“Only a few of us, amid the great fabrications of society, still wonder naively what we are doing on the earth and what sort of joke is being played on us. We want to decipher skies and paintings, go behind these starry backgrounds or these painted canvases and, like kids trying to find a gap in a fence, try to look through the cracks in the world.” – Georges Bataille
A leading figure in contemporary creation in Brazil, Miguel Rio Branco is a polymorphic artist. At the age of twenty, he studied photography in New York, whose effervescence fed his poetic drifts and his first paintings. He lives in the slums of southeast Manhattan, the East Village and the Bowery, which he begins to photograph, where all influences mingle. He befriends a local kid, Gordon Matta-Clark, who slices his geometries out of crumbling buildings, and his compatriot Hélio Oiticica.
Back in Brazil,...Miguel Rio Branco lived successively in the Northeast, with emerald researchers, then in the Pelourinho district, in Salvador, Bahia, which then housed, in unsanitary conditions, deprived families and prostitutes.
Miguel Rio Branco captures bodies, men or women, their glory or their fatigue, their modesty and their exhibitionism, in willingly tight frames, where the background loses all depth. His gaze supports that of his models: nothing is concealed. The characters are against the wall. “Photography most often oppresses or suffocates reality,” said the artist.
By dint of approaching, his images are imbued with dreaminess, without avoiding the grotesque, which they provoke and overflow, as in the last Goya.
To address Miguel Rio Branco’s work, we speak of “exorbitant realism”: disaster catches the eye; the imagination has no other outlet than reality, its violence, its immediacy. The wounds are so many narrative shards, “without beginning or end”, poem-images in the ruins of the world.
Alexis Fabry and Diane Dufour, exhibition curators
Imágenes de la Exposición
Miguel Rio Branco — Cortesía de la Galeria Luisa Strina
Entrada actualizada el el 10 may de 2021
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