A grain of pigment: colour or dirt?, Centro Cultural São Paulo, 2024.

By Guilherme Texeira

A series of billboards reflecting the horizon; the changing of a Fiat Uno tire, one of its tail lights replaced by a red thermos bottle and its hood covered with rocks; a nod to Utopia; a graph between palm trees shading an elderly woman; a man leaning on a hoe, observing the horizon and its electrical lines; a pressure cooker; a horse, a lizard; sleep, and a bunch of bananas.

These are some of the images that compose Todas Sorte de Remendos [All Sorts of Patches], by the artist Felipe Rezende from Salvador (born in 1994). Arranged on a used truck tarp, the myriad of paintings here operates as a collage—or rather, a stitch, using the same procedure employed by tarpaulin workers—professionals responsible for maintaining the tarps, mending the covers by weaving together the personal archive of images and references accumulated by the artist throughout his many travels between Salvador, Barreiras (in Bahia’s outskirts), and São Paulo (where he currently resides).

With a practice that understands geography and the movement through it as a continuous exercise, but also recognizes the gesture of painting and the dust of a road as constitutive traces in the formation of any image, it is no surprise that the potency of Felipe Rezende’s work resides exactly where the everyday life exerts its greatest influence: on what surrounds us; while simultaneously diverting its functionality through a referential play where fiction and reality overlap themselves.

Through drawing and painting, Felipe’s works evoke within the viewer’s imagination a space, an idea from the depths of our memories that surfaces on that tarp, emulating something strangely familiar yet distant. Perhaps it is through some reminiscence of the idea of travel, which subconsciously operates within us by disguising that familiar material, which we fail to recognize when displaced from its original function. Or perhaps it is the execution of the references from pop culture, music, and the popular culture of workers, who inhabit the composition in a constellational manner, making us witnesses of ourselves and our history.