Edgard de Souza

Striking characteristics in Edgard de Souza’s (b. 1962, São Paulo) work – the duality between an intimate space of investigation and the desire to communicate with the public, as well as the virtuosity in the production of his tridimensional pieces – are present in his first solo show at Galeria Vermelho.

Edgard de Souza’s virtuosity in the construction of sculptures is striking in works such as Autofagia II [Autophagia II], 2015, the largest and most intricate bronze sculpture ever produced by the artist. Constructed by a mirroring apparatus, a frequent strategy in the artist’s production, this work holds a new information: the two bodies that compose the piece by intercrossing each other are no longer symmetric; they seem to be engaged in a struggle where only one will survive, in an amalgam between lasciviousness and fighting.

In the drawings of the Rabisco [Doodle] series from 2015, the artist shows us a new territory of his self-devouring clash. At first sight, the drawings in ballpoint pen on paper look like random childish scrawls and scribbles. But the Rabiscos record movements by Edgard de Souza. They are drawings made during simple challenges: drawing while dancing, while talking on the phone, using two hands at the same time, using the pen until it runs out of ink, being symmetric, avoiding symmetry. Each of these tasks gives rise to a graphically or materially different drawing that is imposed on the paper in a different way.

This new series is related to the self-portraits in Cibachrome made in the late 1990s. The photographs from that period seem to serve as an exploration of his own body for the development of his sculptures, as well as a knot made with his own work. Those self-portraits, published by the Edições Tijuana label in the format of an artist’s book, are being released simultaneously with the opening of the exhibition and provide a look at the artist’s first rudimentary studies in the use of a fax machine to combine images.

We can also highlight the piece Restauro [Restoration], 2015, where the artist restores an old and torn floorcloth, and the Conforto [Comfort] series, produced between 2013 and 2015, in which Edgard displaces cushions that seem to have come from chairs and which should offer a sense of coziness and well-being to the sculpture. Besides having their positions displaced, the cushions have been deformed to resemble something halfway between safe, protective seashells, and stark, disarranged shapes. Edgard de Souza’s comfort seems to lie in this terrain between absolutely controlled virtuosity and the lack of control that moves his production forward.