Francesco João Scavarda: Everything tends to ascend. Or not.

Francesco João Scavarda starts Hello.Again 2016 program with an exhibition divided into two steps: in April, the artist occupied Pivô’s elevator with the installation “Concetto Spaziale“, which was as a prologue to the full exhibition opening on May 15th at the institution’s ground floor exhibition space.

At the first moment, the artist showed a version of a 1961’s work from the homonymous series “Concetto Spaziale” by modern artist Lucio Fontana. In Scavarda’s work, the radical gesture of stabbing the canvas, for which Fontana is widely recognized, is simulated using gouache, imitating the jags of the original. If Scavarda’s painting turns Fontana’s gesture static, the action is recovered, with humor, by the elevator’s upward movement.

The elevator’s ascension mechanism also plays with the belief in art’s “spiritual elevation” and also the idea of ​​social ascension. Although choosing painting as media, the artist subject is mainly conceptual – the legitimacy is guaranteed by painting is what matters to Scavarda.

In his paintings, Scavarda chooses to work with images that evoke a feeling of familiarity in the viewer, such as nostalgic landscapes that one could find in touristic brochures; They are recognizable images but iconic. The contact with these references in Scavarda’s work gives us an incomplete sense of familiarity, its ordinary aspect comfort but at the same time instigates the viewer, who cannot figure out the definite source of the image.

Francesco João Scavarda poses the question: by using a Lucio Fontana’s work or a image that is familiar to the viewer, does it raise the level of appreciation of his work? Scavarda takes advantage of the unquestionable value of the media to make tabula rasa with the subjects of his paintings, choosing images from diversified sources such as Art History, comics books or chocolate packages, refusing hierarchies and lifting all these images to the status of work of art.

On the same day, Pivô promotes another edition of its Open Studio, inside the program “Hello.Again”, in which resident artists open their studios to the public, putting them in contact with their recent productions developed at Pivô. Artists: avaf, Bruno Faria, Cibelle Cavalli Bastos, Gui Mohallem, Guilherme Ginane, Lucas Simões, Marie Kølbæk Iversen, Nelson D, Rafael Silvares and Tiago Mestre.