Exhibition running from September 22th until November 15th 2018
Curatorship by António Pedro Mendes
Primner Gallery presents the Brazilian artist Rodrigo de Castro
::: Dialogue Series with Amílcar de Castro :::
From September to December, Primner Gallery presents the Series “Dialogues with Amilcar de Castro”, with the goal of bringing to Lisbon Brazilian artists that work today with the heritage of Concrete and Neo Concrete Art. In first dialogue, Primner presents “Rodrigo de Castro, Vibrations of Color and Its Subletly”
Rodrigo de Castro, Vibrations of Color and Its Subtetly
Many artists have been debugging, little by little, from the real world by simplifying and reducing their visual language. Such is not the case of Rodrigo de Castro. Throughout the subtlety he gives to form and color, also his tones and delicate lines, he invites us to keep the focus on reality. The sheet of paper is on its own a visual field.
Unlike Theo Van Doesburg, who wrote in 1930’s that his art “had no other meaning beyond its own” and that “nothing is more real than a color, a line and a surface”, Rodrigo de Castro draws a pathway where forms, lines and the interpretation of colors are interconnected by way of creating a tool to achieve something else beyond our achievement.
Rothko was closer to the idea that what the author of this exhibition has about his work, when he writes “my paintings are about tragedy, bliss and destiny”. Actually, the works presented inherit from this affirmation because apart from being in an interstice of abstraction organic and geometric, are, above all, a discourse of feelings of the artist that does not accept to be affiliated to an “ism”, rather to his sensitivity to surface and material.
The relationship between the colors and their interpretation is something that fascinates de artist since the beginning of his career in the 1980’s. The questioning, although unclear, on pure abstraction is builded on the interstation and interpretation of visual effects provoked by the art of mixing tones. He is looking for to go beyond the superficial appearances of color, line and form by way of building a harmonic and balanced ensemble which is reinforced in his sculptures and in the way he uses space.
São Paulo is a city of contracts: from big masses of concrete to enormous volumes and the infinite orchestras of colors. São Paulo is also a city for people, made by people; also, of affections, subtleties, relationships, emotions and immense feelings. It is in this dual perspective where Rodrigo de Castro ambulates, trying to show us, through his sublet drawings with lines, nuances and almost imperceptive entries, the individuality but simultaneously the harmony of coexistence, what somehow belongs genuinely to the man and his mental constructions, by separating and combining each other.
Rodrigo de Castro, stem from sensitivity, reveals the possibility of inhabiting this beginning of the XXI, where increasingly the technologic evolution seems to be warding us of from each other and from ourselves.
Coming from the universe post-neoplastic, the artist exhibits the capacity of each one of us be (yet) surprised.
António Pedro Mendes Marseille, 10th September 2018
