‘Fratura’ (fracture) combines three solo shows by Brazilian artists Juliana Cerqueira Leite, Adriano Costa and Arjan Martins at Instituto Tomie Ohtake, who each deal, in very different ways and media, with our time’s ‘predilection for the disposable’, as curator Paulo Miyada puts it. Each of the three have taken over a separate room, starting with Cerqueira Leite’s striking choreography of multilayered and polychrome casts of her own body. These malleable pastel-coloured plaster sculptures contrast with Adriano Costa’s dimly-lit and sober second room. Known for his witty assemblages of the stuff of daily life, here Costa combines a few sculptures, fake record covers and neons in order to create a dystopian club-like atmosphere. The room is punctuated with ironic commentaries (printed in vinyl stickers and on t-shirts) criticizing the wider system in which art is made, validated and sold and pointing to the complex political situation in Brazil. Finally, Arjan Martins presents a group of large-scale figurative paintings that evoke and critique commonplace symbols relating to Brazil’s colonial and slave-trading past.
- Fernanda Brenner