Jarbas Lopes "Park Central"

Tilton Gallery

poster for Jarbas Lopes "Park Central"

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Tilton Gallery presents Park Central, an exhibition of new work by the Brazilian artist Jarbas Lopes. This will be Lopes’ first solo show with the gallery.

Jarbas Lopes’ work is a poetic celebration of life, art, movement, music, and the world around him. It is at once personal and political. It comes out of the Brazilian tradition of colorful weavings and craftmaking and incorporates his country’s abstract modernist movement beginning in the 30s and 40s to fit into a global present day context. Lopes incorporates many media into his work. He makes sculptures, drawings, woven “paintings” and performances. The performative aspect is key to his work and infuses even the most concrete art objects. The dancer and choreographer Malcolm Low will participate during the opening.

Lopes chooses to use everyday, often ephemeral materials, whether found in nature, or attainable at any hardware supply store. Rough, often raw materials are transformed into objects of beauty that, while refined, playfully retain reference to their origins. The idea of ephemera, performance and art being one with the environment holds much greater importance in Brazil, and when viewed in a New York or European art context, his works transpose the viewer into a more utopian world. In his explorations of the reality of everyday life, aesthetics, social, and political concerns are melded into one.

One of Lopes’ best know bodies of work is comprised of bicycles that are both sculpture and useable objects. Lopes adorns his bikes with rattan weavings or rubber, but allows them to retain their functionality. The bicycle becomes a symbol of a symbiotic relationship between human and machine: a bike needs human power to function, and a human needs the bike’s machinery for transportation. These bicycles invite and encourage the audience to interact with them; in fact, the bikes are not fully realized until someone uses them. The need for human interaction is a common theme in much of Lopes’ oeuvre.

Bicycles are also important because they have been a widely accessable means of transportation in emerging cultures. As an environmentally friendly means of getting from point A to point B, they represent a utopian ideal that is being threatened by modernism. Thus their metaphorical implications place them in a larger conceptual and political framework. These sculptures are part of Cicloviaerea, a larger project of public raised aerial bikeways that Lopes has been working on since 2001, in which he attempts to realize a new functional utopia through his art.

Lopes is also known for his series entitled O Debate, the Debate. These works are made of political posters of both recognizable and unknown politicians that Lopes tears into strips, mounts onto carpet, and then weaves together, so that multiple images fuse together to create new, hybrid political personalities. Some incorporate posters of local Brazilian politicians, while some use images such as those of Barack Obama, Hilary Clinton or George Bush, and can’t help but call into question the contrast between these political figures while simultaneously inferring their underlying similarities. The resulting image that emerges is more important than the individual figures and provides the possibility of an improved political future.

In Park Central, a large structure covered with bungee cords invites viewers to bounce off its surface. As in the Debate series, Lopes overlaps varying colors of bungee cord to create an object that is both aesthetic and functional. Placed against the wall at an angle, this leaning three-dimensional grid takes its place in modernist sculpure. The piece also highlights the importance in Lopes’ work of audience participation in order to create a fully-realized work of art. Finally, as with his bicycles, Park Central assumes motion and reflects Lopes’ love for dance and his interest in the body, movement and the interaction of people with each other and with his art.

Audience participation is part of a larger theme running through Lopes’ work, which is that of collaboration. In previous exhibitions, Lopes has shown his own drawings alongside those of his aunt and children. He has invited audiences to draw on walls and participate in performances through dance. Collaboration in Lopes’ practice creates a utopian “art for all” mentality, where the notion of authorship is questioned and the division between an art work and the audience is dissolved. Lopes wants viewers of his pieces to connect with or “hook into,” as he says in Portugese, the work and especially the ideas that motivate him as an artist. The audience can connect to the work through physical contact or manipulation, participation, and even by simply catching a clever joke or play on words.

Jarbas Lopes has shown in Brazil and in London and Paris, and his work has been included in exhibitions in Portugal and Spain. His work was included in the 27th Sao Paolo Biennial in 2006 and in the Gwangju Biennale, South Korea in 2008.

Media

Schedule

from April 23, 2010 to May 29, 2010

Opening Reception on 2010-04-23 from 18:00 to 20:00

Artist(s)

Jarbas Lopes

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