Daily Narratives_ Bruno Baptistelli

Daily Narratives Bruno Baptistelli

curated by Tomás Toledo

FUNARTE, Brasília - DF, Brazil | 28 may - 12 july 2015

installation view

installation view

untitled (museum objects series) print on paper and founded object variable dimensions 2015

untitled (museum objects series) digital photography 60 x 45 cm 2015

double act (more of the same) | analogic b&w photography on poster | 60 x 80 cm (diptych) | 2015

nc_BrasĂ­lia 01 digital photography 95 x 70 cm 2015

installation view

untitled (sketch series) | graphite and dry pastel on paper | 42,2 x 29,8 cm | 2015

superposition | rusty iron and land | 200 x 300 cm | 2015

detail

installation view

installation view

untitled (surfaces series) granite 2 x 65 x 12,5 cm 2014

untitled (surfaces series) concrete 3 x 19 x 18,5 cm 2014

nc_BrasĂ­lia 02 | digital photography | 70 x 90 cm | 2015

installation view

untitled (surfaces series) acrylic on canvas 50 x 70 cm 2015

untitled (surfaces series) acrylic on canvas 60 x 40 cm 2014

untitled (surfaces series) | acrylic on wood | 20 x 50 cm (diptych) | 2014

installation view

installation view

installation view

nc_Rupestre 01 | analogic photography | 90 x 135 cm | 2015

BrasĂ­lia furniture series (in collaboration with GAMB) | recycled wood | variable dimensions | 2015

Cross | founded object: metal and cement | 2015

detail

installation view

DAILY NARRATIVES Built in the centre of the country, Brasília, born from an idea and a political wish, is almost as an oasis that landed artificially on the Brazilian savannah. It is an atypical city within the Brazilian scenery, featured by the disorganized urban growth. Its building and its modern architecture marked the national history as well as the popular imagination.

Daily Narratives is the outcome of a field trip with Bruno Baptistelli to Brasília, where the artist could experience its architecture, its routine, and produce a set of works that dialogue with the city landscape — imbued by the Cartesian framework, by parallel lines and by the low horizon — and with its building process, permeated by utopias.

The exhibition depicts this production together with previous works, which articulate and establish a relation among themselves, reflecting the way Baptistelli absorbed and gave a new meaning for his experience in Brasília. It is an attempt to create a historical narrative about the city out of the visual and sensory experience of the artist, proposing alternatives to the official narrative.

The traditional History leads to the conclusion that Brasília is “a city created from the scratch,” idea that carries the colonizer point of view, from the pioneers that, indifferent to the past, searched for the new; from the conquerors that stabbed their flags in the conquered ground — concept materialized, in the Brasília’s case, by the creation of two axes that cross themselves and generate the foundation of the new city. This vision joins up with the idea that Brazil’s history starts with the arrival of the Portuguese people. It ignores the ancestry of the site, the geological history and the local people history.

There is a contradiction in the origin of Brasília: if, on one hand, it was born from a modernizing wish — from a rational gesture —, it is, on the other hand, an anachronism, in which an old pioneering is disguised as modern. In this sense, Brasília reflects, in a symbolic way, the process of formation and identity of the country that oscillates constantly from a promised land, the country of the future to an archaic society that cannot overcome its colonial traumas.

In the exhibition, a set of objects, some found by the artist, some made out of typical materials used in Brazilian constructions — such as cement, wood and granite —, relativizes the constructive scale of Brasília and acts as visual reflects of its symbols and structures: the orthogonal plans, the cross, a line, the modern furniture and the monumentality.

Baptistelli appropriates himself of expository devices present in the Brasília landscape, as the information signs and poles from the touristic and architectural attractions, and from the expography of a museum dedicated to the city, such as the Espaço Cultural Lúcio Costa, to bring out photographic images produced in Brasília and in other regions of Brazil. They are registers of urban fragments and scenes of the day by day, that evoke the constructive process and the erosion of the modern architecture, not only was the latter caused by the years past but also by its abandonment.

One of the works brings an image of great dimensions with the register of rock paintings from Paridas mountains, in the city of Lençóis (ba), that represents a man and a checkered structure.

When evoking the presence of the prehistorian people, it proposes for the visitors an unusual dialogue of the artwork with the constructive tradition of the Brazilian art.

Tomás Toledo

Bruno Baptistelli bbaptistelli.blogspot.com 2015