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angelo venosa
quasi
april 1st – may 22, 2021
nara roesler rio de janeiro
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Quasi – Angelo Venosa, the Incarnation of Crossings
Daniela Name
Angelo Venosa usually tells two stories that marked his childhood and youth respectively, non-schematically contributing to his development as an artist. His older brother tells the first anecdote, recalling the plot of a horror film in which a serial killer kills students at a boarding school, butchers their bodies, and tries using the parts to construct a perfect woman. The other story takes place upon Venosa's first encounter with ancient Italy when the artist got lost in Rome and came across Bernini's Pulcino della Minerva (1667). Also known as the Elephant and Obelisk, the monument is made of two distinct parts: a polyhedron tip with hieroglyphic engravings looted during the European explorations of Egypt, and a figure of the animal, carved by the sculptor's assistant, which carries the geometric form on its dorsum.
The Frankenstein-girl from the movie, the elephant bearing a foreign past on its back: beings subjected to an allegorical reconstruction that emphasizes their non-conformity to chronological and spatial linearity, exactly as in Venosa's sculptures.
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The selection of works brought together in Quasi sheds light on the artist's trajectory. Rather than constructing a 'borderline' oeuvre, a word that would only account for matters of space, Venosa has dedicated his work to a sculpture that functions in liminality, that combines and emphasizes the contradictions of a tattered body, one made of fragments, and one always immune to different temporalities.
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A work in constant exile: on one side, it presents nearly-dead bodies, seemingly calcifying and fossilizing, on the other, it offers nearly-living-beings, that may be timidly leaving a state of persistent coma gaining spirit, sprouting. At both extremes, “nearly” (“quase” in Portuguese)—or quasi, italicized and used in Mario de Andrade's anthropophagic sense (anthropophagy is an exile, in the end).
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Angelo Venosa preparing his solo exhibition Panorama at Museu de Arte Moderna do Rio de Janeiro (MAM-RJ), Brazil (2012)
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The black sculptures from the beginning of his career come closer to the first movement, the nearly-dead, as does Catilina, exhibited in 2019 at Paço Imperial in Rio de Janeiro, as a great metaphor for degeneration. Quasi, however, assembles works that seem to insist on being alive, and redeem another breath to extend from their nucleus of origin, rounded, vaulted (and, while those axis-supporting forms evoke the relationship between Venosa and the insinuation of organic figures, mainly of animals of the sea, they also reinforce a dialogue with architecture). The nearly-figures and nearly-abstract beings project filaments that meander through the room in an upward movement, like an umbilical cord seeking to connect the body of the sculpture to another body—walls, floors, skins, memories.
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It is necessary to address the experimental radicality of Quasi, which situates the works assembled in this exhibition as a marker in Venosa’s creative process. Since the beginning of the 2000s, the artist has investigated processes of digitalization and virtual projection. There are three notable moments in which this investigation of technique contributed decisively to the creation of a new language, also adding an appreciated level of risk to his sculptural production. On all occasions, the visual result is intertwined with disparity and indetermination, amplifying the opacity and the displacement embedded in the exiled DNA of the artist’s creatures.
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View of permanent installation of Ghabbah (2016) at Circuito de Arte Contemporânea, Museus Castro Maya – Museu do Açude, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil (2016)
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View of permanent installation at Circuito de Arte Contemporânea, Museus Castro Maya – Museu do Açude, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil (2016)
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And, in reaching asymmetry, I find my way back to Quasi. Venosa’s work has always been characterized by a certain mirroring. Digital devices gave the artist the opportunity to open new paths in his methods of composition. Having studied design, Venosa would have had the ability to take advantage of the virtual as a means of ‘perfecting performance’ in his design, in other words, of making the symmetry insinuated in his work, more rigorous and formal. However, he has done the opposite: while in 2012 he worked with the ‘skin’ of the fragmented piece, and in 2016, molded the ‘flesh’ of the sculpture Açude, in Quasi he now operates directly on the structure of his creatures, shifting the axes of their wooden laminas. It is as if, after having worked on the surface and on the muscles, the artist were dedicating himself to the skeleton of his beings, giving them new possibilities in their junctures—both physically and symbolically.
