On the nature of things – Pablo Lobato

Museu de Arte do Rio presents the first solo exhibition of the Minas-born artist Pablo Lobato in the city. With nearly 40 works, On the nature of things – Pablo Lobato invites the spectators to reflect upon the constitution of things and images, paying attention to the singularities of its “nature”. Videos, photographs, installations, objects and a publication that translate the artist’s desire to deal with the immanence and the experience of things in states of minor intervention and manipulation by the other, casting an eye that deconstructs fluxes, dynamics and everyday situations that we are used to. The works propose cuts – physical, symbolic, political and space-time cuts that attempt to “free the meanings”.

In this attempt, the artist problematizes theme ideas, narratives or vocations of totality. Pablo Lobato explores the language of cinema with no storytelling ambitions. Therefore the intention is to bring the spectator closer to experiences that lead to other ways of perceiving. In one of the works, the installation Expiration, the artist creates a type of device that makes images expire (unarchive and exclude).

Expanding this field of investigation, Pablo presents STREET (Rua), research with photographs that documents small arrangements created organically in the interstices of days in the cities, without intervention of any kind, such as sticks that pile up after rain to create natural installations or ruins that are the result of time. When choosing to appropriate these pre-existing conditions instead of opting for defying gestures – and, at times, authoritarian in face of the specificity of matter –, the set of images that make up Street (Rua) questions the role of the artist and of the gaze, inviting the spectator to join this reflection through the publication that bears the same name of the project, as well as through a series of objects from it. Objects which, based on cuts and approximations, present a new perspective that goes beyond the core of things: they cause tension and rearrange the gestures of world ordering.

Lastly, Pablo Lobato appropriates the concept of ultra-thin (inframince), created by Marcel Duchamp, to force the spectator to not only deal with the faces that present themselves horizontally but also with the laterality of things, as small as they might be – such as the one in a paper sheet, for example. For that, in the series Frontlight, the artist photographs billboards from this angle, transforming large structures into simple rays of light.

Curated by Clarissa Diniz, On the nature of things – Pablo Lobato gives continuity to MAR’s exhibition program, dedicated to artists whose work is hardly seen in the Rio-São Paulo axis, coming from contexts of little institutionalization and market, where, therefore, the artistic production is realized as a break in social logic.