Traplev: Equivalência Absurda – Sala 3

For his first solo show at Sé, Traplev (b. 1977, Caçador, Brazil) selected and edited media contents to present hitherto unseen works. To create the pieces, he sampled images and headlines, which were applied in several media – prints, signs, screens, audio and metal bars, carbon paper and others –, originating installations and interventions. Between information from mass media and news of counter-history and counter-communication, Traplev’s production reverberates critical ideas, contravention thinking and record of the absurd. The last aspect is intimately related to Brazil’s own historical moment, when questioning the absurd seems utterly senseless, as the concepts that regulate public jurisdictions seem all alienated and altered.

Traplev’s works exist in the informational vacuum created by the society of communication, and is triggered by a political, social, and cultural collective unconscious of reflections and opinions. The pieces exhibited reflect what the artist sees as a contemporary artistic cliché of works that exist only as language, but don’t make any statements.

In his production, Traplev approximates issues from economy and mathematics to administrative contexts and everyday institutional negotiations. He works with installation, objects, photographs and editioned works. He has been editor of the publication recibo since 2002, where he exercises the critique of art as an extension of his artistic practice. Traplev also experiments with languages and supports for publically conveying issues inherent to the political and social unconscious, thus creating multiples for distribution, diffusion and insertion on the social fabric that goes beyond the arts circuit.