Casa Tringulo no Piv

Piv, So Paulo 527 April

A floor-to-ceiling riot of red, white and black
decals and freestanding artworks in Pivs
entrance way, an installation by the FrenchBrazilian duo Assume Vivid Astro Focus that
greeted visitors to the downtown artist-run
space throughout April, was utterly So Paulo
in its explosive, disorderly energy in the red,
white and black of the flag of So Paulo state;
in the decals layer upon layer of angular
forms, with their elements of Concretism
and Neoconcretism, touchstone Brazilian art
moments; and in the neon squiggles on the
ceiling overhead, tracing out variations on
the citys cryptic, omnipresent pixao graffiti.
A mashup of a number of previous AVAF series
(Neons, 2008, Transgeomtricas, 2013, Acebolada
Vadia Anabolizada Fascinante, 2014), the installations impact, upon stepping off the grey street
into a world of form and colour, was almost
overwhelming, and a beautiful use of a part
of the gallery that is more often empty.
Infiltrating AVAFs area and beckoning
visitors upwards, hanging pendulously
in the stairwell was the brilliantly coloured,
tasselled and sequinned bulk of Joana
Vasconceloss Valquria Amaznia (2014),
an immense, stuffed, tentacled form plunging
through the stairwell from top to bottom
and insinuating its way horizontally into Pivs
main gallery space with its gaudily sensual,
unstoppable immensity. Against the concrete
backdrop of Oscar Niemeyers mighty Copan
building, in which Piv is housed, the piece
was a dazzling conduit into a show featuring
all 25 of the artists currently on the roster at
the gallery Casa Tringulo, celebrating its 25th
year with this brief return to Centro, close
to the louche street Largo do Arouche, where
it first opened in 1988.

But this is no retrospective, and theres

no sign of some of the most famous of the artists
who have passed through the gallery since it
first started out as an incubator for young
talent the likes of Dora Longo Bahia, Rivane
Neuenschwander, Rosngela Renn and Sergio
Romagnolo. Instead, the show is an absorbing
infusion of (mainly Brazilian) art in 2014. With
the exception of a short film by Stephen Dean
(Pulse, 2001), none of the works dates from before
2008, and the vast majority were made in 20134.
Many of the pieces, site-specific or otherwise,
interact with the building and its beguiling
brutalist interior, rendered organic by a sensitive
recent renovation that uncovers and almost
excavates original features, leaving them
stripped interrogatively bare. Across one long,
curved sweep of window, Albano Afonsos
fractallike adhesives Cristalizao da Paisagem
(Crystallization of the Landscape, 20114), created
digitally from photographs of foliage, sent a
contagion of angular, geometric shards of jungle
green creeping across the glass. Further inside,
a purpose-made piece by Sandra Cinto, Tanto Mar
(So Much Sea, 2014), brings an almighty monochrome sea hissing across one huge wall in
the form of a 16-metre polyptych in acrylic,
its rearing waves pointing the way to a narrow,
tapering space in which Guillermo Moras
No Consigo (I Cant Manage To, 2014) is a mess
of painted wooden frames, joined with hinges
to form one long, tangled whole, hung like
an untieable knot.
Its in the exhibitions smallest space, deep
inside the building, that some of the most
delicate, intimate pieces are to be found. Like
his paintings, Eduardo Berliners exquisite
sketches and drawings for a book of Aesops Fables
show their workings and the process of creation

to the extent that it almost becomes the subject

of the works. In the case of these 2013 ink
drawings, the paper is turned and sketches
made facing every which way, depicting a
macabre world beset by cautionary and absurd
written phrases, in which besuited bears and
foxes don aprons to dissect people, and donkey
masks dissolve on human faces to reveal more
animals beneath.
Also suffused with a sense of something
happening or imminent is Tony Camargos
trio of tableaux vivant videos (all 2012), where
preposterous but beautifully balanced scenes
feature boots, balloons, plastic buckets, rickety
structures and the artist himself, arranged
beneath a sheet like an ungainly pantomime
ghost. In the similar still-photograph versions
of this series, he seems perpetually on the brink
of blundering into life and ruining the ramshackle scene. And as each video gets under way,
thats exactly what he does, with a choreographed awkwardness thats simultaneously
graceful, contained and laugh-aloud funny.
In Max Gmez Canles paintings in oil on
wood and oil on copper (from 2011 and 2012),
delicately realist rural scenes are subverted with
the insertion of ramrod-straight edges into the
landscape, namely in the form of sharply ruled
riverbanks, their waters rendered in solid shades
of blue that contrast with the delicate light and
shade playing across the rest of the landscapes.
It seems an innocent enough trick to play on
the viewer, but in a final work by the artist
also the final work in the show, if you take the
exhibition clockwise what looks like a simple
visor painted with a bucolic scene has had a pair
of cruel-looking copper cones attached to the
inside, ready to put out the eyes of anyone who
should dare to look through it. Claire Rigby

Joana Vasconcelos, Valquria Amaznia, 2014, handmade woollen crochet,

felt appliqus, fabrics, ornaments, polystyrene, polyester and steel cables, 1200 600 330 cm.
Photo: Edouard Fraipont. Courtesy Casa Tringulo, So Paulo

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ArtReview

23/05/2014 14:40