MARCELO CIPIS

The manager’s lost it: Gomide&Co is pleased to present Cipis on Black Friday, a solo exhibition by Marcelo Cipis on view at the gallery from November 28th, 2025 to January 22nd, 2026—or while supplies last!

This your chance to have a Cipis at home, at the office, at the country house... wherever you wish (even in a little cabin in the woods)! Each painting for just R$ 3,999.99! That’s right—only R$ 3,999.99, plus special payment terms. See it, love it, take it: Pay & Go (nice and easy!) right away!

Cipis on Black Friday is conceived as a happening that combines installation and performative action to reflect on the universe of consumption. The installation comprises 440 newly created small-format paintings (40 × 30 cm), subdivided into 24 series, with the paintings arranged side by side and in sequence, lining the walls of the gallery in a manner that evokes supermarket shelving and the logic of mass production. A “sophisticated supermarket,” in the artist’s words; or a “masterful temple of consumption”, as described by Clotilde Perez in her critical text for the exhibition. High-end taste, with elegance and a wink.

During the opening, uniformed attendants will perform a direct-sales action, wrapping and handing over the works to buyers so that the space gradually empties—a gesture that turns the act of consumption into part of the work itself. In the end, only labels marking the former locations of the sold works will remain, transforming emptiness into an integral element of the exhibition.

The interplay between reproducibility and exclusivity lies at the core of the project, as the dialogue with industrial logic is present from the very process of making the works. Each series corresponds to a motif (sometimes figurative, sometimes abstract) developed within a genuine serial-production dynamic, with each theme unfolding into variations marked by point-specific color shifts. The 440 paintings were produced in 80 days, within a calculated, production-line process—“440 paintings in 80 days,” the artist emphasizes—echoing the tension between manual labor and mechanical reproducibility. Yet despite the repetitions and color variations, each painting is unique, preserving a kind of singular “aura.” Cipis describes the set as a “constellation of images”: fragments of an imaginary universe that gain meaning in relation to one another and to the viewer. His process recalls the idea of a “factory of oneself,” in which repetition becomes a critical device questioning the permanent-demand-for-novelty that governs the art market. The idea echoes, in part, CIPIS TRANSWORLD Art, Industry & Commerce, the installation-performance he presented at the 21st Bienal de São Paulo (1991).

Within the series, a range of motifs central to the artist’s trajectory appear—a drum, various everyday objects (a teapot, a match, a cigarette), references to abstract forms, among others—forming a kind of survey of his career. Some themes also engage with North American advertising iconography from the 1940s and ’50s or with compositional aspects of Russian Constructivism from the 1920s and ’30s, reinterpreted with irony and humor. There are nods to Surrealism, particularly Francis Picabia, and to classical cinema, such as Hitchcock. Some elements evoke a nostalgic, childlike imagination, such as the Estrela toy-company logo, associated with childhood joy and consumer fantasy. The repetition of these figures creates a symbolic repertoire that blends the pop and the psychic.

For Cipis, this is not a direct critique, but rather an “ode to the market”—a dialectical relationship of gratitude and irony. His work reflects on the art and consumer systems, exposing their dynamics with lightness and humor: “it’s laughing at ourselves and at the market,” he summarizes, a logic that also unfolds in the sales and promotional strategies. This ambiguity—at once critical and celebratory—sustains the tone of the exhibition: playful, self-aware, and sharply humorous. After all, among the many daily necessities, we also want fun and art!

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