Andrea Redher
Art Dealer and Curator at Andrea Redher Arte Contemporânea
São Paulo, 2022

TECER ENCAIXAR ACUMULAR, Andrea Rehder Arte Contemporânea Galeria de Arte

Among artists and art thinkers persists the notion that there exists a dialogue between artworks, any artworks, when exhibited, whether in individual or collective exhibitions, starting from the sequence in which they are shown. This dialogue manifests from the choice of the artworks' placement in the exhibition space to the relationships created between them based on the exhibition's installation proposal.

This subtle and relational reality presupposes the materiality of a poetic language, attributing the human quality of speech to the artworks and establishing an initial territory between object and subject. It presupposes that there is something in them that surpasses their material state and that seems already imbued with humanity through the action of the artist, perhaps a preliminary state of language suspension. This dialogue, which can range from a cry of despair to a whisper and silence, demands from the viewer only their full attention, their presence. It requires this congruence of presence: the agreement between being and existing.

This leads to the possibility of an increasingly naturalized experience, namely, that the artwork anchors another relationship of time and space. A decelerated time that expands. In order to establish dialogue with artworks and access the relationships between them, the gaze needs to be available, needs to want to connect with a poetic experience. It implies not exclusively looking at what arouses immediate interest, but rather the whole, the set of artworks, accepting the possible fluency from the set, from their margins, from the gaps between them, and from their various vocabularies. There is always the possibility for the artwork to capture rare, pure, and unarmed gazes that roam among us. That being said, we can assert that this exhibition aims to provoke relationships between the artworks of some individuals, artists from the gallery's roster.

In recent years, Andréa Rehder has brought together in her space artists who share similar constructive procedures and who operate in the territory of expanded language. This allows us to establish contacts and tangents between singular poetic bodies. Essentially, these are artists who already allow us to draw parallels between their works through the choice of non-representational languages. We are talking about weavings and textures, fittings, accumulations and vibrational fields, flows, structures, and the attachment to a certain craftsmanship, something built from the hands, affirming art as labor, and which, in doing so, evoke the original human dimension.

It was my privilege to situate the experience that brought us to this gathering of artists and artworks, here organized by the firm and gentle hands of Andréa Rehder, who with wise intuition knew how to shape the curation of this exhibition.

We thank Ralph Ghere and Jaime Prades for their brilliant contributions to this text.

Jill McGaughey
Art Dealer and Curator at Jillian Mac Fine Art
New Orleans, 2021

Rodrigo Franzão is a contemporary Brazilian mixed media artist who works mainly with textile elements, creating three-dimensional abstract geometric shapes out of everyday materials. These “reinventions” push the boundaries of textile art, elevating the material out of the realm of utilitarian craft into pure art for art’s sake.

His elaborate, highly rhythmic pieces are created by hand-placing each individual piece of material onto a three-dimensional substrate. A dynamic tension is evident between the tangible sense of hand-work and the overall effect of the abstraction. One element at a time, his artworks emerge as a shimmering field that is never static, giving a sense of organic life and movement.

With degrees in Language and Visual Arts, with MBA in Art History e Visual Culture and a concentration in Physchopedagogy and Art Therapy, Rodrigo seeks to synthesize principles from different mediums. His sculptural works evoke emotions through the interplay of color, light and texture.

Peer Golo Willi
Critic and Art Historian
Berlin, 2015

The color, the colourfulness, is the most striking feature that the viewer finds in the works of the Brazilian Rodrigo Franzão. This applies in particular to the objects in which he combines different materials, primarily textiles, but also metal objects found. Franzão woven stripes of different fabrics in powerful colors into rhythmic compositions which, by interacting with the objects of metal, move between an apparent bulkiness and extraordinary dynamics. The combination of the colors, which is often balanced, but not infrequently also on the border of the harmony, testifies to Franz's willingness to explore boundaries and, if necessary, to cross them.

For his work, the artist primarily uses textiles, different fabrics, but also sewing needles, copper wire and paper, sometimes also working with oil and acrylic paints. His focus on everyday, preferably industrial, materials underlines his predilection for the materials that surround the human being, whether he is wearing it on the skin or in daily life, directly or indirectly, consciously or unconsciously. When asked why he used material, which is usually associated with the art of textiles, Franzão points to biographical experiences: that his mother, who works as a seamstress, already has the materials, the tools, and the sound from her workshop His childhood. Similar impressions refer to his father, who was active in metallurgy. From this he draws his passion and inspiration.

