On Sunday

May 6, 2012

| ART | 11

ARGENTINE ARTISTS IN BRAZIL

Bs As na Choque
BY CLAIRE RIGBY*

For the Herald

Cementing a relationship that began in 2009 with Buenos Aires en Choque, a celebration of BA street art held at Choque Cultural gallery, So Paulo, the three Argentine artists known as Chu, Defi and Tec opened a new show at the prestigious gallery last Saturday, featuring individual sets of works that for each of them, in different ways, mark a turning point. The three last worked together in Brazil in 2011 as part of the major show De Dentro e de Fora, in which Choque Cultural took over the main space at the MASP on Avenida Paulista, inviting artists from home and abroad to create works in and around the monolithic art museum. In that show, the trio worked collectively to create an immense mural along the length of the space, as well as a series of smaller installations. Invited back this year by Choque Culturals Baixo Ribeiro and Mariana Martins, this time the three are showing individual works, over a floor each of the rocking Pinheiros house that is Choques main space. The result, as the buzz around the gallery at Saturdays opening attested, spilling out onto the street, is an absorbing, rewarding exhibition, and three bodies of work that are strong enough to stand alone, but gain enormously from being shown together. With a rich dose of colour and a silky-smooth finish, Chus new pieces nudge his trademark anthropomorphic figures toward the abstract, in a set of high-definition paintings with razor-sharp transitions from colour to colour the result of an increasing use of stencil, plus glossy car paint. On a tall table in the second room of his exhibition space, a set of 3D sculptures, MagnetoTerapia, completes the transition. Like off-kilter toys in a palette of orange, amber and turquoise, the bright, geometric objects are magnetic sculptures that can be disassembled and reassembled but with magnets placed strate-

COURTESY OF CHU

(L) Untitled by Chu; (r) Vo em Orden by Tec gically inside them, they only spring together in one formation. Theyre kinetic sculptures, says Baixo Ribeiro, but the movement in them is really subtle you have to pick them up to find it. For Chu, the three months leading up to the show were a chance to put the sculptures into practice: I already had them in my head, and this was the perfect excuse to make them, he said on Saturday when Buenos Aires en Choque opened. It has opened up a line of work that I want to pursue, he says, adding that his famous, colourful cartoon characters are still around they feature in some of the paintings in the show, and theyre here in these pieces, he says of the abstracts. In Defis work, shown at the top of the house, one room holds large canvases bearing tangles of black, blue, red and white in a controlled, beautifully balanced confusion. A set of primitivist images of cats, a recurring motif in Defis painting, seem like a bit of a distraction in the face of the mad energy and sweeping gestures of the larger canvases. And then in a change of pace altogether, in the next room is a set of meticulously created tableaux, where all day long, at last Saturdays opening, people lingered, staring in at the scenes inside them, entranced. In the framed, warmly lit boxes, inch-high figures star in a series of tiny catastrophes involving model cars and lorries, under rough-cut wooden clouds. In one, a lorry has shed its load of fruit and theyve rolled out onto the road. In another (see photo below), a car begins to leap over a house as a minute figure raises his hands in alarm by the light of a tiny glowing lamppost. For Tec, the So Paulo show has perhaps the most resonance. The artist upped sticks and moved to Brazil four months ago, from his home in Colegiales, and is now living and working in Sade, in So Paulos south zone. At Choque, Tecs black-painted basement space is filled with bold, complex canvases that seem to sing from the walls, featuring larger-than-life sambistas surrounded by busy colour and scattered words snatches of samba lyrics. The samba theme in the new works complements the tangueros Tec has painted previously, lyrics and all. And like a true porteo he has found his way to the melancholy heart of samba, more often associated with Rio de Janeiros joy and abandon, in the work of So Paulos Adoniran Barbosa, whose sambas inspired the paintings. Theres a lot of sadness in Barbosas songs, he says. Its urban samba a big city style of music. He points to one of his paintings, which incidentally sold within hours on Saturday, to a buyer who paid on the spot with his credit card (That never happens in Buenos Aires), explaining that it was inspired by Barbosas samba Apaga o Fogo Man. In it, a woman asks her man to put out the fire, shell be right back. When I heard it, I thought, this is a tango, says Tec. Its an apt way to bridge the gap between Buenos Aires and So Paulo a move propelled for Tec mostly by the desire to be with his paulistana girlfriend, a journalist he met during the MASP show. He talks about the chaotic look and feel of the city Architecturally, this is Babylon. Un desastre. Every city in the world should come and see it and be warned and the day-today kindness with which he sees Brazilians treat one another people always seem a bit irritated in Buenos Aires. The high cost of living in So Paulo has had interesting effects on his work: in part because of the cost of materials, Tec has started making preliminary studies for his paintings. Its more planned, more controlled, he says, but it still leaves room for surprises as you go along. Slivers of previous paintings are allowed to show through gaps in the final layers of paint on canvas, revealing his technique of painting over and over until a composite image emerges a habit acquired during years of graffiti art. When you come back and find your work painted over, sometimes you think, yep, it looks better that way, he says. Its made me unafraid to paint over my own work. Not that his street-painting days are over he still goes out, in Sade, with his dog along to keep watch. I never want to stop going out painting, he says. If it were up to me, thats all Id do I love the space, the scale of the walls. Its much more sociable. Bs As na Choque is at Choque Cultural, Rua Joo Moura 997, Pinheiros, So Paulo Tel: +55 11 3061 4054 www.choquecultural.com.br until 16 June.

COURTESY OF DEFI

Duke, 2012 by Defi.

*Claire Rigby is editor-in-chief of Time Out So Paulo

COURTESY OF TEC