Luiz Paulo Baravelli: Duas das Partes

Galeria Marcelo Guarnieri (Rio de Janeiro) presents the solo exhibition “Duas das Partes” of the artist Luiz Paulo Baravelli. After displaying in 2015 a series of retrospectives – “Object versus space, abstraction versus empathy”–at Instituto Figueiredo Ferraz (Ribeirão Preto, Brasil) and on the gallery’s spaces in the city of São Paulo and Ribeirão Preto, the artist returned into show at Guarnieri’s in 2016 with a fourth exhibition at São Paulo’s gallery, this time displaying works produced in the last ten months.

The production was on such a proficuous moment that another show with the same line of thought was displayed in the Rio de Janeiro’s gallery. With this method, the gallery creates a historical arc that follows the artist’ s production for a more extended period, trying to understand each time and context. What has been lost and can be found, what was not executed and may be staged, what was discarded and can be rescued.

In the current exhibition, Baravelli does not return to what was executed in the early 1980s – since the production is a distant, but younger, relative of works produced for the Venice Biennale 1984 and also for the solo exhibit in the same year at Galeria Sгo Paulo. What is presented is a leap of 31 years, which has lagged behind and only now makes sense.

Baravelli’ s faces have no bodies, are autonomous and live within their logic. Bodiless head can choose the leg it wants, the foot it finds more interesting, the life you it wants to follow. This logic extends to the construction of the works – materials of various uses – acrylic paint, encaustic, crayon, nail polish and shellac. The materials are used to cut plywood, the curves of the work suggest images are supplemented by painting – a hand that is hair and hair that is also hand.

The range of the work is fundamental; a disembodied face that faces the viewer imposing an intimidating presence – the scale is larger than the human body. The show shall display 9 works in the dimension of 220 x 160 cm and also a series of drawings-studies that served as support for the construction of the current exhibition.

About the artist:
Born in 1942 in São Paulo, Brasil, where he lives and works, Luiz Paulo Baravelli studied architecture at FAU-USP, drawing and painting at Fundação Armando Alvares Penteado and later with the painter Wesley Duke Lee, who exerted great influence on Baravelli’ s career. Always exploring different materials and techniques in his works, which often appear in“ non-support supports” with irregular shapes (cutouts) and transfigure as the very human nature and the nature of things in general. He approaches a “ virtual conscious” that mixes human impulses, space, time and cultural references and that becomes a representation that challenges the apparent reality, a mise en scène of contemporary society by the artist’s style.