Barrão: Fora Daqui

Fora Daqui [Out of here] inaugurates a new phase in Barrão’s (b. 1959, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil) production. The artist created specially for Casa França-Brasil 50 works in plaster and white resin, moulded after everyday objects, which where assembled and modified to create new forms. With over 30 years of career, this is the artist’s larger institutional solo show.

From 2013 – when the exhibition’s plans begun – until now, has grown in Barrão the interest to explore the frontiers between objects and sculptures in a different manner than he had done so far (the artist is renowned for his work with China figurines, which he broke and reassembled, creating hybrid creatures). For Fora Daqui he developed a new creation process: by using plaster, he took moulds of everyday objects, like glass, plastic, metal, wood and even food, to create his hybrid sculptures, all of them with a uniform white appearance.

Conceived as an installation more than a set of individual pieces, the sculptures create a dialogue with the primary function of the 1820s building, that worked as the city first central market, during the Empire. He created, then, a great central tent, much like one can see on a street market, as a shelter for his sculptures, a condition for their existence in such a challenging space.

To create solutions to unite two or three different pieces in such a fragile material as plaster, Barrão worked for months in his studio at Fábrica Bhering and, for the larger pieces (that have three meters hight) in a storehouse. The sculptures were created from moulds of plastic bottles of bleach, plastic buckets, stereos, books, home appliances, corn, etc. By uniting such different elements, all of them are re-signified, and displaced, loosing not only their original appearance, but also their original functions, which are completely annulled.

For Felipe Scovino, who wrote the exhibition text, the fact that, after being a central market, the Casa França-Brasil building worked as the first customs office in Brazil, “creates a connection with the current political crisis involving immigrants in Europe. Barrão’s work is about uniting differences, an important issue in contemporary times. The estrangement in his production isn’t far from our current world, from an intuitive and metaphorical point of view”.