The solo exhibition by Rodrigo Andrade features the artist’s unreleased series The arrival of the tsunami and other paintings and Bicromias.
The first series highlights large works that explore the materiality of paint in the representation of the monumental strength of certain natural events: the work The tsunami wave (240 x 420 cm) projects the wave out of the canvas, while The arrival of the tsunami (240 x 420 cm) recreates a city taken by water. The second series, Bicromias also evokes nature in landscapes that have been constructed in two colors with thick layers of paint that characterize the artist’s work, and consists of two large paintings, such as Blue woods (180 x 240 cm), in addition to a number of smaller works.
The selected paintings depict the artist’s most recent phase, which emerged in 2009, when Rodrigo Andrade began to use photographic records as a starting point for his work. In this exhibition, the artist seeks inspiration from photographs taken by Daido Moriyama, Don McCullin and August Sander (in addition to news photos and photos taken by the artist himself) – creating paintings loaded with dense masses of paint, like “a desire to engraft reality in the image, one hallucinatory desire to create a landscape painting as concrete as the real landscape,” as explained by the artist in an interview in early 2014.
To achieve this, the artist makes use of tools like games and illusion for the purpose of instigating feelings of fascination, hypnosis and instant pleasure in the viewer. “The word ‘illusion’ literally means ‘in game’ (inludere), an idea that fits nicely in my work.”
The exhibition Paintings of wave, woods and ruin opens with the launch of the artist’s book, Resistance of matter, published by Editora Cobogó. The book revisits his production in the last five years: featuring works from five different series – Nocturnal matter, Old stone bridge and other paintings, Paintings of the flowing world, Road paintings and Paintings of wave, woods and ruin – accompanied by two critical essays by Tiago Mesquita and Lorenzo Mammì, and an interview with Rodrigo Andrade and Tiago Mesquita, conducted in early 2014.