them onto art, so as not to risk losing something substantial or essential about it, which is precisely its capacity to be a kind of living knowledge. In the words of art critic Lorenzo Mammì, “a work of art is an object that outlasts the life and intention that generated it, and all the discourses generated about it.”
For this exhibition that inaugurates the VERDE project, titled “…every green is transparent, and trembles in the wind,” we have brought together eight artists who, each in their own way, stand firm against the many external currents to artistic creation that currently seem to tutor and validate the quality of artistic production. With admiration, we see the works of Alexandre Furcolin, Eduardo Antônio, Isadora Almeida, Heron P. Nogueira, Paulo Lobo, Ricardo Bueno, Rodrigo Cruz, and Roberta Schioppa as bearers of a very natural way of making art, pulsating in the material of their drawings, paintings, and sculptures a solemn and direct dialogue with two of the sovereign spirits of our Earth: the mineral spirit and the vegetal spirit, catalyzing in these singular objects the brief passage of our human lives.
Verde, June 2023
