“Papagaio do Futuro”: Luiz Zerbini at Max Wigram Gallery, London

Retângulos e sombras by Luiz Zerbini

9 October-9 November 2013

“Papagaio do Futuro” comprises figurative and abstract paintings, collages and sculpture, which reference the recurrent themes of temporality, memory, and modernity. With these works, Luiz Zerbini (b. 1959, Sao Paulo, Brazil) resolves the duality between figuration and abstraction, blending nature and architecture, surface and depth, materiality and opticality.

Zerbini’s work combines myriad sources, borrowing from the cityscapes of Rio de Janeiro, art history, and pop culture. The artist uses grids in many of his works, including in collages of old photographic slides, some hollowed out, some filled with coloured gels, intervening on a collection of memory. In Zerbini’s work, everything is dislocated: the landscape loses its depth, and the grid gains it.

Here the grid bursts out of the pictorial plane and takes over the objects that populate Zerbini’s reality. Zerbini collects from this reality not only what he sees, but also its spiritual nature, into what he calls “bins” of memory–materialised in the abstract shapes of geometry, light and colour. For Zerbini, “the little coloured rectangles in the paintings seem to be bearers of random information, without a defined meaning. Disconcerting information, able to provoke a feeling of strangeness.” This feeling is embodied in the hollowed out slides in Pattern: these are empty carriers of information and memory, simultaneously hosting time and no time, they are a place and no place at once. They are the matrix of Zerbini’s work, encapsulating opposing impulses and resolving them in works that do not suppress, but embrace multi-directional tensions in a flickering harmony.

Installation view, Luiz Zerbini, Papagaio do Futuro, Max Wigram Gallery, London, 2013Zerbini’s exploration of memory points at wider notions of time. Temporality for Zerbini is a multifaceted concept that includes ideas of modernity, the future, the past, and timelessness. The grid thus takes on another role: ubiquitous in the art of the 20th century, it becomes a memento of a future that has gone, it is the emblem of modernity, but it belongs to the past. Conversely, the “future” of the exhibition’s title alludes at a future that, instead, never seems to come. Zerbini however does not surrender to melancholy. The fluidity of his notion of time is discernible in the continuity between his works and exhibitions over the years, which are connected like thoughts in a stream of consciousness. And a positive, electric energy in palpable in the new works, each square or “bin” referring to a sense of speed, a useless digital speed. These capsules bring with them more data than mere information: they carry memories and emotions, thrill and pulse – instilling new life in emblems of a bygone future.

(adapted from the gallery’s press materials)


INFORMATION

Max Wigram Gallery
106 New Bond Street
London W1S 1DN United Kingdom
(020) 7495 4960

Hours:
Tuesday-Friday, 10AM-6PM
Saturday, Noon-5PM
or by appointment

MAP | WEBSITE | FACEBOOK

Image (top):
Retângulos e sombras
by Luiz Zerbini
34″x38″ framed
slides and tape
2013
Image courtesy of Max Wigram Gallery and the artist

Image (middle):
Installation view, Luiz Zerbini, “Papagaio do Futuro”, Max Wigram Gallery, London, 2013
Image courtesy of Max Wigram Gallery and the artist