Alex Frechette is an artist interested in the everyday life of the city.
Not the everyday life depicted in newspaper photos, whose cold objectivity seems to summon the indifference with which we are accustomed to contemplate them - because, as Susan Sontag, an exquisite photographer as well as an essayist, reminds us, "people can get accustomed [to violence] in real life, they can get accustomed [to the cruelty] of certain images."
Nor does Frechette deal with a romanticized everyday life, seeking in aesthetics the comfort that days do not bring and that undoubtedly has a place of honor in contemporary arts - but which also opens up a consoling, albeit only imaginary, distance from everything that, in daily life, hurts us, anguishes us, revolts us, silences us.
The five works exhibited here speak of an urban everyday life as it is experienced: as constant movement, which the pages of the news and our idealizations are unable to manifest, and which led the artist from Cinelândia to Chile, from Chile to Niterói and back to Cinelândia and then to Buenos Aires.
In Niterói, residents denounce the lack of electricity which has become recurrent in rainy periods, paralyzing the city and the lives of its inhabitants; in Rio de Janeiro, the protest in Cinelândia reveals that the attack on January 8, 2023, is not just a memory, but an open wound that cannot be hidden; the pro-Palestine act in Santiago, Chile, a city that brings together the largest native community in the region outside the Arab world, has the urgency of the fight against humanitarian catastrophes; in Rio de Janeiro, the collective cry is of repudiation of the cruel murder of Julieta Hernández - Venezuelan, in her words "nomadic migrant, puppeteer, clown, and bicycle traveler", Miss Jujuba who brought so much joy to children wherever she went - which occurred in December, in the Amazon; in Buenos Aires, a protest against the newly elected president's package of ultra-right-wing reforms, which was announced as the first of many, brings together a large number of Argentines.
In the city, behind the beautiful architectural harmony already challenged by everything and everyone left aside, beyond the circulation of cars and the disorderly violence of power, dissension emerges: protests that do not fit in photographic records or in reconciling memories.
Alex Frechette offers us here a diary in images, his memories, which explore in colors of sensitivities and textures sounds, images, odors, touches, flavors, which create surfaces more or less delineated according to the relationships of bodies, which portray struggles and pains, but also the joy of being together - and isn't that how the city is for us?
Lílian do Valle
Tags:
Publicado em 01/03/2024
Not the everyday life depicted in newspaper photos, whose cold objectivity seems to summon the indifference with which we are accustomed to contemplate them - because, as Susan Sontag, an exquisite photographer as well as an essayist, reminds us, "people can get accustomed [to violence] in real life, they can get accustomed [to the cruelty] of certain images."
Nor does Frechette deal with a romanticized everyday life, seeking in aesthetics the comfort that days do not bring and that undoubtedly has a place of honor in contemporary arts - but which also opens up a consoling, albeit only imaginary, distance from everything that, in daily life, hurts us, anguishes us, revolts us, silences us.
The five works exhibited here speak of an urban everyday life as it is experienced: as constant movement, which the pages of the news and our idealizations are unable to manifest, and which led the artist from Cinelândia to Chile, from Chile to Niterói and back to Cinelândia and then to Buenos Aires.
In Niterói, residents denounce the lack of electricity which has become recurrent in rainy periods, paralyzing the city and the lives of its inhabitants; in Rio de Janeiro, the protest in Cinelândia reveals that the attack on January 8, 2023, is not just a memory, but an open wound that cannot be hidden; the pro-Palestine act in Santiago, Chile, a city that brings together the largest native community in the region outside the Arab world, has the urgency of the fight against humanitarian catastrophes; in Rio de Janeiro, the collective cry is of repudiation of the cruel murder of Julieta Hernández - Venezuelan, in her words "nomadic migrant, puppeteer, clown, and bicycle traveler", Miss Jujuba who brought so much joy to children wherever she went - which occurred in December, in the Amazon; in Buenos Aires, a protest against the newly elected president's package of ultra-right-wing reforms, which was announced as the first of many, brings together a large number of Argentines.
In the city, behind the beautiful architectural harmony already challenged by everything and everyone left aside, beyond the circulation of cars and the disorderly violence of power, dissension emerges: protests that do not fit in photographic records or in reconciling memories.
Alex Frechette offers us here a diary in images, his memories, which explore in colors of sensitivities and textures sounds, images, odors, touches, flavors, which create surfaces more or less delineated according to the relationships of bodies, which portray struggles and pains, but also the joy of being together - and isn't that how the city is for us?
Lílian do Valle
Tags:
Publicado em 01/03/2024