“Insular Night: Invisible Gardens ”is the result of a five-month immersion in Cuba, and presents analog photographs that take the maritime imagery as a reference point and explore a subjective concept of “insularity”, evoking tensions between the sense of isolation and the desire to cross the island's limits
The Sao Paulo Gallery Floating inaugurates "Island Night: Invisible Gardens”, Bahian photographer's first solo show Rodrigo Shadow, curated by Regina Boni, and presentation text by Caetano Veloso. Composed by 30 images captured with analog cameras during a five-month immersion in Cuba, the exhibition takes maritime imagery as a reference point and explores a subjective concept of “insularity”. Decisive trait of Cuban culture, insularity is felt in Sombra’s work beyond its merely geographical meaning. In this exhibition, the concept serves as a key to exploring the dynamics of desire in contemporary Cuba, evoking tensions between the sense of isolation and the desire to cross the island's limits.
“Your trip to Cuba is an encounter with a historic landmark, cultural, geopolitical and existential”, the firm Caetano Veloso, about Sombra's work, in the presentation text. “Instead of hiding or freezing the human figures and their surroundings in cold formalism, such compositions highlight their mystery, the sensuality, helplessness and the pleasure of being. Sombra reveals himself to be a true artist and a sensitive observer. The beauty of his photos lies in the human adventure of those who capture and those who are captured. This makes those who see them think further and feel deeper.”, says the composer about “Island Night: Invisible Gardens”.
The title of the series is inspired by a poem by Cuban writer José Lezama Lima. For the photographer Rodrigo Shadow, “Insular Night: Invisible Gardens” explores the stimuli of the foreign presence in Cuba, increasingly intense since the recent cultural and economic opening of the island. By addressing the contradictory relationships between Cubans and foreign influence, Shade outlines an aesthetic with a strong geometric appeal. With frequency, the documentary basis of his images is lost in games of lines and shadows that aspire to abstraction. This reveals an unsuspected Cuba, completely averse to the exotic images of tourism or the grandiloquence of revolutionary propaganda.
Unlike the crowds celebrated in official Cuban photographs, in your photos Shadow privileges the individual. In them, elusive bodies are seen, often shaded, who question us about what we see, and also about what is hidden. Your camera also opens up to the signs of popular culture: religious symbols, tattoos, sports logos and foreign flags, traces of new imaginaries populating the Cuban interior island.
Exposure Rodrigo Shadow is the third project of Sao Paulo Gallery Floating, which will not be located at a single address in the capital of São Paulo. Created by merchant and tropicalist stylist Regina Boni, in 1981, to Sao Paulo Gallery held memorable exhibitions by Hélio Oiticica, Walter Smetak, Master Didi, Aluísio Coal, Leda Catunda, Luiz Paulo Baravelli, among others. Reopened at the end of 2018, the gallery now intends to present new artists and contrast with petrified trends in the Brazilian art market. About individual Rodrigo Shadow, Regina Boni comments: “Many people in the photography industry are highlighting the fact that I, in this moment of resurgence and considering my past, that I only exhibited a few very famous photographers, I'm dedicating my body and soul to Rodrigo's work, which is a revelation. Something new. Photographic art”.
| Exhibition: “Island Night: Invisible Gardens” |
| Artist: Rodrigo Shadow |
| Curated By: Regina Boni |
| Opening: 19 March 2019, Tuesday, at 19h |
| Period: 20 March to 18 May 2019 |
| Local: São Paulo Floating Gallery |
| Address: United States Street, 2.186 – Jardim America – São Paulo/SP |
| Tel.: (11) 3064-4768 |
| Timetables: Monday to Friday, from 10 at 12:00, e the 13 at 18h | Saturday, from 10 13h |
| Number of works: 25 |
| Technique: Analog photography |
| Dimensions: 30 x 34 cm a 84 x 100 cm |
| Values: R$ 4.000,00 to 12.000,00 |
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Rodrigo Shadow
Bahian photographer, born in Ipiaú, in 1986. In 2012, was part of the collective exhibition “A visit to Benin – Photographs from a Journey”, the Museum Afro Brazil, in São Paulo, curated by Emanoel Araújo. He also participated in group shows at Rayko Photo Center and Dryansky Gallery, in San Francisco, California, where he lived for three years. In 2018, “Insular Night: Invisible Gardens”, his series on contemporary Cuba, was selected to be published as a book by the British magazine and publisher Paper Journal. It was one of 3 artists selected by Paper Journal in a call for proposals that received more than 400 projects from all over the world. The book will be released in May 2019, in London and São Paulo.
Sao Paulo Gallery Floating
“In 2002, the São Paulo Gallery closed its doors after 21 Febrile years in the Brazilian art market, a cycle in which five samples of Oiticica speak for dozens of other artists dedicated to hitherto inserted in the supply chain with shyness, just open the transgressive and experimental languages. My job as costume designer tropicalism, in 1968, out the source of this itinerary: long before thinking about being a dealer in the years 80, there was in me the belief in the originality of a Brazilian artistic proposition in dialogue with the world.
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Sixteen years later, here we are with the floating Galeria São Paulo. The return is due to an equivalent of the unrest 1981, the year of the opening of the first space in the street the United States - but the reasons are quite different from those born in the decades that contribute to the modernization of the market and the links between gallery owners and artists. I feel today challenged by course (deviations?) of that market, in their vertigo abusive values and stellar trustees, apart of the sovereign paths of creation.
We not announced an eternal return, but ephemeral and floating, without the shackles of a fixed address: interventions now empty places of the state capital, empty well as a metaphor for abandoned concepts and content in the era of Trustees, marketing at all costs and the perception foolish gesture of Duchamp. Without doubt, this system begins to collapse in Brazil. The floating Galeria São Paulo intends to return to the adventures of languages not domesticated by the concepts of the season. It comes to me like the inspiring memory of dancers parade Hose dresses with Helium parangolés, closing the street traffic United States, in 1986. Art in the heat of street, within the desires, in the whirlwind. Our travel beginning”.
Regina Boni
Presentation Text – “Island Night: Invisible Gardens”
“The series of photographs taken by Rodrigo Sombra in Cuba is an experience of deepening the perception of life. A young man from Bahia studies communication at college with sketches of dreams of becoming a journalist or writer and, as you learn about the complexities around you, approaches images as a means of study and expression – and, and, arrives at the cinema. Society's knowledge, of history and politics made him study the history of this art at a Californian university. But it is the static image of photography that seems to impose itself on its expressive ambition.. Your trip to Cuba is an encounter with a historic landmark, cultural, geopolitical and existential. This appears in each photo that now makes up this exhibition. The figures of boys and men and girls in locations and situations that are both revealing and mysterious are elements of constructive compositions, where the lines, oblique to the frame but often parallel to each other, suggest an abstract organization that is neither defined as found by chance nor artificially ordered by the artist. As its motivation was primarily to understand Cuban life from a foreign perspective – or how it responds to the presence of that gaze –, These diagonals suggest, in addition to giving shape to the image, complex tensions, unsuspected thanks, things unsaid or even sayable. Instead of hiding or freezing the human figures and their surroundings in cold formalism, such compositions highlight their mystery, the sensuality, helplessness and the pleasure of being. Sombra reveals himself to be a true artist and a sensitive observer. The beauty of his photos lies in the human adventure of those who capture and those who are captured. This makes those who see them think further and feel deeper.”.
Caetano Veloso