em-entre-para-perante: [in-between-to-towards]

Sprovieri is delighted to present with em-entre-para-perante [in-between-to-towards], Cinthia Marcelle’s third solo exhibition at the Gallery.

 

Internationally recognised Brazilian artist Cinthia Marcelle's practice is a consistent continuation of socio-political art production in 20^th-century Brazil, combining material experimentation with conceptual rigour and unique participatory practice. Since the late 1990s, Cinthia Marcelle has been creating material-intensive and performative installations and video works, many of them made in partnership with Tiago Mata Machado, as poetic-metaphorical images that question conventional ways of perceiving and behaving, how we see the world and our role in it, and disrupt habitual routines and categorizing patterns. Marcelle repeatedly blurs the supposedly fixed binary opposition of concepts such as order–chaos, fiction–reality, rule–exception, submission–resistance, or inside–outside. She points out that conventions and norms are never fixed and that the meaning of things always depends on the specific perspective and context of consideration.

 

The exhibition at Sprovieri is centered on the eponymous installation em-entre-para-perante #2 [in-between-to-towards #2] (2015/2024), which was created for her survey exhibition “Disobedient Tools” at Marta Herford Museum in 2023 and is re-staged here. It is a new version of a work that she had originally developed in 2015 for the gallery Silvia Cintra + Box4 in Rio de Janeiro.

 

em-entre-para-perante #2 consists of a floor installation made of metal objects that are bound with black shoelaces and arranged in a grid-like formation, six “paintings” and two clipboards with fax printouts hanging on the wall.

 

The shape of the objects on the floor suggests that they could have been employed to break open or break out of something. Here, however, they lie carefully wrapped in black shoelaces, thereby robbed of their potential function as tools. The binding and bandaging is a protective, caring gesture that gives them a cult-like quality. The once hard, cold metal tools become warm and dysfunctional objects. Their object status and thus their meaning have changed.

 

The neutralized “tools” are framed by six painting-like works on the wall – a continuation of a line of work that runs through the artist's entire oeuvre in various forms: Single-colored, vertically striped cotton sheet of which the artist manually paints the machine-printed stripes with white paint. The vertical stripes of the fabric might evoke associations with the bars of a prison, which are seemingly canceled out by the white paint; thus, the act of overpainting appears like an act of liberation. As Cinthia lifts the contrast of the stripes, she disorganizes the fabric's defining pattern – a thoroughly political gesture, not least because of the political connotations of the colors. The width of the stripes, identical to that of the laces, also creates a connection between the neutralized stripes of the painting and those that defuse the tools.

Marcelle never stretches her “paintings” on frames, in the manner typical of the Western painting tradition. Marcelle subverts the expectations of painting, which in the Western painting tradition usually takes the form of stretched canvases on frames. Instead, she knots her canvases, hangs them on two corners like drying laundry, or presents them hanging on wooden slats like flags. In other instances, they are bound together in a bundle or are tied around architectural structures. The canvas, which is traditionally a picture support, is transformed by Marcelle into a sculptural object, for example to mark something.