In his fifth solo show at Galeria Millan, Emmanuel Nassar turns even bolder in his critical exploration of the mechanisms that sustain the art world (a modus operandi which has permeated his career since the 1980s). Opening on March 21st, [infiltrações] – literally “infiltrations”-- represents an expansion of Nassar’s repertoire of appropriations and reshufflings, both citing and allowing himself to be cited by the works of other artists, creating a kind of game for visitors and questioning the concept of individual, collective and authorial space.
A procedure that he shares with a number of artists from his generation, the appropriations of pre-existing images, emptying them of their previous meaning and assigning new meaning (in general as a formal casing open to multiple possible meanings, where no one is more correct than another)
are characteristic of Nassar’s work. The Pará-born artist constructs his poetic world from the contamination of classical tradition (especially constructive tradition) with popular images of northern Brazil, approximating both languages, at the same time allowing them to mutually question each other in a sort of eternal dialectic procedure.
Occupying more than the traditional exhibition space, Nassar’s pieces infiltrate the other areas of the gallery, exploring them in a way that blurs the authorial lines between his works and those of other artists which occupy these spaces. The exhibit is also not limited to representing just his more recent production, placing pieces from several different periods and of different media side by side (objects, paintings, metallic sheets and drawings), focusing on the wide range of new meanings that are able to emerge from these relationships.
If, as critic Tadeu Chiarelli once said, Nassar blurs “the boundaries between art and anti-art to the limit, testing, in this process, the complicity between other components of the circuit and the complacency of the average spectator,” it’s fair to say that, in [infiltrações], Nassar has discovered new limits for this frontier as well as the relationships that it involves.