João Trevisan: Body and soul

“The paintings evoke the night skies while the sculptures refer to the trails that cross the land”.

Museu de Arte Sacra de São Paulo – BUT/SP, institution of the Department of Culture and Economy of the State of São Paulo Creative, displays the exhibition “Body and soul”, plastic artist João Trevisan, under the curatorship of Simon watson. Composed of works with different techniques and supports, the exhibition presents 28 works created in the last three years, with a selection of oil paintings, sculptures in carved wood and raw iron and a video-performance, recorded at a location close to the artist's studio in Brasilia. “Trevisan creates paintings and sculptures that are meditations of physicality, seeking to create a space that offers a deep contemplation to the audience ”, curator defines the. João Trevisan: Body and soul, is the artist's first individual institutional show and the project's first exhibition Contemporary LIGHT.

The exhibition, installed clockwise, begins with the first works of the period - paintings as small as prayer books - and ends with the most recent - paintings with dimensions similar to murals. Interspersed to the screens, are the sculptures. To João Trevisan, the painting process resembles a deep meditation and includes walking, sweep the surface of each job more than 500 times until polished shine is achieved. The black color, intense, exhibited in the series of paintings “Interval”, grants them a meditative quality that seems to allude not only at night, but to the cosmos as a whole.

“These are paintings that, due to its dense and dark hue, ask for several minutes of intense observation to simply capture them. They exemplify what we can call “slow art”, recreating in a secular language the conditions of contemplation that are common in spiritual practices. for some, the painting may even suggest night prayers ”, define Simon watson.

The sculptures are constructed from discarded iron pieces - screws, nuts, scrap etc. - and wooden sleepers found in railway yards. The gross quality of these sculptures seems to refer to the sec. XIX when the freight trains traversed the railway network of Brazil. Featured are large wooden beams connected by iron hinges; a fan-shaped pile of large industrial screws; and a pile of iron plates – all with a sensual patina of reddish rust that echoes the surfaces of nearby paintings.

As featured, we have the installation sculpture site-specific from João Trevisan, in the inner garden of MAS / SP, which he says about: “I like to think of the seven sculptures arranged in an orderly manner in the courtyard as seven bodies pointing towards the sky, as if standing and asking permission to be in that monastic place ”.

Various aspects of the João Trevisan come together in the six-minute video performance of the exhibition, “Walk to light”. In a daydream of a performance that seems to speak poetically about the source material of the artist's paintings, Trevisan is seen first on a railroad track, ‘Struggling’ with a huge piece of wood and then, carrying it on the shoulder uphill, where, at nightfall, he burns it. For those who remember hearing distant trains, this video-performance directly reaches memory. But the work has its own strength to seduce everyone. Installed no Museum of sacred art, echoes through corridors filled with Brazilian Baroque artifacts and religious icons, to remind us of human struggle and spiritual yearnings.

The exhibition is concentrated on the works that the artist developed recently during the period where painting and sculpture were executed simultaneously. When conceiving and conceptualizing this exhibition, Simon watson sought inspiration in the anniversary celebrations of 50 years of Rothko Chapel (Houston, TX, USA) hoping that the message transmitted by João Trevisan: "Body and soul”Be of deep meditation and tranquility.

Contemporary LIGHT Project

Idealized by the curator Simon watson, Contemporary LIGHT consists of 12 exhibitions - individual and / or collective - of contemporary artists to be developed, in partnership with the Museu de Arte Sacra de São Paulo, where diverse themes will offer proposals and challenges to the invited artists seeking conceptual and material dialogue with works from the institution's collection… or not! Each show is unique in its own universe.