The Pink Panic Show
Agnaldo Farias - 2011
And so Rodolpho brings us pink. Not in its floral version, softened by white and emitting a delicate light, comfortably pleasing to the eye and suitable for gift wrapping on Valentine’s day, taking us back to a carefully preserved memory of childhood, when we ignored the world outside and lived exclusively for ourselves. Rodolpho brings us bright pink, “Here I am!” pink, tacky and loud. Technically called magenta, Rodolpho presents an exhibition rooted in this colour, so stigmatised by some modern painters, namely those who defended the use of natural colours or the purity of primary colours, as defined by the great Dutch painter Mondrian many years ago. Here in Brazil, it was only in the 1950s that industrial colours began to be accepted. And even then, with some reservations. After all, as our concretist artists used to declare, colour should not touch our emotions, surpass the level of the eyes and talk to our sentiments and, even less so, our guts. This formulation caught on so much that it is echoed to this day by those who think that art should not give in to the fantasy of contemporary life, to its excesses and soap opera dramatics, to high speed everyday life augmented by the shouting of packaging of goods, of adverts on building walls and billboards with their intentionally seductive images, of the Doppler effect of car radios that incessantly tear into the nearest layer of the urban landscape. But not Rodolpho.
Like most of us, Rodolpho Parigi gladly listens to both Bach and baião , he is interested in news from the catwalks of Paris, New York and Milan as well as traditional lacework from the Brazilian northeast; he enjoys dishes with refined descriptions that feature on the menus of dusty restaurants as well as “shrimp and chayote strew”, that same recipe lovingly referred to by Carmen Miranda. But Rodolpho is a virtuoso and, after spending the six-month Cité des Artes residence in Paris last year, a prize offered by FAAP to its best students, somewhat erudite too. The chance to visit an abundance of museums, to see at close hand works that he knew and worshipped through prints, was a timely measure. It allowed him, after enjoying such a rapid and surprising success, to take a vacation from himself.
Nowadays, to a far greater extent than in the past - when the market verged on nonexistence, early recognition can often truncate an artist's maturing process, leading him to put external demands before his own needs, without giving much concern to the fact that the public is a hypocrite, reacting impulsively in favour of novelties while demanding similar products to those that brought the artist success, which leads to the future risk of being left without a consistent oeuvre and without any market. With an unusual technical resourcefulness, Rodolpho was discovered in 2007 when he was still at art school; his paintings and interventions were reminiscent of graffiti, although also referring, in unintelligible proportions, to works like those of Adriana Varejão, Luiz Zerbini, Jeff Koons, Matthew Ritchie, Franz Ackerman, Julie Mehretu and, above all, not least because they came before his formal studies, the detailed illustrations that naturalists draw of plants and organisms, relished by a curious young boy.
The paintings and interventions made on the walls put before him were well received by the public who were beginning to appreciate graffiti at the time, despite the fact that the special significance of Rodolpho's work lay in a broader spectrum of references, which ensured him a fresh and powerful look without stopping short at the palatable and decorative solutions produced by the majority of his student colleagues. Even so, how can one fail to be impressed by these formal raptures, a furious energy materialised in colourful fragments and splinters, pointed planes, overlapping and juxtaposed in angled directions and vectors, shooting up the walls and ceiling, challenging the unsurpassable and subservient perpendicularity of the architecture? A similar seduction poured over the spectator in the form of organically motivated black and white or colour paintings and interventions. Branches, stems, spadices, peduncles, nerves, spongy tissue, muscles and bones, an interweaving between the botanical and animal universes, a hubbub of elements from these two orders suggesting, not quite as ostensibly as now, the intimate relation between everything that exudes life. Right from the start, even an uninformed onlooker could perceive the relationship between the energy spent by the artist’s vast and intense gestures in executing his work and the erotic component allied to more evidently sexual elements that they presented; the works celebrated the energy that flows through all organisms, turning them on in mutual attraction to interpenetrate and merge with each other, copulating and producing, in the friction greased by their dense fluids, new organisms. All that exists, the artist warns us, is in a state of transformation, perpetual transmutation.
The title, Atraque, the imperative form of the Portuguese verb which means to berth or to dock, commands this exhibition and barefacedly indicates this recent direction taken by the artist. The choice of various tones of the same pink ignited as the single colour in all the pieces on show, presents an artificial colour as the protagonist, with the glow of the projected images to capture our desires, with the same power to transform our vision of the world as the pink cellophane candy wrappers, which as children we used to cover our eyes with, remember? In this exhibition, the pink, made powerful, is brought to a halt as it progresses to purple and black. Skin and lip tissues, the artificially-coloured goodies of our bodies, are rosy, the artist reminds us. Pink can be the anthurium’s heart-shaped leaf and meaty flower standing unashamedly erect or the artist’s invented orchid. Or else the purple, pink asshole, eternalised by Rimbaud's sonnet (Dark and wrinkled like a purple pink, It breathes, nestling humbly among the still-damp…”), and substituted by a woman’s face in one of Rodolpho's paintings.
