"Shamanic Modernism : Parrots, Bossanova and Architecture"Sergio Vega
Galleria Umberto Di Marino
Via Alabardieri 1, 80121 Napoli, Italy
Tel.+39 081 0609318 Fax +39 081 2142623 mail:
30 September > 18 November, 2016
|
Umberto Di Marino is pleased to announce Sergio Vega's exhibition titled: Shamanic Modernism: Parrots, Bossanova
and Architecture opening on Friday, September 30th. The exploration of contemporary Latin American culture,
focusing specifically on the post-colonial debate, has been one of the key themes of the gallery’s program for several
years. The gallery’s 2016-17 season offers a careful collective form of reflection, starting with one of the fundamental
critiques of new forms of cultural colonialism.
On a trip to Mato Grosso (Brazil) that took place in 1999, the Sergio Vega came across an avenue in the city of Cuiaba and wrote: "Tall buildings were distributed alongside as if they were in a carnival parade, but instead of dancing to the deep sound of African drums they seemed to be swinging to the smooth sound of Bossanova; their monumental presence ostentatiously announcing the triumph of modernity over the jungle.
The organic facades of those buildings had pure colors and featured curved balconies. This tropical architecture established a dialogue with nature not to camouflage itself, but to contend with it. In some cases, it acquired an emblematic presence that not only competes with mango trees, coconut palms, and parrots, but also imitates them. Even if this extravagant degree of belief in the symbolic function of form deviates from the marriage of form and function, it must have made no use of avant-gardist rupture to establish itself, since its grace relies in the deviation of high modernism towards the regional."
This chance encounter signified a kind of "profane illumination" for the artist that led to the interpretation of modernist architecture in relation to shamanism and marked the beginning of a series of investigations that took place over the course of several years.
"Thus modernist architecture went someplace else, and by forgetting Cartesian logic entered a sinuous terrain that left it under the shelter of shamanism. It is hard to tell how this detour started, if whether as a formalist exercise or as the result of heat stroke. In any case, it drove architecture into a performative space, to cross- dress as animal or plant. When the shaman impersonates animals, speaks their tongues and emulates their movements, his actions are not just a manifestation of hysteria, but the careful construction of a sign, one that indicates to the tribe that he had entered the "edenic stage." He now embodies the spirits of the animals and the plants and much more, because in that process of transformation he has gone up a ladder or a tree with a request from the tribe and is coming down with a message from the creator. However modern, a building cross-dressed as something else and presented as a message from above is indeed an ancient idea."
Following these ideas, the artist researched key elements of Brazil's modernist architecture and urban design and its aesthetic and conceptual relationship to bossanova music. The works presented in the exhibition explore the paradisiac dimension of Brazilian modernism associated with shamanistic practices and interpretations of nature. In addition, the exhibition approaches the dynamics between a modernist program dictated from above (capital) and a marginal postaesthetic approach arising from the edges of society (poverty). In parallel tasks, while high Modernism constructs, the periphery deconstructs, developing organically, finding the empty spaces, slots and gaps that play such an important role in the deconstructionist theories of Jacques Derrida. The precarious shanties are built with urban waste: surplus building materials, advertising hoardings, abandoned furniture, temporary cables...
The series "Social Landscape" is made of photographs of shantytowns with overlapping geometric abstract compositions. A new series of humorous collages titled "Interventions on a book" takes the pages of the book Brazil's Modern Architecture (Phaidon, 2007, a milestone in the study of the topic) as readymade and juxtapose objects and photos, painting, and drawing over the text and images of the book producing uncanny associations. The installation "Modernismo Chamánico (Cathedral-Pineapple-Bossanova)" consists in black and white photographs combined with covers of bossanova records and a scale model of the Cathedral of Brasilia by architect Oscar Niemeyer rotating on top of a turntable. The gallery thus becomes a single installation where images, sounds, photography, architecture and nature are organically integrated into a modernist tropical environment.
