The infinite poem of Wlademir Dias-Pino

The Museu de Arte do Rio (Museum of Art in Rio) – MAR, under the management of Instituto Odeon, presents The infinite poem of Wlademir Dias-Pino, one of Brazil’s most significant artists. Curated by Evandro Salles, the exhibit brings together over 800 works, among books, posters, objects, photographs, drawings, videos and installations that tell the story of almost 90 years of the artist’s life – the various focuses of his work, his political activity in the foundation formerly known as Universidade da Selva (known today as Universidade Federal do Mato Grosso) and his intense work as design theorist and visual programmer.

Four poems make up the central axis of the exhibit: Day of the city, A Ave (The bird), SOLIDA and Numerics. In the first poem, the artist connects verses and lines, describing places in Cuiabá – the geodesic center of South America – and creates a large map, linking issues related to cartography with art. In the second poem, clear pages and lose words present various possibilities of readings, while the third, SOLIDA, appropriates the ambiguity that exists in the Portuguese words solidão (solitude) and sólida (solid) to invite the reader to give form to the poem by manipulating the pages of the book. The last poems is a word play with numerical associations, creating poetry through arithmetic formulations, in a criticism of the whole idea of the artist’s inspiration.

In the exhibition, which seeks to amplify the sensorial experience of the works, such book-poems were transformed into large magnetic installations, in which elements will be constructed and rearranged by the visitor. Another highlight of the exhibit is the Visual Brazilian encyclopedia, which the artist has been working on for the last 20 years. Consisting of 1001 volumes, the work intends to present, through planks resulting from allegorical montages of various cultural references, the history of image construction throughout the world.