Mariana Mauricio

19/06/2012 - 21/07/2012

Galeria Leme is delighted to present its first solo show by the Brazilian artist Mariana Maurício. The artist works with the reframing of imagery memories by interfering on collected photographs.

Mariana uses old photographs collected in different contexts, from her personal files to old albums bought randomly without focusing on where or how they’ve been collected, but in the possibilities of affective interaction and in how they provoke her this wish to interfere in a memory that isn’t hers.

In her early works, Mariana had a certain appreciation for the original photographs, and the final work was a larger impression of the original after the intervention. The process of intervention, scanning and impression was repeated many times, as the

work was made by layers, until the image was completely emptied of it’s primary function, becoming impenetrable by having its original meaning irreparably lost.

In this exhibition Mariana Maurício gives a different tone to her reframing process, for the works possess the original photograph on which the artist interferes. It’s not about a nostalgic object or about this object’s aura. It’s about breaking even the copy and the original, extracting its function of record and affective memory.

The artist takes random and unknown family records, and uses it as a simple vehicle for her work, as a painter uses a canvas and an architect uses a pencil. Those people’s worries about registering and legitimizing each moment is destroyed by the artist to the point of being completely disfigured and re-filled by her own affection. Mariana has created in her studio a chaotic space filled with stolen memories, which become her own by her marks, marks of her territory.

The work Nosso Filho (Our Child in literal translation) shows how the artist extracts from the object on which she interferes its original use. The album, once seen by mothers, fathers, uncles and grandfathers, is now part of a concrete block, it can’t be handled and it’s images can’t be seen. It’s an object without an aura.

This group of works transcends the literal staging of the visual record and breaks any affective layer such a record might still have.

About the artist:
Mariana Maurício was born in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, in 1983. Lives and works in London. Graduated in Fine Arts by Saint Martins College of Art and Design in 2007, her work has been exhibited in a group show at the Saatchi Gallery and it’s on the Londoner collection Frank-Suss. In March 2010 she had her first solo show at the Project Room of Mummery-Schnelle Gallery, also in London.