Sergio Vega
Born in 1959 in Buenos Aires (Argentina). He lives and works in Gainesville, FL - USA
Selected solo and group exhibitions:
2016
Florida Prize in Contemporary Art, Orlando Museum of Art, Florida, curated by Hansen Mulford
2015
Latin American Art Museum, Department of Parrots, 2015, Jenielift, Miami, USA
When Clouds Enter the Forest and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, Galerie Karsten Greve, Paris, France
Theorem, curated by Octavio Zaya , Mana Contemporary, Jersey City
2014
Encontro de Mundos, curated by Paulo Herkenhoff , Museu de Arte do Rio de Janeiro, Brazil
2013
Disassembling Paradise, Kabe Contemporary, Miami, USA
2012
Sublime Entropies, Galerie Karsen Greve, Cologne, Germany
dOCUMENTA 13 - Worldly House, project curated by Tue Greenfort, Kassel, Germany
2010
Paradise: real time, Ikon Gallery Eastside, Birmingham, England
2009
hashish in Naples, Galleria Umberto Di Marino, Napoli, Italy
3rd Moscow Biennale of Contemporary Art: Against Exclusion, curated by Jean Hubert Martin Moscow, Russia
2008
Excerpts from Paradise in the New World, curated by Hermann Arnhold, and Marcel Schumacher, LWLLandesmuseum fur Kunst und Kulturgeschichte, Munster, Germany
Distance and Proximity, curated by António Pinto Ribeiro, Fundação Calouste Gulbenkian, Lisboa, Portugal Greenwashing- Environment: Perils, Promises and Perplexities, curated by Ilaria Bonacossa and Latitude, Max Andrews and Mariana Cánepa Luna, Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo, Turin, Italy
2007
Sharjah Biennial 8, Still Life, Art, Ecology & the Politics of Change, curated by Jonathan Watkins, Sharjah Expo Center, United Arab Emirates
2006
Tropicalounge, Monumentum Series, curated by Bennett Simpson, Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston, USA Crocodilian Fantasies, curated by Aikiko Miki, Palais de Tokyo, Paris, France Utopian paradises: modernism and the sublime, Galleria Umberto Di Marino, Napoli, Italy ARS06, Sense of the Real, curated by Jari-Pekka Vanhala, Kiasma, Helsinki, Finland
2005
Always a little further, 51 Biennale di Venezia, curated by Rosa Martínez, Arsenale, Venice, Italy
On a trip to Mato Grosso (Brazil) that took place in 1999, the Sergio Vega came across an avenue in the city of Cuiaba and wrote: "Tall buildings were distributed alongside as if they were in a carnival parade, but instead of dancing to the deep sound of African drums they seemed to be swinging to the smooth sound of Bossanova; their monumental presence ostentatiously announcing the triumph of modernity over the jungle.
The organic facades of those buildings had pure colors and featured curved balconies. This tropical architecture established a dialogue with nature not to camouflage itself, but to contend with it. In some cases, it acquired an emblematic presence that not only competes with mango trees, coconut palms, and parrots, but also imitates them. Even if this extravagant degree of belief in the symbolic function of form deviates from the marriage of form and function, it must have made no use of avant-gardist rupture to establish itself, since its grace relies in the deviation of high modernism towards the regional."
This chance encounter signified a kind of "profane illumination" for the artist that led to the interpretation of modernist architecture in relation to shamanism and marked the beginning of a series of investigations that took place over the course of several years.
"Thus modernist architecture went someplace else, and by forgetting Cartesian logic entered a sinuous terrain that left it under the shelter of shamanism. It is hard to tell how this detour started, if whether as a formalist exercise or as the result of heat stroke. In any case, it drove architecture into a performative space, to cross- dress as animal or plant. When the shaman impersonates animals, speaks their tongues and emulates their movements, his actions are not just a manifestation of hysteria, but the careful construction of a sign, one that indicates to the tribe that he had entered the "edenic stage." He now embodies the spirits of the animals and the plants and much more, because in that process of transformation he has gone up a ladder or a tree with a request from the tribe and is coming down with a message from the creator. However modern, a building cross-dressed as something else and presented as a message from above is indeed an ancient idea."