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All the more baroque for combining ellipsis and synthesis, this exhibition at Nara Roesler is made of spirals: On one hand, the artist appears to return to the rationale of his early work, on the other hand, that ‘return’ takes shape on another level, in beautiful divergence. Lighter and nearly-transparent, today’s sculptures—covered in translucid ectoplasm—establish a phantasmatic relationship with Venosa’s own history and with the visual repertoire that has always stunned him. They entwine in search of a memory from the past and slither to reach what is yet to come. Return as difference. Future as balancing. Nearly-past, nearly-ahead: an exhibition that amplifies the vision of the artist’s sculpture as an incarnation of crossings.
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Angelo Venosa is one of Brazil's most celebrated sculptors. A son of Italian immigrants, the artist became a migrant himself upon moving from São Paulo to his now adoptive hometown of Rio de Janeiro. In Rio, he graduated with a degree in Industrial Design from the Industrial Design College (Escola Superior de Desenho Industrial da Universidade do Estado do Rio de Janeiro, Esdi) and attended several open courses at the Parque Lage Visual Art School's (Escola de Artes Visuais do Parque Lage) during the 1980s. Between 1984 and 1990, Venosa, along with Daniel Senise (1955- ), Luiz Pizarro (1958- ) and João Magalhães (1945- ), formed the Ateliê da Lapa. The studio offered the artist an environment that encouraged him to develop his first works - Venosa's early production evokes a sense of exile, mainly through his sculptures, formally echoing fossils that simultaneously function as vestiges from a distant past and marks of an indeterminate future.
Venosa is part of the so-called Generation 80, a movement marked by a subjective and intimate approach to the production of imagery. In his work from the 1990s, the artist began investigating and experimenting with the relationship between abstract form and matter, which eventually became a fundamental aspect of his practice. The various materials used in his works - marble, wax, metal, glass, acrylic, and animal teeth, amongst others - offer the artist a means of engaging with both the organic and the sculptural tradition. In interweaving lines and volumes, Venosa also proposes an encounter between sculpture and drawing. The arguably biomorphic, yet abstract forms of Venosa's structures, trigger an ambiguous temporality through their unfamiliarity, bearing references to immemorial times and dystopian futures. The tension between the organic or inorganic forms and materials present in his work further amplifies the feeling of strangeness and temporal ambiguity.
Angelo Venosa was born in 1954, in São Paulo, Brazil. He currently lives and works in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. Recent solo exhibitions include: Catilina, at Paço Imperial (2019), in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil; Penumbra, at Memorial Minas Gerais Vale (2018), in Belo Horizonte, Brazil, and at Vale Museum, in Vila Velha, Brazil; Marimbondo, for the O Grande Campo project, at Oi Futuro Flamengo (2016), in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil; in addition to the retrospective Angelo Venosa: Panorama, which had itinerancy at the Museum of Modern Art Aloísio Magalhães (MAMAM) (2014), Recife, Brazil; Palácio das Artes (2014), Belo Horizonte, Brazil; Pinacoteca do Estado de São Paulo (2013), São Paulo, Brazil; and Museum of Modern Art, Rio de Janeiro (MAM Rio) (2012), Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. Recent group exhibitions include: Ateliê de gravura: Da tradição à experimentação, at the Iberê Camargo Foundation (FIC) (2019), in Porto Alegre, Brazil; Oito décadas de abstração informal 1940-2010: Coleções Museu de Arte Moderna de São Paulo e Instituto Casa Roberto Marinho, at Casa Roberto Marinho (2018), in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, and at São Paulo Museum of Modern Art (MAM -SP) (2018), in São Paulo, Brazil; Bestiário, at São Paulo Cultural Center (CCSP) (2017), in São Paulo, Brazil; and Em polvorosa – Um panorama das coleções do MAM Rio, at the Museum of Modern Art, Rio de Janeiro (MAM Rio) (2016), in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. Moreover, his works are part of important institutional collections, such as: Colección Patricia Phelps de Cisneros (CPPC), Caracas, Venezuela; Instituto Itaú Cultural, São Paulo, Brazil; Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía (MNCARS), Madrid, Spain; Museum of Art of Rio (MAR), Rio de Janeiro, Brazil; Pinacoteca do Estado de São Paulo, São Paulo, Brazil; amongst others.
