This exhibition took place at our previous 22 East 69th St, New York location.

Opening its new venue in New York, Galeria Nara Roesler presents Marcos Chaves, a selection of 23 pieces including photographs, installations, and videos, spanning 25 years of the artist’s work.

The featured artworks highlight Chaves’ unique perspective as he captures and spins visual chronicles out of images found in cities, especially Rio de Janeiro, where he lives. With a vocabulary built on humor and chance, the artist draws commonplace objects, everyday scenes and landscapes out of their logical contexts to subvert established angles and provoke different narratives. 'Marcos Chaves unearths the meanings and values that underlie mundane things, disguised by habit or convention. He carries out unpredictable displacements and produces parodic assemblages to convey his razorsharp observation of the world, from technology to trash,' says Brazilian critic Ligia Canongia.

Humor is the catalyst for Chaves’ work; he relies on multiple visual registers to criticize the blindness with which run-of-the-mill things are seen when under the sway of social-cultural convention. For him, the process of creating an artwork can consist of picking an ordinary object out of its functional environment, combining it with other objects, contexts or references, and then exhibiting it with unexpected captions. 'It’s astounding that despite centuries of debate, distinction between laughter and seriousness can only be made through opposition. Humor, as a sincere intention, can be a concise, undogmatic, rather consequential political attitude,' the artist ponders.

In the urban realm, Chaves depicts spontaneous popular interventions such as road hole signs built with off-the-cuff objects (Holes series, 1996/2014), or else he captures the exquisite poetry in tipped-over cans of paint (Untitled, 2012/2016), an insect’s shadow on a wall (Dancing spider (horizontal), 2016), or the colorful luminance projected on ordinary sidewalk tiles (Untitled, 2012).

His ironic streak jumps out in images like the phallic photocomposition of three skyscrapers (Untitled, 2016), the diptych that couples the unlikely growth of the crown of a tree with a functionless chair (Santiago series, 2012), the photo of a worn-out rope laid out as a G clef (Untitled, 2016), or the video that implies the tragicomedy of a smile (Laughing mask, 2005)

'Evoking a noise-ridden world in his work, Marcos Chaves is above all things interested in the willingness to see what’s given to everyone–ordinary life–as if it were the first time, over and again,' says Moacir dos Anjos.

About Marcos Chaves

Marcos Chaves (b. 1961 in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil) lives and works in Rio de Janeiro. Chaves began his artistic career in the early 1980s. A conceptual artist, Marcos Chaves creates photographs, videos, assemblages, and large-scale installations that transform neglected everyday experiences and materials into art objects. His parodic, light-hearted work uses humor to obscure a tragic and poetic sensibility. 'Humor opens paths,' he says. 'Sometimes you might laugh at something, but it may not be that funny. Humor might make us stop and think.' Chaves superimposes text over photos, documents his own artistic interventions in photographs and video, and installs pre-existing non-art objects in artistic contexts in a manner reminiscent of Marcel Duchamp. In the Academia exhibition, Chaves created an open-air gym, with objects made from cement, iron pipes, wood and rods, that Rio de Janeiro residents could use in order to exercise. The title itself is a pun on the centrality of the samba and gyms in the everyday lives of Cariocas.

Press release courtesy Galeria Nara Roesler.