Study group

Fidalga' 05

Ateliê Fidalga was founded in 2000 by artists and professors Sandra Cinto and Albano Afonso, and the current exhibition brings together the work of thirty artists who use the space. I ask myself what brings them together. Convivality? Collective intelligence? A community of exchanges? An intellectual exchange? Or the search for knowledge?

Perhaps all of this and something more – I suppose that the process of experience and living with others is just as important as personal research itself. Changing the linearity of the usual course, the exhibition is an event that requires a shared organization, among students, teachers and curators, in order to achieve a desired goal. However, what gives meaning to this exhibition? The trick is to bring all under one umbrella that is not what the work themselves indicate – the diversity of their creative processes.

In art, the concept of gender is linked to regulatory principles creating thematizations and stable figurative paths. They are models that determine a systematic set of ideas and values. To this academic thought, artists of the contrast an artistic practice more compatible with contemporary trends. It is proposed to reprocess and expand limits through procedures such as: appropriation, hybridization, displacement and simulation. In the works exhibited there is no suspension of confrontation, a characteristic of Modernism, but rather an interaction between methods, styles and techniques – formal, informal, real, surreal, fictional and virtual. Paths that intersect, deviating and transgressing norms that the representational systems of the ideological formations impose… or imposed. Thus, the deviation became the norm. The history of the contamination of methods is long, and refers to the Cubist and Dadaist collages. In Brazil, the pioneering work of Oswald de Andrade already indicated, in the Manifesto Antropófago of 1928, the cannibalistic aspect: “I am only interested in that which is not mine”. In the 1960s, Pop Art contributed to the spread of the hybridization of languages. Therein came about a taste for something new, for the unknown, for the locally and globally foreign, for heterogeneity and interaction.

Thus, today, the coexistence of differences is one of the mediating processes for transforming worn and exhausted parameters and renewing the state of art.

Nancy Betts / curator