Emmanuel Nassar presents a new exhibition at Galeria Millan
Comprised of works from different periods, including never before seen pieces,
[infiltrações] explores questions regarding the physical and symbolic space of the gallery
and the art scene
In his fifth solo show at Galeria Millan, Emmanuel Nassar turns even bolder in his critical
exploration of the mechanisms that sustain the art world (a modus operandi which has
st
permeated his career since the 1980s). Opening on March 21 , [infiltrações] – literally
“infiltrations”-- represents an expansion of Nassar's repertoire of appropriations and
reshufflings, both citing and allowing himself to be cited by the works of other artists,
creating a kind of game for visitors and questioning the concept of individual, collective
and authorial space.
A procedure that he shares with a number of artists from his generation, the
appropriations of pre-existing images, emptying them of their previous meaning and
assigning new meaning (in general as a formal casing open to multiple possible meanings,
where no one is more correct than another)
are characteristic of Nassar's work. The Pará-born artist constructs his poetic world
from the contamination of classical tradition (especially constructive tradition) with popular
images of northern Brazil, approximating both languages, at the same time allowing them
to mutually question each other in a sort of eternal dialectic procedure.
Occupying more than the traditional exhibition space, Nassar's pieces infiltrate the other
areas of the gallery, exploring them in a way that blurs the authorial lines between his
works and those of other artists which occupy these spaces. The exhibit is also not
limited to representing just his more recent production, placing pieces from several
different periods and of different media side by side (objects, paintings, metallic sheets
and drawings), focusing on the wide range of new meanings that are able to emerge from
these relationships.
If, as critic Tadeu Chiarelli once said, Nassar blurs “the boundaries between art and antiart to the limit, testing, in this process, the complicity between other components of the
circuit and the complacency of the average spectator,” it's fair to say that, in
[infiltrações], Nassar has discovered new limits for this frontier as well as the
relationships that it involves.
SERVICE INFO
[infiltrações] – a solo exhibition by Emmanuel Nassar
Opening: Thursday, March 21, 2013, 8 – 11 p.m. Galeria Millan.
Visitation: March 22 – April 20, 2013, Tues – Fri, 10 a.m. - 7 p.m.; Sat, 11 a.m. – 6 p.m.
PRESS CONTACT
Caroline Carrion: [email protected] / 55 11 3031 6007
ABOUT EMMANUEL NASSAR
(Capanema / PA, 1949) Holds a degree in architecture from the Federal University of Pará (PA).
Throughout
his th
career, he has realized several solo and collective exhibitions. He participated in the
th
20 and the 24 Biennial of São Paulo (SP), in 1989 and 1998, respectively, and was one of Brazil’s
representative artists at the Venice Biennial in Italy in 1993. In 2003 and 2004, he realized the
retrospective A Poesia da Gambiarra [“The Poetry of Improvisation”] at Banco do Brasil Cultural
Center – CCBB in Rio de Janeiro (RJ), CCBB Brasília (DF) and the Tomie Ohtake Institute in São Paulo
(SP). He has been presenting solo exhibitions at Galeria Millan (SP) since 2002. His works are included
in important collections: Marcantonio Vilaça, Fundación Cisneros – Colección Patricia Phelps de
Cisneros (New York, USA / Caracas, Venezuela), the Museum of Modern Art of São Paulo - MAM
(SP), the Museum of Modern Art of Rio de Janeiro - MAM (RJ), the Museum of Contemporary Art of
Niterói - MAC (RJ), the Museum of Contemporary Art of USP - MAC in São Paulo (SP), the Museum
of the State of Pará (PA) and the University Essex Museum (England).