Dense and compact pink is the colour of the box, aquarium, acrylic urn, a similar artefact, not in colour, for sure, to one found in any natural history museum, in which we can make out amidst a butterfly, skull and hands, a Modiglianesque head and neck, a mannequin, a human simulacrum made for window displays, with opaque eyes. From one of its walls, as if overflowing, resting on the floor like the four metal (and pink) feet that sustain it, a crooked branch; an extension and anchor of the figure? These, like the other works and assemblages exhibited, do not stray from the same axis: the systematic investigation of sexuality as the common denominator among beings, the affirmation of life as a by-product of the constant state of intumescence of beings through homologous solutions or visual puns. Witness the appropriation of Jean-Paul Goulde memorable picture of the Jamaican actress/singer Grace Jones, on the front cover of his 1985 album Island Life. The design of the slender, luminous black body tensed in its pose holding the microphone, is inscribed suspended in an empty box, like a moment seized by a scientist, or a test specimen under the scrutinizing eye of a microscope. Jones, who with this photo achieved the feat of being converted into a photograph of a sculpture of herself, emerges like a natural extension of a tree branch. The tree, with some shapely branches and others that open out into curly tissue, flourishes into anthuriums, mushrooms, ears and beings that we cannot tell as imaginary or monstrous amplifications of minuscule creatures, but one can be identified as a reproduction of one of Saint Anthony’s tormenting demons, in Martin Schongauer’s vision.
The multiple references help us draw the conclusion that the artist is guided by levelling them out, regardless of their origin, a statement as arbitrary as any logic that intends to be absolute, and that he reiterates, to the panic of accommodated spirits, through the disabused use of pink. The monumental Magenta Exotic, measuring 2 x 4.90 metres, once again highlights Grace Jones, on another album cover (Nightclubbing), alongside Bianca Exótica, a well-known transvestite from the São Paulo nightlife, and friend of the artist. Rodolpho brings people, plants and animals together one the same panel, living together in a disconnected architecture, a succession of complex environments, an order beyond the pacific, stable order, whose existence many want, by force, to believe. The show closes with another large-scale painting: Magenta bacanal, a tour de force whose title should not fool the reader, leading him to think that the work addresses something with explicit content; a product of coarse realism. Rodolpho never strays into the apology, or the publicity discourse for an option about being in the world. This painting, with echoes of Bouguereau and his Dante and Virgil in Hell, a work which, in turn, resounds baroque and mannerist solutions, brings the representation of a tangle of bodies, a convincing statement about the force of attraction that unites all living things, making them belong to one another. The irresistible magnetic force engaged by our gut, muscles and skin and that predisposes us for contact with each other.
Click here to download the DOC archive with the full text
Agnaldo Farias - 2011
And so Rodolpho brings us pink. Not in its floral version, softened by white and emitting a delicate light, comfortably pleasing to the eye and suitable for gift wrapping on Valentine’s day, taking us back to a carefully preserved memory of childhood, when we ignored the world outside and lived exclusively for ourselves. Rodolpho brings us bright pink, “Here I am!” pink, tacky and loud. Technically called magenta, Rodolpho presents an exhibition rooted in this colour, so stigmatised by some modern painters, namely those who defended the use of natural colours or the purity of primary colours, as defined by the great Dutch painter Mondrian many years ago. Here in Brazil, it was only in the 1950s that industrial colours began to be accepted. And even then, with some reservations. After all, as our concretist artists used to declare, colour should not touch our emotions, surpass the level of the eyes and talk to our sentiments and, even less so, our guts. This formulation caught on so much that it is echoed to this day by those who think that art should not give in to the fantasy of contemporary life, to its excesses and soap opera dramatics, to high speed everyday life augmented by the shouting of packaging of goods, of adverts on building walls and billboards with their intentionally seductive images, of the Doppler effect of car radios that incessantly tear into the nearest layer of the urban landscape. But not Rodolpho.
Like most of us, Rodolpho Parigi gladly listens to both Bach and baião , he is interested in news from the catwalks of Paris, New York and Milan as well as traditional lacework from the Brazilian northeast; he enjoys dishes with refined descriptions that feature on the menus of dusty restaurants as well as “shrimp and chayote strew”, that same recipe lovingly referred to by Carmen Miranda. But Rodolpho is a virtuoso and, after spending the six-month Cité des Artes residence in Paris last year, a prize offered by FAAP to its best students, somewhat erudite too. The chance to visit an abundance of museums, to see at close hand works that he knew and worshipped through prints, was a timely measure. It allowed him, after enjoying such a rapid and surprising success, to take a vacation from himself.
Nowadays, to a far greater extent than in the past - when the market verged on nonexistence, early recognition can often truncate an artist's maturing process, leading him to put external demands before his own needs, without giving much concern to the fact that the public is a hypocrite, reacting impulsively in favour of novelties while demanding similar products to those that brought the artist success, which leads to the future risk of being left without a consistent oeuvre and without any market. With an unusual technical resourcefulness, Rodolpho was discovered in 2007 when he was still at art school; his paintings and interventions were reminiscent of graffiti, although also referring, in unintelligible proportions, to works like those of Adriana Varejão, Luiz Zerbini, Jeff Koons, Matthew Ritchie, Franz Ackerman, Julie Mehretu and, above all, not least because they came before his formal studies, the detailed illustrations that naturalists draw of plants and organisms, relished by a curious young boy.
