Writing is trace, drawing is breath is the title of the project organized by curator Galciani Neves for Galeria Millan’s booth at ArPa - Art Fair.
The works by Guga Szabzon (São Paulo, 1987) and José Damasceno (Rio de Janeiro, 1968) are brought together by ways of thinking about line and space as plastic events. They also constitute a place of coexistence in their differences and singularities: Guga and her concentration on a drawing that takes place on fabric and Damasceno experimenting with sculptural issues and object construction processes.
This selection aims at presenting to the public works that were recently produced by the artists and that discuss drawing in a broad sense, detaching themselves from a specifically schematic nature, that is, which is put at the service of the work.
In Guga and Damasceno’s works, drawing is a gesture of writing in space, by its own force. And because of this, it leaves traces of a body and proposes possibilities of relationship. There is, in this idea, a will to think drawing and writing out of the obviousness that surrounds these notions (writing that is not only focused on the word and drawing that is not only plastic production), in its temporal crossings (one is not a structure/project for the other), in hybridizations (games of ambivalence, exchanges, limits).
The line has a strong presence in works such as Beira, by Guga, and Ângulos, by Damasceno. In Guga Szabzon’s works, the line crosses and demarcates spaces and narratives in fabrics. While in Damasceno’s works, the line is in various materials, it is contour, scene, and also crack. Constructions of spaces are also established and seem to point to logics of encounter, as in Nós, by Guga, and Iguais, by Damasceno.
Read the curatorial text