Jonathas de Andrade: Eye—Spark

The exhibitions presents a selection of works which are intended to be both thematic and monographic, spanning the entirety of Jonathas de Andrade‘s career, allowing the audience to establish contact and become familiar with his artistic practice. Jonathas de Andrade’s poignant practice takes advantage of the visual and narrative possibilities of media such as installation, photography, film and sculpture and is grounded in research processes that have a profound collaborative nature. His ongoing reflection has been speculating on the shortcomings of late modernity’s utopias, ideals and world visions, especially in the Latin American context. The resulting works tend to conjure feelings and ideas that oscillate between nostalgia, eroticism and historical and political critique in order to subjectively address themes such as labour and identity, almost always through the representation of the male body. Even though the presence of the male body has taken center stage in de Andrade’s practice throughout the years, it has never been perceived as a research or a topic in and of itself, but rather as a tool to inquire into other issues. This exhibition attempts to correct that by focusing on the role men, their bodies, in all their erotic dimension, and their secret meeting spots have had in the construction of a very nuanced, at times conflicting and contradictory, homoerotic gaze.