Paulo Climachauska, “Night Watch,” 2015. Print on glass with anti-vandalism adhesive film. photo: Filipe Berndt
RECOMMENDED
A violent homage to Dutch master Rembrandt is the starting point for a new series by Paulo Climachauska. The desire to criticize today’s world is at the core of Climachauska’s fascination with the interrelations of economy, society and art. This urge is central to his first exhibit in one of São Paulo’s finest galleries, Galeria Leme, headed by Eduardo Leme and housed in two soft velvet-grey cement cubes by Pritzker-winning architect Paulo Mendes da Rocha. The series of eighteen works, titled “Night Watch,” hails the large, iconic Rembrandt painting of the 1640s, which evokes a local militia monitoring Amsterdam, commissioned by the Town Hall and, since 2013, at the Rijksmuseum. Rembrandt’s painting is at the heart of this solo show of the São Paulo-born artist of Lithuanian origins in his attempt to relate the mystique of bygone times to the present, which in this exhibit is his criticism toward our over-monitored society.
Paulo Climachauska, “Night Watch” installation.
A reproduction of Rembrandt’s painting, at a fraction of the original’s size, is topped by Climachauska with anti-vandalism adhesive film on ballistic resistant glass, and cracked by a bullet. The impetus for the show, however, was ignited when Climachauska’s eye caught the striped design of the heavy gates of the condominiums that abound in São Paulo’s neighborhoods, rich and poor alike. This led him to develop the group of iron-framed rectangular mirrors striped with dark-tinted protective adhesive that literally reflects the caged life of Brazil’s bullied contemporary society, intimidated by social, moral and political violence. The artist binds his vehement comment on the paranoia of surveillance and the cacophony of control devices on Rembrandt’s clever critique, the depiction of the militia in the wealthy, fearful, seventeenth-century century Amsterdam.
Paulo Climachauska, “Night Watch XIII,” 2015. Iron, glass and mirror with safety film. photo: Filipe Berndt
Among the artwork is also an outdoor sculpture-installation composed of eight two-meter high pedestals in a circle topped by convex surveillance mirrors coated with safety film cut like the eight phases of the moon. Titled “Eclipse,” it creates a direct link to the round dark brown panel centered with only two small coins, one halfway on top of the other—a U.S. dollar coin topping Brazil’s real—a critical yet subtle note on financial power, another theme dear to this artist’s elegant critical esthetic.
“Night Watch” shows through June 13 at Galeria Leme, São Paulo.
Rio-born Cynthia Garcia is a respected art historian, art critic and journalist fluent in five languages stationed in São Paulo. Her daughter America Cavaliere works in the contemporary art market and her son Pedro Cavaliere, based in LA, is in the international DJ scene.
Contact: [email protected], www.cynthiagarcia.biz
Related Stories
- Resisting the Silence of Forgetting: A Review of The Edge of Things at MSU Broad Art has the capacity to render visible that which certain political powers are determined to erase. The legacies of politically and socially engaged art within the context of contemporary Latin American history provide an array of artistic strategies in which creative action and political action were necessarily indistinguishable. From the 1960s through the late 1980s, repressive political regimes permeated Latin…
- In Search of Simplicity: A Conversation with Paulo Pasta on the Occasion of Two Solo Exhibitions The trademark painterly elegance of Paulo Pasta is in two solo exhibitions that corroborate the resolute continuum of his three-decade disciplined narrative as a pivotal name of contemporary art produced in Latin America. Twenty-four canvases and works on paper of his recent production are in display at Anexo Millan but it is at Instituto Tomie Ohtake (ITO), a longtime project…
- “A Cry That Rises Up in the Heat of the Moment”: An interview with curator Paulo Miyada about the powerful AI-5 exhibition at… “In the 1960s, artists were faced with only two options. Either you criticized what was going on by stretching your imagination or you abided to the rules.” This testimony of artist Cildo Meireles is in a video being shown at “AI-5 50 ANOS — Ainda não terminou de acabar” (AI-5 50 YEARS — It still isn’t over yet), an exhibition…
- Curator’s Choice: A conversation with Tadeu Chiarelli about the 33rd São Paulo Bienal The 33rd São Paulo Bienal reshapes the way in which the curatorial concept of art biennials is typically organized. Coordinated by Spanish-born Gabriel Pérez-Barreiro under the theme “Affective Affinities,” evoking Goethe’s “Elective Affinities” (1809) and Mário Pedrosa’s thesis “On the Affective Nature of Form” (1949), a key text in the development of Brazilian art, the world’s second-oldest international biennial in…
