In his new solo exhibition at Galeria Millan, Dudi Maia Rosa revisits the figurative strand of his work. Known mostly for his fibers (works made of fiberglass that explore matters regarding painting as well as sculpture, present in his career since the 1980s), the artist created this exhibition with a new technique, starting from drawings and watercolors which he made in 2011 and 2012.
It represents a new phase in his research of materials in which he discusses relationships with the pictorial tradition in a singular form, via the revisitation of such themes as landscapes, still lifes, movie scenes, costumes and images for unrealized projects. The artist has nicknamed these works “cábulas” [literally “truancies”], a term which refers to his artistic beginnings as described in this statement:
When I was 13 or 14 since I felt a certain difference from the school environment, I needed to decide how to deal with my free time and solitude when I was deliberately absent from class. After hiding my bookbag, I started to try to decide what activity I would take to. From that point on, I learned to invent things to do. There weren’t many options, but they determined my initiation in the arts: I could go to the 2 o’clock movie show if I had money or wander around the central region of the city. During this same “free time,” I understood that I wanted to and was able to create something artistic. In this way, in 1965, I started drawing with Bic pens and creating free images.
In 1978, when presenting my first solo exhibition at MASP, I mixed a variety of techniques: acrylic canvases, ceramic pieces that were painted and sometimes combined with synthetic glue and pigments. Today, I realize that one of the most important things in the exhibit was perhaps a limited-print catalog that I produced with watercolors that represented practically all of the works. The publication had significant repercussions in all my subsequent work, characterized by the use of a media, a procedure which is present in my ‘fibers,’ something “between” painting and a rereading of painting, which also incorporates sculpture material.
In the current exhibition, I revisit the idea of reworking images through watercolors and also a few pieces made of fiberglass, something quite similar to the images in the 1978 catalog – curiously titled ‘paintings,’ written in pencil and characterized by dominant chromatics. It was an important moment in which the initial “cábulas” took on another dimension, a certainty that they were works which synthesized risk and adventure through which I communicated with an audience, definitively initiating my work as an artist. (Dudi Maia Rosa, September of 2012)