All Anew, Dudi Maia Rosa’s new solo exhibition at Millan, three years after the exhibition Lírica, in 2019, presents a vast selection of the artist’s practice, mixing recent works from his production with older ones, under Victor Gorgulho’s curatorship.
Through a non-hierarchical approach, around forty original pieces are presented, among his well-known works in pigmented polyester resin - a technique on which the artist has been working for decades, taking a central role in his practice - and works in small formats where the resin is fused to other various materials: pieces of glass, aluminum, brass, plastic, and even small objects. Often covered by subtle layers of color, either by the occasional use of oil paint, acrylic, charcoal or graphite, these pieces result in delicate two-dimensional assemblages, whose compositions of visual noises contrast with the chromatic and luminosity properties of the larger-scale works.
Although the mixture of these two groups of works suggests, at first, dichotomous relations between light and shadow, color and darkness, polish and fracture, the exhibition of the works in small groups and compositions carefully thought out by the artist alongside with the curator, deepen and complexify the frictions among them. Thus, the artist’s works made in a wide temporal window - from a small work dated 1993 to a robust group of works made in the last three years or so - gain new semantic layers from unsuspected relations wether of affinity as of opposition: be it of a formal, chromatic, material order, or of other nature yet to be revealed.
All Anew, a phrase written by Maia Rosa on one of the small resin and fiberglass works, refers, thus, to the irrevocable nature of artistic work in the studio, the daily experience of the workshop where artistic ideas are born and are materialized; successful or not. It is celebrated here, therefore, such resilience intrinsic to the unstoppable artistic work, in the most diverse practices and productions, all over the world.
Dudi Maia Rosa knows - any artist knows - that it is necessary to face the studio, day after day, going through its questions and doubts that insist on populating the thick fog of one’s thoughts. It is necessary to enter, without fear, the endless nights of creation, of inspiration and impasse, surprises and failures, enjoyment and dissatisfaction. It is really necessary to do it all over again, we know: to enter the exhibition space, to look once more at your own work (your own life, after all?) to then recreate it, reconfigure it, like someone who cleans their own eyes in search of seeing life again for the first time. Washed, naked, astonishing. All over again, once more and once more still, and so on.