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LOVE AND AGGRESSION
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For years, Marcelo Solá’s trademark has been his use of striking black and white. From his earliest work onwards, he has employed pencil, pen, paintbrush, charcoal, and a variety of other tools, demonstrating his respect for the intrinsic qualities of each. His work is almost exclusively in black, attacking the white surface of the paper or a wall, and can never be seen simply in terms of classical drawing on a sheet of paper. It gouges out rugged figures, striking cutting lines into the support; smearing it with blurs, scribbles, regular strokes, obsessively executed with carefully calibrated abandon, to the point where they cut out the noise, border on the incomprehensible; and even suffocate the support with thick layers of black, as if one skin were superimposed upon another, partially stifling it, albeit to mark out a tiny rectilinear patch of white that shines out as if it were a splendid achievement. Drawing borders on to appropriation, taking over. We put our ideas down on paper, draw in the sand, carve our names in tree-trunks and stones, in an atavistic desire to be and to remain beyond our own bodies. Marcelo Solá takes up this ancestral drive and makes it his own. And he does so by making use of the equivalence of gestures, of an aggressive understanding that written phrases and words, outlined silhouettes, ornamental lacework, structures that suggest three-dimensional volume, all of these belong to the realm of drawing, are relevant to the graphic gesture, with an invention that signified the very invention of ourselves as a species. Drawing has twin origins. On the one hand, it retains visual features; on the other it involves projecting out our ideas, exposing them to the light of day and giving them a material bodily form. Moving on from his beloved contrast of black and white, Marcelo Solá started introducing colors and eventually arrived at this new surprising series, in which black prevails. The shiny blades and colored planes of his drawings appear over a field in which light is swallowed up and clarity shot through with a mysterious darkness. A profusion of colors blossoms on the paper, beyond and before it. Juxtaposed, interspersed, and in some cases interpenetrating or even superimposed motifs appear to adjust themselves to the spaces left by the swathe of black. There are architectural forms, some clear, others blurred together, fading into the distance, opening up lines of perspective in the dark plane. There are silhouettes and scribbles, open outlines that shrink or expand in movements similar to those we find on the surface of lakes. There are words, letters and numbers, various sentences, dates and places, which open up mental and temporal spaces, shifting us in other directions, as is typical of the written language. Finally, there is the overwhelming plane of colors, the expanses of red and yellow, the iridescence of gold, the muted violets and blues, invading the space that separates our gaze from the paper or draws us into it. It is all always very aggressive, messy, but also always deeply imbued with love.
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Rua Bar達o de Jaguaripe, 387 Ipanema Rio de Janeiro RJ 22 421-000 Tel.: +55 (21) 2523-4696 +55 (21) 2274-8287 contato@lucianacaravello.com.br www.lucianacaravello.com.br