The paintings and interventions made on the walls put before him were well received by the public who were beginning to appreciate graffiti at the time, despite the fact that the special significance of Rodolpho's work lay in a broader spectrum of references, which ensured him a fresh and powerful look without stopping short at the palatable and decorative solutions produced by the majority of his student colleagues. Even so, how can one fail to be impressed by these formal raptures, a furious energy materialised in colourful fragments and splinters, pointed planes, overlapping and juxtaposed in angled directions and vectors, shooting up the walls and ceiling, challenging the unsurpassable and subservient perpendicularity of the architecture? A similar seduction poured over the spectator in the form of organically motivated black and white or colour paintings and interventions. Branches, stems, spadices, peduncles, nerves, spongy tissue, muscles and bones, an interweaving between the botanical and animal universes, a hubbub of elements from these two orders suggesting, not quite as ostensibly as now, the intimate relation between everything that exudes life. Right from the start, even an uninformed onlooker could perceive the relationship between the energy spent by the artist’s vast and intense gestures in executing his work and the erotic component allied to more evidently sexual elements that they presented; the works celebrated the energy that flows through all organisms, turning them on in mutual attraction to interpenetrate and merge with each other, copulating and producing, in the friction greased by their dense fluids, new organisms. All that exists, the artist warns us, is in a state of transformation, perpetual transmutation.
The title, Atraque, the imperative form of the Portuguese verb which means to berth or to dock, commands this exhibition and barefacedly indicates this recent direction taken by the artist. The choice of various tones of the same pink ignited as the single colour in all the pieces on show, presents an artificial colour as the protagonist, with the glow of the projected images to capture our desires, with the same power to transform our vision of the world as the pink cellophane candy wrappers, which as children we used to cover our eyes with, remember? In this exhibition, the pink, made powerful, is brought to a halt as it progresses to purple and black. Skin and lip tissues, the artificially-coloured goodies of our bodies, are rosy, the artist reminds us. Pink can be the anthurium’s heart-shaped leaf and meaty flower standing unashamedly erect or the artist’s invented orchid. Or else the purple, pink asshole, eternalised by Rimbaud's sonnet (Dark and wrinkled like a purple pink, It breathes, nestling humbly among the still-damp…”), and substituted by a woman’s face in one of Rodolpho's paintings.
Dense and compact pink is the colour of the box, aquarium, acrylic urn, a similar artefact, not in colour, for sure, to one found in any natural history museum, in which we can make out amidst a butterfly, skull and hands, a Modiglianesque head and neck, a mannequin, a human simulacrum made for window displays, with opaque eyes. From one of its walls, as if overflowing, resting on the floor like the four metal (and pink) feet that sustain it, a crooked branch; an extension and anchor of the figure? These, like the other works and assemblages exhibited, do not stray from the same axis: the systematic investigation of sexuality as the common denominator among beings, the affirmation of life as a by-product of the constant state of intumescence of beings through homologous solutions or visual puns. Witness the appropriation of Jean-Paul Goulde memorable picture of the Jamaican actress/singer Grace Jones, on the front cover of his 1985 album Island Life. The design of the slender, luminous black body tensed in its pose holding the microphone, is inscribed suspended in an empty box, like a moment seized by a scientist, or a test specimen under the scrutinizing eye of a microscope. Jones, who with this photo achieved the feat of being converted into a photograph of a sculpture of herself, emerges like a natural extension of a tree branch. The tree, with some shapely branches and others that open out into curly tissue, flourishes into anthuriums, mushrooms, ears and beings that we cannot tell as imaginary or monstrous amplifications of minuscule creatures, but one can be identified as a reproduction of one of Saint Anthony’s tormenting demons, in Martin Schongauer’s vision.
The multiple references help us draw the conclusion that the artist is guided by levelling them out, regardless of their origin, a statement as arbitrary as any logic that intends to be absolute, and that he reiterates, to the panic of accommodated spirits, through the disabused use of pink. The monumental Magenta Exotic, measuring 2 x 4.90 metres, once again highlights Grace Jones, on another album cover (Nightclubbing), alongside Bianca Exótica, a well-known transvestite from the São Paulo nightlife, and friend of the artist. Rodolpho brings people, plants and animals together one the same panel, living together in a disconnected architecture, a succession of complex environments, an order beyond the pacific, stable order, whose existence many want, by force, to believe. The show closes with another large-scale painting: Magenta bacanal, a tour de force whose title should not fool the reader, leading him to think that the work addresses something with explicit content; a product of coarse realism. Rodolpho never strays into the apology, or the publicity discourse for an option about being in the world. This painting, with echoes of Bouguereau and his Dante and Virgil in Hell, a work which, in turn, resounds baroque and mannerist solutions, brings the representation of a tangle of bodies, a convincing statement about the force of attraction that unites all living things, making them belong to one another. The irresistible magnetic force engaged by our gut, muscles and skin and that predisposes us for contact with each other.
Click here to download the DOC archive with the full text
