well, its just an
ocean between

tal projects/
JACARANDA

Cabelo, Carlos Vergara, João Paulo Serafim, José Bechara,
Paulo Arraiano, Pedo Batista ,  Raul Mourão, Sandra Baía

Curated By TAL Projects And Jacaranda
Text By Cláudia Camacho

Cláudia Camacho
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Cultural Platform, producer and contemporary art gallery TAL founded in 2010, in Rio de Janeiro,is expanding  its territory and came to Portugal in 2017. For the exhibition Well, It’s Just an Ocean Between TAL invited Jacaranda - a crossmedia art platform created to promote Brazilian Contemporary Art in the international art circuit -, proposing a dialogue between four contemporary Brazilian artists (Carlos Vergara, José Bechara, Raul Mourão and Cabelo) and four contemporary Portuguese artists from the new generation (João Paulo Serafim, Paulo Arraiano, Sandra Baía and Pedro Batista). Well, It’s Just an Ocean Between is an exhibition that brings together the wishes and artistic practices of two countries so close even 4040 nautical miles away. 

Plato's philosophy was expressed and transmitted through dialogue, having in its origin the dialectic, that is, the "path between ideas" that is drawn methodologically through oppositions and contradictions of ideas, which lead us to new ideas. Dialogue, with Plato's Dialogues, thus emerges as a form of creation. Between Brazil and Portugal, the dialogue has crossed, through the centuries, sinuous paths. Between guilt and redemption, the historical reason will always refer us to the silences that colonial behavior imprinted both in the distant past, as in a present marked by the mnemonic scar. It is difficult to find another way of communicating the works of these eight artists exposed, if not by the dialogical way, finding points in common, divergent points, mirrors, symbioses, analogies, dichotomies. " Two monologues never made a dialogue." (Edward A. Murphy).

The work of Carlos Vergara (Rio Grande do Sul, 1941) embodies a perspicacious phrase of Goethe: "Nature and art seem to move away, but before we think it they have already met." Like Nature, his artworks assume its unpredictability. In his pictorial registers Nature enters the color, draws the form, sculpts the two-dimensionality. When the works are transported to the museum environment, the natural oxidations, the botanical DNA, and the animal tracks that so often inhabit his body of work are restless. It seems to find no cataloging in the collections, reserves and archives of museological institutions so often scrutinized in the work of João Paulo Serafim (Paris, 1974). There, we find frozen, in aesthetically serene images, the historical and sociological riots trapped in silent surroundings, embraced by relative humidity and temperature. Nature is almost always superior to itself.

The course/route of José Bechara (Rio de Janeiro, 1957) stresses between the two-dimensional and three-dimensional planes, transmuting from one to the other in an excellent way. Complementing each other, integrating each other. In painting and in sculpture, filling spaces or emptying them is done in a geometrically existential way. In Bechara there is an accidental balance that is supported by the pieces of Sandra Baía (Lisbon, 1968): interiors that show itselves, exteriors that wants to hide, irregular formalism. The volumetries of Sandra Baía hide the fragility of those who are mirrored and face-to-face with human vulnerability. And when this encounter takes place, the matter bends over itself. The sculptures bends, crinkle and sometimes ashamed of (itself).

Raul Mourão (Rio de Janeiro, 1967) and Paulo Arraiano (Cascais, 1977) in different but complementary ways find in space an absence of centre. Raul Mourão through steel, iron and plastic tubes defies the force of the movement giving shape to empty planes that only seem fragile and that sway each other. Sculptures where speed stops to be speedy, and where apparent equilibrium constantly interrogates us. The artworks of Raul Mourão never end in its physical borders, those that Paulo Arraiano outlines so subtly in his work, not only pictorial. The physical and immaterial territories collide in an orbital way with emotions. Post-human sediments that interrogate the root, Nature, and the gravitational essence of a body. Digital communications crossed between Earth and Heaven in an abstract landscape, act of Being.

in this show, the urban aesthetics gathers the artistic paths of Cabelo (Cachoeiro do Itapemirim, 1967) and Pedro Batista (1980). Firm but wavy traces, trimmed by primitive improvisation. They are still raw images with a palette of color that seduces us. Cabelo gets carried away by funk, Pedro Batista by hard-core punk. There is a territorial dimension that delineates the work of both artists and the street dictates the coordinates. It is the space of dreams, of freedom, of the endless sequence of paths, crossroads and alleys. Errors and accuracy, leaving and not returning.

"The dialogue must be simply a sound, among other sounds, just something that comes out of the mouths of people whose eyes tell the story in visual terms." (Alfred Hitchcock)