However, his researches, art studies, color and material research are also important for Franzão. The linking of different textile materials allows him countless artistic possibilities, and the choice of both the material and the medium is dependent on the subject. Thus, says the artist, "the material should enter into a dialogue with the subject". In addition to his artistic research, which is part of his work process, his professional career, which led him to the fine arts, is also remarkable. Rodrigo Franzão has already integrated art into his work when he worked as a Portuguese teacher for several years. Subsequently, he studied architecture, psycho-pedagogy and art therapy. Currently, he is studying art history and aesthetics. Thus, what interests him at the scientific level, art in its historical, social and aesthetic context, he expands in the concept of his artistic research, color and material research, as well as a broad philosophical view of man and his role in society.

In his work complex Subtração Involuntária, which Franzão has created mainly in the years 2014 to 2015, work can be categorized as panels (oil or acrylic) with applications (sewing needles, copper wire). Here, however, the viewer also encounters works that extend so far into the room that they leave the plane of the panel: objects made of interlaced, colored cloths and wires of copper, which protrude from this surface, leaving them, as it were, extensively and comparatively disorderly. Especially the objects, in which he combines textiles with copper wires, very much remind us of Eva Hesse's works. But other influences of geometric abstraction and constructivism are also evident.

These objects are often installed at a certain distance from the exhibition wall, so that they search for the dialogue with the viewer as autonomous objects, sometimes free-hanging. It is for him, "says Franzão," to make the individual "what makes his life as a visible, active member of society", his "role as a consumer, and how he conceals his true being through this role" , This connection is not necessarily immediately apparent when these works, which are sometimes inaccessible at all dynamics, It is precisely through the high degree of abstraction of these works that such considerations are left to the viewer at first sight.

Naturally, content access to the works is easier when figurative elements come into play. In his series of catharsis, on which Rodrigo Franzão has been working since last year, the artist presents forms in his wall objects that are familiar: human organs, stomach and intestines, kidneys and bladders, lung wings. The forms are kept simple, as they are to be found on radiographs or, in models, in medical and biological literature. They are distinguished by a red color from abstract-polychromatic background and are interspersed with laid copper wires and needles. Franzão's inspiration is clearly the human being, the human body and its biological structures. To this structural model, the artist contrasts an observation model: By contrasting the aesthetic aspects of the color composition with the aspect of the biological condition, the artist makes the viewer look less toward a general than to his own individual reality.

The material, which moves in these forms and is not food, fluid and breathing air, but found metal objects, leads this work back to the abstract plane, which Franzão had already treaded in Subtração Involuntária. To this extent, Franzão reveals, on the other hand, the dialogue between consumption and its effects on the one hand, and the people in society on the other. The fact that Franzão does not want to leave it with a mere projection of his ideas with regard to man and society in the sense of a pure projection is demonstrated in Franzão's participatory approach, which according to his own data is to gain increasing importance in his future work. Already, as Franzão wished, the viewer should "step in front of his works and become a part of it," and he should "create an effect that remains in his memory".

His recent paintings, paintings of geometric forms, arranged in contrasting narrow stripes, create visual effects following the movement through the eyes of the viewer. In continuation, for example, Franzão is planning installations with light, which can be manipulated by the viewer. It is essential in the work of Rodrigo Franzão that the material is in dialogue with the subject, but in addition the work should also enter into an active, alternating dialogue with the viewer.

Robert Yahner
Chief Curator at The National Arts Club
New York, 2015

The National Arts Club is pleased to present the New York debut exhibition of Brazilian artist, Rodrigo Franzão.

Born in São Paulo in 1982, Franzão is one of the most dynamic and provocative artists among Brazil's new generation of talent. Enlightened by an early background in Literature and Communications, the work of Rodrigo Franzão reveals an incantatory discourse between the artist, his vision and his uninhibited involvement with found materials.

KATHARSIS transforms this dialogue into an exploration of the human form moving from aspects of beauty to biological condition. The grounding force of Franzão's line combined with the vibrant play of geometric abstraction gives KATHARSIS a rhythmic power.

The work is further enhanced by the artist's facile use of mixed media and a brilliant sense of color - an echoing pulse of his native country. KATHARSIS comes to New York following the success of Franzão's breakthrough show, INVOLUNTARY EXCLUSION, presented at the The Superior Court Museum in Brasília, Brazil.