Fortes D'Aloia & Gabriel's presentation at Art Basel 2023 proposes an investigation into matter, traces and lines. These three components of the artwork, however fundamental, are nonetheless structural constraints that artists have continually subverted, challenged and transformed.
Whether we approach the camouflaged collage surfaces of Antonio Tarsis or the short-circuited scripts of León Ferrari, the material consistency of drawings and markings are put into question. Likewise, Adriana Varejão and Erika Verzutti both carve, rupture, expand and erode the surface of their works, opening them up to the influx of historical and symbolic currents.
Ernesto Neto's crocheted structures and Leda Catunda's textile painting-objects are created from soft, pliable forms, serving as containers for the inanimate objects they work with to acquire a lively and malleable resonance in three-dimensional space. Mauro Restiffe and Iran do Espírito Santo also establish dialogs with spatiality and architecture in their photographs and sculpture, respectively. The first through the analog recording of inhabited space and its palimpsestic layers of memory, the latter through the tweaking of human scale through a renewed subject-object relation.
Through her cumulative assemblages, Jac Leirner deals with the hybrid nature of everyday ephemeral objects, serving both as indexes of consumption and traces of experiences safeguarded from obsolescence. Valeska Soares' erased still lifes, analogously, create a loop between objecthood and memory, where the creation of an absence signals an opening where novel meanings might be harbored.
The painterly contributions to the presentation, by late Afro-Caribbean artist Frank Walter, Janaina Tschäpe and Marina Rheingantz, are united in an unequivocally dense rendering of the atmospheric qualities of space. While Walter works on minute surfaces, the Tschäpe and Rheingantz paint encompassing environments of color and texture, while all three recompose the gaze toward an active, probing sensorial activity.
In parallel with Art Basel, Mauro Restiffe has a solo exhibition at the Nouvelle Musée National de Monaco, dedicated to the Santo Sospir series, a dialog with the historical artist Jean Cocteau, featured in our presentation. The artist also has works on view in "Chosen Memories: Contemporary Latin American Art from the Patricia Phelps de Cisneros Gift and Beyond" at the NY MoMA, together with Iran do Espírito Santo. Jac Leirner has a solo show at the Swiss Institute in New York, while León Ferrari is the subject of a wide-ranging retrospective at the Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes in Buenos Aires.At Bard College's Hessel Museum of Art, Erika Verzutti has a solo exhibition spanning 15 years of her practice, while Leda Catunda is the subject of a solo show at ICA Milan.
Location
Messe Basel
Messeplatz 10
4058 Basel, Switzerland
Our show takes place at the Swiss exhibition site Messe Basel, featuring a hall designed by international architects Herzog & de Meuron of Basel.