Between dissolutions and appearances, the work of Marcela Gontijo, in this exhibition, is the result of a paradox: part of a deconstruction for the creation of a poetic event governed by a high potential. In the clipping and joining of fragments of photographs, the artist builds a new landscape. With this procedure, it puts in doubt our look and perception about what this field called landscape means. We should not, therefore, wait for something representative of the real, but poetry that reveals a place or time that remained on the sidelines, and that in its appearance to the world results in potency and inserts itself as a landmark of investigation in the artist's work. In a world saturated with images (ephemeral), Gontijo through a usual and apparently simple technique reveals and accentuates his difference in an environment steeped in images of what we should be to become happy, more beautiful or successful.

 

The construction of Gontijo is not only about the fragmentation and union of distinct parts, which in this imagery shuffling create an aspect of landscape, but the creation of a geometric figure that constitutes the plane where these dissolutions occur. They are, therefore, two fields of experimentation for the artist's abstract-geometric collage. This type of occupation makes us suppose how Gontijo deals with built spaces, with certain hierarchies and conditions of pre-established models, with our spatial habits that ended up leading to a surprising result: what may seem like a formalist exercise, in fact, a critical activity full of meanings, the emphasis is given not to the forms themselves, but to the meaning of the plastic organization. Its plastic occupation method disorganizes, deconstructs the established order, showing that something that is repressing is hidden.

 

Gontijo creates a space that is no longer a place of representation to become an environment for action. Therefore, this desire to subvert is very confused with a desire to remain indifferent to the movements of the world. In this yearning, the artist opens a family of new ideas. It is no longer an idea that the amount of ideas in the world is added; but an idea that doubts all other ideas. We are facing a production that has a kind of organic elasticity that propels it towards the production of new forms, there is a compulsion to proliferation: the narrative of his works does not end, it unfolds.

 

Felipe Scovino

curator