Millan is presenting two new projects for the 18th edition of SP-Arte: an individual stand by Nelson Felix (1954, Rio de Janeiro, RJ) entitled Essay for Discomfort, and a collective project entitled Language Games.
Originally conceived for its 2020 edition, Nelson Felix’s individual stand proposed a meditation on possibilities for interventions in contexts of discomfort and stagnation. With the advent of the pandemic and new global crises, the project affirms and expands its meaning.
In it, the artist proposes an understanding of artistic production as a field for transformative actions that interfere in situations of prolonged discomfort. In this sense, the very act of drawing or sculpting is defined as an interference on matter and on thought. It is an expression which reacts to the inert and is thus capable of transforming a given situation.
In the collective project Language Games, the selection highlights the work of artists who have recently joined Millan alongside artists of other generations and whose practices are developed through different media and materials. From the extensive conjunction of techniques, objects and subjects, when entering the stand we can delineate different factors which condition the expressive exercise and the strategies for the construction of meaning employed in each work.
Language games do not concern only the formal, linguistic or conceptual aspects of the works. They imply a set of rules that involve the subjects that participate in this language, their ways of life, contexts of production and uses that they attribute to certain techniques or visual signs. This adventure begins with a radical opening provided by the act of creation, in which each artist gropes for signs, using some and discarding others. Therefore, this groping also presents its silences, that is, the signs that were abandoned.
From this contact with the works, part of the selection brings the experience of being in front of an object that is heading towards a borderline visual frayedness. Works in which it is possible to perceive either a silent language or a syncopated visual composition that does not affirm any univocal perception or meaning. In other cases, the language games take on an almost mathematical character: calculation, scale and volume operations guide the construction of these objects. There is also among these works an imbrication of languages from other disciplinary fields that sometimes get mixed up with scientific experiments. Objects whose presence in space creates enigmatic and suggestive situations of transubstantialization phenomenon.