Following these ideas, the artist researched key elements of Brazil's modernist architecture and urban design and its aesthetic and conceptual relationship to bossanova music. The works presented in the exhibition explore the paradisiac dimension of Brazilian modernism associated with shamanistic practices and interpretations of nature. In addition, the exhibition approaches the dynamics between a modernist program dictated from above (capital) and a marginal postaesthetic approach arising from the edges of society (poverty). In parallel tasks, while high Modernism constructs, the periphery deconstructs, developing organically, finding the empty spaces, slots and gaps that play such an important role in the deconstructionist theories of Jacques Derrida. The precarious shanties are built with urban waste: surplus building materials, advertising hoardings, abandoned furniture, temporary cables...
The series "Social Landscape" is made of photographs of shantytowns with overlapping geometric abstract compositions. A new series of humorous collages titled "Interventions on a book" takes the pages of the book Brazil's Modern Architecture (Phaidon, 2007, a milestone in the study of the topic) as readymade and juxtapose objects and photos, painting, and drawing over the text and images of the book producing uncanny associations. The installation "Modernismo Chamánico (Cathedral-Pineapple-Bossanova)" consists in black and white photographs combined with covers of bossanova records and a scale model of the Cathedral of Brasilia by architect Oscar Niemeyer rotating on top of a turntable. The gallery thus becomes a single installation where images, sounds, photography, architecture and nature are organically integrated into a modernist tropical environment.
Sergio Vega
Born in 1959 in Buenos Aires (Argentina). He lives and works in Gainesville, FL - USA
Selected solo and group exhibitions:
2016
Florida Prize in Contemporary Art, Orlando Museum of Art, Florida, curated by Hansen Mulford
2015
Latin American Art Museum, Department of Parrots, 2015, Jenielift, Miami, USA
When Clouds Enter the Forest and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, Galerie Karsten Greve, Paris, France
Theorem, curated by Octavio Zaya , Mana Contemporary, Jersey City
2014
Encontro de Mundos, curated by Paulo Herkenhoff , Museu de Arte do Rio de Janeiro, Brazil
2013
Disassembling Paradise, Kabe Contemporary, Miami, USA
2012
Sublime Entropies, Galerie Karsen Greve, Cologne, Germany
dOCUMENTA 13 - Worldly House, project curated by Tue Greenfort, Kassel, Germany
2010
Paradise: real time, Ikon Gallery Eastside, Birmingham, England
2009
hashish in Naples, Galleria Umberto Di Marino, Napoli, Italy
3rd Moscow Biennale of Contemporary Art: Against Exclusion, curated by Jean Hubert Martin Moscow, Russia
2008
Excerpts from Paradise in the New World, curated by Hermann Arnhold, and Marcel Schumacher, LWLLandesmuseum fur Kunst und Kulturgeschichte, Munster, Germany
Distance and Proximity, curated by António Pinto Ribeiro, Fundação Calouste Gulbenkian, Lisboa, Portugal Greenwashing- Environment: Perils, Promises and Perplexities, curated by Ilaria Bonacossa and Latitude, Max Andrews and Mariana Cánepa Luna, Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo, Turin, Italy
2007
Sharjah Biennial 8, Still Life, Art, Ecology & the Politics of Change, curated by Jonathan Watkins, Sharjah Expo Center, United Arab Emirates
2006
Tropicalounge, Monumentum Series, curated by Bennett Simpson, Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston, USA Crocodilian Fantasies, curated by Aikiko Miki, Palais de Tokyo, Paris, France Utopian paradises: modernism and the sublime, Galleria Umberto Di Marino, Napoli, Italy ARS06, Sense of the Real, curated by Jari-Pekka Vanhala, Kiasma, Helsinki, Finland
2005
Always a little further, 51 Biennale di Venezia, curated by Rosa Martínez, Arsenale, Venice, Italy
Opening :
Friday 30 September 2016 - 7pm - 10pm
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