FALL COLORS AND LIGHTS

Believing that autumn is just around the corner, this exhibition brings together three artists who share an interest in color and light: Shizue Sakamoto, Isis Gasparini and Luciana Rique. One is a painter, Shizue, the second is Isis, a plural artist who this time presents photographs in dialog with painting, and Luciana is definitely a photographer. Shizue was already part of the gallery’s roster, Isis and Luciana became closer after their brilliant participation in the Usina Luis Maluf residency program, which took place between January and February this year and ended with a remarkable exhibition.

This time, fall, as we know all too well, didn’t show up. No matter. For us, it came in the form of Shizue Sakamoto’s monochrome paintings, the soft, gentle colors, the delicate atmosphere typical of the way in which autumn sheds the luminosity of summer, lowering the harsh, relentless way in which the sun imposes itself, making it more collected, calm. Shizue’s confidence is impressive, overlapping thin layers of paint, allowing the chosen color – yellow, blue, red, pink, etc – to become stronger, just a little, as it moves towards the square edges, a procedure that guarantees the core of the canvases the appearance of airless volumes. The canvases on display are few – and there’s no need for more – and they alternate along the entrance, to the right and to the left, slowing down the visitor’s walk and inviting them to space out their steps.

Following this whispered chromatic procession, breaking the audience’s rapture, Isis Gasparini arrives proposing small sets of photographs combined with overlapping plates of colored acrylics. A play between photography and painting, image and color, figure and abstraction. The photographs are glued to the wall and on top of them, supported by small scapulae, in various shapes and never coinciding with the photos, are intensely colored plates. Most of the photographs in the room, not just these ones, reproduce images of museums, an inversion of what is expected of them: exhibition spaces for works now on display, targets of our curiosity to find out more about the vanishing points, what happens beyond the corridors and at the end of the stairs, what paintings are fitted into such refined frames. The irony doesn’t stop there: if most of these museums feature paintings and they, in turn, are taken up by colors, this time it’s not natural colors that are the protagonists, but artificial ones, the offspring of industry, as fake and iridescent as the words maltodextrin, saccharin sodium, acesulfame potassium, among other suspicious ingredients that make up the harmless chocolate drink you have for breakfast.

In the third and final room are Luciana Rique’s photographs, based on praising the shadow, in search of the point at which light awakens things, objects, wall corners, as if making them exist. The artist scrutinizes the penumbra, evaluating the way the light discreetly wounds it, an arm drop to which we are increasingly oblivious. After all, what is the point of this blinding lighting throughout the city, the loud and continuous rumble of the urban machine that never stops and finds its counterpoint in the excessive ambient music of stores, bars and restaurants, forcing us to shout instead of talking, making listening an impossibility? Luciana
goes towards the dark, hunting for what emerges in it together with the light, in the form of light, and which soon disappears, like an unidentified rumor in the dawn, like a flash so fast that we wonder if it really happened.

From warm colors to shadows, including an acute awareness of the resources for thinking about the nature of what we call the environment, the three artists in this exhibition create a small and necessary break in our dispersive daily lives.