7º Prêmio EDP nas Artes, Instituto Tomie Ohtake, São Paulo, 2020.

By Amanda Carneiro

Traditionally granted a preliminary role in the production process, the drawing was conceived as a subsidiary to the creation of artworks, many times taken out of sight from the public, and replaced by painting and sculpture. Shifting towards site-specific installations, based on graphic impressions and that do not break away from the aesthetic experience of the object as an autonomous form or even as a support; in the works of Felipe Rezende, the drawings are not part of a preparatory phase, but rather are a direct language, used to express his intimate and revealing artists language.

Created in a very subjective perspective, on the one hand, and based on a set of interests related to work life¬¬, its tools and debris, on the other, Felipe’s drawings are composed from a dedicated attention to actions and gestures that are commonly unnoticed, naturalized as regular part of life. The artist suggests that certain behaviours and experiences, by being dealt with as ordinary or even mechanical, may lose their critical approach – which are everywhere, and at the same time, nowhere. Based on everyday minutiae which are embedded with contradictions, he seems to direct us towards an act of affirmation: here lies value. As the value becomes more concentrated into the object, the person who produces it becomes an object, perceived more like an instrument, reinforcing the flux and fragmentation of the social world. But differently than what occurs in this process of alienation, here the tool and the person reposition themselves into an integrated piece with converging connotations, without qualifying the work as something heroic, or even superfluous.

The support for Felipe Rezende’s drawings are usually found during his would walks across the city, in construction sites. According to him, “the drawing forbids the artist to stop. Walking with my head down in the streets, I actually end up finding things, choosing materials and giving identity to remains. From there comes my desire for the graphic”. These encounters and exchanges of materials and stories assume a common ground of shared experiences with people and objects, allowing a consideration of the effect of daily routines upon a profoundly political thread: amplifying voices muffled by the sound of large urban centres.

There is still something which makes reference to brutalism reversed: the big blocks of brute concrete are alluded by their remains, almost personified. Although part of the structure is discarded, seen as cheap material, and the physical labour is handed off to those lower down the hierarchies of intellectual domination. These works are part of a series entitled “Inventário arquelógico confabulado” [Confabulated archeological inventory], in which helmets, blocks of wood or rocks, bones, and tactile floors gain subscriptions by civil construction workers, and in this way it survives. Focusing in the form of the remains, Rezende explores various ways to insert his technique into the space of the object or exhibition, in the nooks which can make reference to encounters and displacement, and in the bases that indicate support. His works operate simultaneously as an critical exploration of the practice of drawing – coming from the relationship between the figure and the background – and from the characteristics and specificities of the middle, creating a productive relationship between the system of representation and its material execution.