This exhibition includes engravings and photographs taken over the last five years.
There are colours that were added “a posteriori”, not very common in prints until some time ago. There is a certain intellectual fear of colour. The same as when serious film was black and white. That the content engraving was black, period. Fear of being popular, fear of the taste of the poor (“the luxury of the poor is colour”, said Aldemir Martins).
Be that as it may, the colours are influenced by artist friends (Paulo Borgato, Claudia Sperb, Maria Tomaselli), by local technical limitations of introducing them already in print, by the desire to put them and because many like it.
The photographs, influence the look of the engravings and influenced by them are for me, usual companions. In this way they are together, mirroring each other here as well. The mirror appeared because in the room of the “largest smallest gallery in Porto Alegre”, in the words of its enthusiastic owner, João Luis Steinbach, there are two mirrors.
And the mirror refers to,
- Art as a mirror of nature, as Courbet wanted.
- Art as a mirror of ourselves. Even from the unconscious as some want.
- Art as a mirror of the beholder.
- Today’s art in which you can mirror everything you want; from the time and the way you want. More a problem than an ease…
- Mirror of two engravings, one mono and one of several colours.
- Mirror inside the engravings, sky in the water, in the ice, in the shadows.
- Mirror of João Luis’s store. Whoever chooses what they want to see is the one who looks, nobody else. No curator or museologist ideas. Which already reflects an idea…
- Mirror of likes, mirror of dislikes, mirror of the other, which often represents heaven, not hell.
I appreciate your understanding with my overly constant, perhaps insistent presence, but I assure you that the plethora of works is organically and personally coherent. Everything is mirrored, so not everything is transparent. I hope the exhibition conveys to you something good, something beautiful, something to reflect on. I also hope that they can go through the mirrors like Alice, “that she dared to enter the other country and discovered the world” as her great friend Aldo Duarte said.
