Artist: Zé Tepedino
Exhibition title: Fresta
Curated by: Domenico de Chirico
Venue: ABC-ARTE, Genova, Italy
Date: June 6 – September 14, 2024
Photography: all images copyright and courtesy of the artist and ABC-ARTE, Genova
ABC-ARTE is pleased to announce Fresta, the first solo exhibition in Italy by the Brazilian artist Zé Tepedino (*1990, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil), curated by Domenico de Chirico.
The opening in Milan will take place on Wednesday 5 June, followed by the opening in Genoa on 6 June.
Zé Tepedino is a strong supporter of autochthonous poetics – a unique and meaningful cultural expression aimed at reflecting the traditions, peculiarities, beliefs, mythologies and aspirations of a given people. He does so by means of his authentic practice, which is deliberately without frills and with a pronounced identity, in order to convey a highly personal and profound sense of connections with the earth and the history of his native soil.
Indeed, his work often starts with a careful observation of everything around him in his daily explorations in Rio de Janeiro. He bumps into prosaic materials, spaces and situations that are selected for poetic treatment, either through reorganisation or simply by bringing them to light. As he moves nimbly between the calm of the beach and the chaos of the city centre, he recombines the various elements he find with the ultimate goal of seeking to find plausible relations between them. In this way, through simple fitting operations and using different techniques, ranging from sewing to assemblages and from painting to sculpture, Tepedino sets out to create often new and surprising arrangements that can offer a new perception of everything that we think we already know only too well.
Applying a markedly gestural process of elaboration in his attempt to organise best the materials, colours and forms within the space in which it all takes place, and further seeking to formalise variable ideas on the heterogeneity of times and traditions, he sounds out infinite ways of seeing, reading and living the world around us right down to its full semantic potential.
His own creed, the basis of his artistic research, is that every time objects and materials lose their practical function they take on a poetic value as they drag themselves, metaphorically speaking, to the margins of the world. While he collects objets trouvés, the artist turns all his sensitive attention to everything that is not visible at first sight and that is probably destined to disappear.
Hence whether selecting volumes, forms and tonalities or playing freely with the density of the materials, Tepedino cancels the tension that usually exists between what is hard and soft, geometric and organic, urban and natural as he cleverly devises new and possible meanings in the name of unknown horizons of discovery waiting to be explored. His pressing need to understand the world prompts him to close his eyes, because touching the eyelids is that fleeting but particularly significant moment in which reality and imagination go their respective ways. This enables him to see further and to immerse himself in a more elegiac poetry.
These are the presuppositions behind Fresta (interstice), a new heterogeneous episode conceived ad hoc for the two ABC-ARTE exhibition spaces. It is characterised by precise incisions, interstices that offer a glimpse of a fantastic landscape made of colours that emerge and gently intersect with something that is capable of being infinitely bigger.
This traversing is guided by straight lines, incisions and superpositions that unanimously point to abstraction and inevitably lead us into a particularly indefinite dimension where form and dimension gradually become more autonomous as they generate the unfolding of a new poetic recomposition of reality.
Zé Tepedino lives and works in Rio de Janeiro. Using techniques such as sewing, painting and assemblage, his work ranges from sculpture to monumental installations and performance art, expanding the scale of his poetics. His research revolves around the banal, organizing materials, colors, and shapes in space, creating new arrangements and situations.
Zé Tepedino’s work reveals a playful operating system that redefines the contours of his environment. In an attempt to recreate the salted memories that permeate his life and work experience in Brazil, trailing on the margin of the world, the artist gathers found objects, exposing an attentive gaze for what is not visible at first sight, for what is supposedly disappearing. Dislocating these scavenged residues from their initial function and providing them with new meanings; sorting out volumes, shapes and hues, playing fluidly with the materials’ density, the artist cancels the underlying tension between hard and soft, geometry and organicity, urban and nature. Stitching, threading, assembling, or walking; Tepedino’s poetics revolve around time and memories contained in discarded elements, which he arranges to understand the world.
Tepedino graduated in 2016 with a diploma in Visual Communication from PUC-Rio. Between late 2019 and 2021, this emerging figure of the Carioca scene, Rio de Janeiro, carried out countless ephemeral interventions in various public spaces of the city, always with the help of friends to carry materials, set up structures, and document the work. Zé Tepedino has had several solo exhibitions in his hometown namely with Casa Triângulo as well as numerous participations in group exhibitions. He recently did a residency at Senne Art Lab, Brussels, Belgium which culminated with a site-specific installation.
