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Mercedes Viegas Gallery presents to Miamis public two Brazilian artists, Rafael
Couto and Alice Quaresma that shares a touch of irony and humor.
Who does not remember the classic and ironic sculpture of Jasper Johns, Savarine
can, where the Pop artist forge, in bronze, a small coffee can with brushes overturned?
Rafael Couto remade in photography, Johns work to put a handful of brushes in the
mouth itself, giving a new twist of irony, redefining that image that has become a
classic in the art history books. We could call Rafaels medium irony over irony. But
not just from irony lives the works of Raphael. They also carry with them a load of
tension and distress when submitting his own body to a series of physical torture. The
gaping mouth filled with strange and sometimes aggressive objects such as knives,
test the limits of the body, its elasticity and permeability, the boundaries between the
internal and the external.
The forms of geometry are the forms of rationality, the capacity of man to abstract and
find the constant structure of the world. The forms of nature are the organic forms of
existence. The classical perspective coded rationally the natural world in order to
allow for the seizure of reason in an attempt to reconcile these two worlds. The
award-winning Rio de Janeiro artist Alice Quaresma practices an anti-perspective.
Her photographs of landscapes and animals receive geometric forms, parallel to the
plane of the paper, blocking access to image, denying any possibility of deepening in
perspective, inherent in the photographic device. The look stands in the foreground,
made evident the photographic paper support on which the light and shadow spots are
configured as images. Alices solution rather than articulate the interaction between
the two worlds is to show their inconsistency and incompatibility. The world of
phenomena is hardly rationalizable. The existence resists reason.