Litro por kilo
Massapê Projetos, São Paulo, Brazil
April 6 – 20, 2019
Duo Exhibition with Mano Penalva
text by Leandro Muniz
A yellow plastic sheet stretched from the four corners of the space filters the light that falls from the ceiling of the room. A drawing made with palm leaves covers a large part of the walls, altering the texture of the walls and creating seemingly random patterns. Two felt umbrellas - used by street vendors as counters for jewelery and handcrafts - show pairs of earrings arranged in two lines that cross and mimic the lines of the yellow canvas. In a small wooden box used for the transport of fruits a pumpkin is embedded, while a small gouache painting, present in another wall sculpture, reproduces parts of the inscriptions and motifs of the fruit box.
There is something like a ‘mise en abîme’ in the exhibition Litro por kilo, the result of the collaboration between Mano Penalva (Salvador, 1987) and Rodrigue Mouchez (Le Chesnay, 1987). Moving away from psychological interpretations or narratives that unfold infinitely in space and time, in this exhibition we find objects inside or behind other objects, with functions, materialities and values similar to each other: Behind the merchandise we find other merchandise, within of the wrapper, we found another wrapper. In this sense, Litro por kilo is an eloquent title to think about the interchangeability of functions and values that objects and goods can acquire in the context of street markets and their economy. In suggesting at the same time the change of the same quantities between liquids and solids, the title refers as well to the announcements that street vendors shout in street markets as "three for ten, two for five”. The way in which the artworks are exhibited recalls certain logics of presentation of goods in the markets. The exhibition seems an auspicious occasion for those ephemeral solutions to gain interest on their own, aligning the history and social uses of the materials, objects and forms of popular markets, with some formal rigour, in which the relationships between colours, textures and spatialities try to give some structure and autonomy to those materials. We can say that in the practices of Penalva and Mouchez there is a permutation between the activity of informal merchants and that of the artist, in which negotiations are central parts of the work. If the values can be negotiated and the goods and activities changed according to their contingencies, what determines the minimum stability of the process? How are values defined?
Part of the boxes used by Mouchez are appropriated, part are carefully painted with gouache replicating images, type fonts and logos that can be found on fruit transportation boxes, giving to the pieces an industrial look and at the same time a special vibration connecting to the pictorial procedures and history. Penalva uses materials such as canvases, plastics and PVC pipes in compositions that evoke various moments in the history of modern art, such as concrete movements. What are the consequences of replicating in the context of art the same counters, materials and objects that we find in the market? How is it possible to extract from that daily context a certain ambiguity or ambivalence of things that would leads us to understand possible pulsions, desires or contradictions that would normally not be entirely scrutinized ? The production of the two artists begins in the markets and on the streets and the artist studio seems to be no longer the privileged place of formalization. The passage between the market and the exhibition, between the contingency of objects in the world and the possibility of stopping our attention to their characteristics in an isolated space and time, may be the beginning of a less automatic and more ambiguous relationship with both fields.
(translated from portuguese)
