As in much of history, there are controversies, but everything indicates that it was the English captain and explorer James Cook (1728-1779) who was the first to use the word tatoo to speak of the drawings that perforate and dye the skin since Ancient Egypt. A symbol of sailors' virility, but also of the exclusion of criminals and prisoners, tattooing has reached our day as a form of expression capable of combining the collective iconography of an entire civilization, with the particular repertoire of each one who is tattooed.

 

São Paulo artists Fernanda Figueiredo and Eduardo Mattos make their first exhibition in Rio with lipstick tattoos, works that designed them in São Paulo and that show tattoo as memory and repertoire. Tattooing is an archive on the skin - of the history itself and of what is around it. In this set of images, Fernanda uses her own body as a support for very thin line drawings, made with red lipstick. Ephemeral, the works gain the permanence of a real tattoo after being photographed by Eduardo, surviving the removal of the makeup on the skin.

 

The relationship with Yves Klein's human brushes is quite clear, since Fernanda arrived at the drawings after creating monotypes on her body: she painted the nipple, knees and elbows with lipstick and traced the skin painted on the paper. The work of Italian-American Vanessa Beecroft is also a possible neighborhood, as is Brígida Baltar's Casa de abelha (2001), in which the Brazilian portrays herself in drawings and photos wearing clothes inspired by bees and their hives.

 

After the monotypes came the drawings, which present two types of battle: that of love and that of war. The erotic scenes, very tributary of Carlos Zéfiro's comics, show the constant flirting of the duo's work with pop (and pulp). Man and woman who are caught before, during and after the sheets are Fernanda's self-portraits and Eduardo's portraits, which extend to the intimate life the partnership that maintains in artistic research.

 

In the territory of the war, entrenched soldiers are preparing to attack. Designed with lipstick, these characters can give the illusion of being torn in the skin, which now bleeds. On the other hand, they are a synthesis of a curious process that has been happening in Fernanda's work, both in what is done in partnership with Eduardo and in the drawings she signs alone: she constantly transposes signs and archetypes from her natural territory to her hair. opposite, exiling him in an opposite field. As well as creating soldiers, martial and boy icons, wearing lipstick, the artist transposed elements of jewelery (pearls, silver clasps and the like) to the arms' war territory, designing knives, daggers and other weapons.

 

An upside-down mirror, rebuilt as a puzzle, as shown in one of the photo sets assembled in this exhibition.

 

Daniela Name

curator