This time, the geometry and the icons of popular Brazilian culture usually so peculiar to the work of Emmanuel Nassar appear through oil paint. These are shown through six large diptyque (1,80x 1,80m) displayed only in one of the four walls of the main room of Galeria Millan. The group of paintings return to the classic repertoire of the artist “going back to the world of least considered things”, as he usually explains. With this return to the pictorial tradition, Nassar, however, does not intend that the support prevails over the gaze. “In my work I seek the aesthetic of the gaze, not that of the language”.
The new screens insinuate the grammar of photography. Tadeu Chiarelli had already pointed out a certain photographic edition on Nassar´s paintings. “It is this manner of seeing, contaminated by photography – appearing much more alive than the ´painter’s gaze’ – that select certain elements of the real, that cut, ignore and throw them over the support. It is this ´eye´ that knows the precise way in which to cut and harmonically transform the forms from the presumed chaos that surrounds us”, writes the critic (“Da fotografia à pintura à fotografia à pintura à fotografia”, A Poesia da Gambiarra, Catalogue of the exhibition held in the Centro Cultural Banco do Brasil, RJ, in 2003, and in the Instituto Tomie Ohtake, SP, in 2004).
For the artist, as the gaze is the plot of his work, the support loses importance, Nassar is more interested in the dilution of these limits. To transit among different languages, creating certain confusion for the spectator is part of the composition of his particular poetics, in which the precarious is sensible to the protagonist. This way, images that refer to shapes and colors of circus acts (Alvo, 2010), tools (Serras, 2010), mundane street elements (Tapume, 2010), gadgets (Maquinário, 2010 / Maquinário2, 2010) and spatial games with color (Inclinação Azul, 2010) compose his universe with oil paint.