Gabriela Machado: Loose Animal

Galeria Marcelo Guarnieri – São Paulo presents the exhibition Loose Animal (Bicho Solto) by Gabriela Machado.

In the critic text, Ronaldo Brito writes: “These sculptures have just come up, they carry on still tied up with their indefinite emergence. Thus, they ask for a glance, without lingering on details, when following their process of chaotic enumeration. Each of them, in the very act of individualizing, seems to involve all others. Pasted to the world of contemporary life, they fully exist in transition. We are many, sometimes we are even too much, but, I prefer to believe, we all want to be loose, imaginative, unassimilable animals. With or without aura, art continues to be the social place of singularities. Otherwise, the risk is to turn it into just another one of these unpalatable advertising tricks, to appeal to a pathetic (or ludicrous) creative consumerism.

In their practical and intuitive manner, Gabriela Machado’s sculptures do not forbear from discussing about the current statute of the concept of Object. Things produced ardently, unrepeatable, they would be, however, too much volatile to keep identity stiff. The more they grow and swell, the more they find themselves strange, they are beside themselves, disproportionate, they twist and skew in constant metamorphosis. It is impossible to domesticate them under a contemplative look. It is necessary, indeed, to pursue them in their winding course, in their abrupt manifestation, which is never complete. We, as uncompleted subjects, are therefore lead up to a positive attitude of aesthetical anxiety too; because, after all, there is no escaping anyway, we also have to move on, to deal with our unceasing and troublesome self-transformation.

Coming from painting, these pottery sculptures, which initially went out into the space almost like solid strokes, as time passes were gaining plaster and bronze as well, without losing spontaneity. They do not know, they cannot know what they are, only what they struggle to be. The impetus of making prevails over the formal calculation; its ideal might consist in eluding all and any definite aspect. Hence, the coherent manner they present in exhibition – displayed sort of randomly over a long table, in temporary bases that belong and do not belong to the sculptures. Sometimes they speak, talk at ease to each other, sometimes they take distance, get isolated in their private formal unit. It is clear they no long show off the heroic loneliness of Giacometti’s classic figures and their existentialist incommunicability. But neither they lower themselves to banal icons of the wordy industry of contemporary art. They answer to another demand, less conspicuous, less communicational: potentially, they act on independent imaginaries, they seek to attract heedful and qualified aesthetical perceptions, unknown to previous destinations”(Ronaldo Brito).