PRÓPRIO-IMPRÓPRIO | FREDERICO FILIPPI AND RAPHAEL ESCOBAR
Leonardo Araujo, curator
Opening: October 25th, 7pm
What is with this possibility that is always engaged in one way or another in its impossibility?
This is from this question that Maurice Blanchot departs in his explanation to conceive what is utopia – existing in the relationship between communism and community. For this, the writer resorts to the creation of a concept-word: proper-improper. His resource then becomes narrative and imaginative in language.
In this exhibition Galeria Leme presents its new represented artists Frederico Filippi and Raphael Escobar, held together with the critic Leonardo Araujo. borrows the term and its use by the author to make its title both the context of emerging as to which immerses.
Having this movement aligned with the artistic process and the movement of “things” (images, texts and actions) which it appears is proper-improper that keeps attentive to the politics of image. Going beyond communism or community that thoroughly penetrates the writer, the exhibition stands with the posture of how the image communicates what is urgent, its imagination power.
The works of artists resort to an affirmative and negative set of the double words of the title chosen to create unique perspectives on their own practices. By simply choosing the image produced by contemporary art in the current capitalist context is not tied anymore as the fundamental strength of a civilization, but as a reiteration of life – and this as an act of imagining – the exhibition intends creative and critical deepening that the artists present in their production environments.
Escobar, thinks and responds to social update with an invisible policy only emerged in meetings between those involved in relationships in which he gets or demand.
Filippi, revisits and proposes, through nature and the Western neglect to it, a silent, meditative abstract and rereading image as an intervention in the collective unconscious.
Leonardo Araujo
Icapuí (CE), September 2016
About the Curator:
Leonardo Araujo lives and works in São Paulo. He is a writer, art critic and independent publisher. Partially studied Philosophy at Unifesp and graduated in Visual Arts from the University Center Fine Arts of São Paulo. Curated the exhibition Noves_Fora at the independent space Beco da Arte, where he worked for 3 years. He was an assistant at the Center for Research and Criticism in Art History at the Pinacoteca do Estado de São Paulo. Developed the exhibition projects Estruturas Possíveis: um diálogo crítico-criativo com o artista Bruno Baptistelli at Oficina Cultural Oswald de Andrade. Currently he participates in the Group of Practical Studies in Experimental Language and develops the Gramatologia project in the same institution. Also, is underway with the project Gravity [species spaces], together with the artist Daniel de Paula Mendes in Colônia da Cratera, Parelheiros. Through Glac Editions, recently released the book Claire Fontaine: em vista de uma prática política.
About the Artists:
Frederico Filippi.
São Carlos, Brazil, 1983. Lives and works in São Paulo, Brazil.
Frederico Filippi’s work of faces oppositions of order and disorder, invisible relationships existing in the vertigo of civilizing processes, particularly in the context of South America. With various procedures and scattered techniques, the centrality of these images in his investigations often arise from the influence received from anthropological topics – specifically the Amerindian ethnology – as a field of research, imagistic waste from the meeting of different worlds and the diagramming of apparently chaotic information in a new context. For this, while focusing on objects and materials to produce paintings, drawings and installations he also carries out more extensive research on displacement processes and residencies that end up producing an action on reality, even if very small, so to introduce a noise in the overall image. Increasingly the invisible agency of objects and information have become a meeting point in his process, so that the artist does not befalls vertically on a technique but moves according to his survey and finds in different materials and actions ways to make visible these procedures.
Among his main exhibitions are: The sun, the albino alligator and other mutations, Galeria Athena Contemporânea, Rio de Janeiro; Totemonumento, Galeria Leme, São Paulo (2016); Fire in Babylon, Pivô, São Paulo; So far, so good, White Cube Gallery, São Paulo (2015); Si no todas las armas, los cañons, Matadero Madrid, Madrid, Spain; Exhibition from the 5th edition of the Bolsa Pampulha, Museum of Pampulha, Belo Horizonte; A parte que não te pertence, Maisterra Valbuena, Madrid, Spain (2014).
Awards and residencies: Kiosko, Santa Cruz de la Sierra, Bolivia; El Ranchito Matadero Madrid, Madrid, Spain (2015); Bolsa Pampulha Museum of Pampulha, Belo Horizonte; Novíssimos Award, IBEU Gallery, Rio de Janeiro; La Ene, Buenos Aires, Argentina (2013); 5th Red Bull House of Art, São Paulo (2011).
Raphael Escobar.
São Paulo, Brazil, 1987. Lives and works in São Paulo, Brazil.
Raphael Escobar’s work is based on the dichotomy of the notions of public and private, place and non-place, center and margin. Using objects, actions and situations that are characteristic of the language of urban daily life, he discusses power relations and imposition, but also the subversion of these logics, towards the illegal or what might be considered “vandalism”. Since 2009 he works with non-formal education in contexts of social vulnerability. This activity also serves as a research and activation of his work, often showing the forms of resistance amid the precariousness, deletion, exclusion and lessening of rights and freedoms.
Among his main exhibitions are the group shows: Totemonumento, Galeria Leme, São Paulo (2016); Vaguear, transitar, caminhar, errar…, Open Studio, Campinas, São Paulo (2015); 31th São Paulo Biennial (in collaboration with collective Ruangrupa), São Paulo (2014); X São Paulo Architecture Biennial, Centro Cultural São Paulo, São Paulo; A Alma é o Segredo do Negócio, Funarte, São Paulo, Brazil (2013), among others.
Artistic residencies: Red Bull Station, São Paulo, Brazil (2016); Condomínio Cultural, São Paulo, Brazil; Walls: Territórios Compartilhados, Salvador, Brazil (2013), among others.
