CAROLINA MARTINEZ: TODAVIA, CAMINHAR

Carolina Martinez (Rio de Janeiro, 1985) presents Todavia, Caminhar (Nevertheless, Walk) her first solo show in São Paulo, from May 6 to June 10, in Room 2 of Galeria Marilia Razuk. The show, curated by Diego Matos, brings together a set of the artist's new works, in which elements of painting, architecture, relief, and sculpture are mixed. In all, there are more than 10 works, produced with wood, concrete, and acrylic paint, which are displayed on the walls or on the floor of the room. The prevalence of geometric vocabulary and the exploration of architectural features of the space make the exhibition a specific and integral situation, especially because of the correspondences that open up between different artistic languages.

About this, curator Diego Matos writes the following: "In this given situation, our body is compelled to move, to delineate trajectories: front and back, left and right, horizon and opacity, top and floor. Fruition is overly active: the space of one's sensory experience and contextual awareness seem to play a central role in one's perceptual construction. Not infrequently, the viewer's own physical complexion - height, view, stride size, balance position - seem disturbed in the response to what is materially given to see."

In general, what is identified as painting, sculpture, relief, or installation in Carolina Martinez's work deals with space, visitor perception, and emptiness - or the space between beings and things. With a degree in architecture and urbanism from the Pontifícia Universidade Católica do Rio de Janeiro (PUC-RJ), the artist has established, in her works so far, connections between urban areas, interior spaces, and wandering experiences that usually go unnoticed by most of the residents of big cities and fast-paced times.

In the words of Diego Matos, "from the total awareness of a de-functionality of art, Martinez proposes his poetic-spatial adventure, almost always in a frontier place of the spatial dynamics of life". Among the highlights of this exhibition is Toda vida, a set of three-dimensional pieces that interrelate in golden proportion. The work performs the projection in environmental scale and with the concrete of a multiple of the same name, produced by the artist last year and formed by small manipulable wooden pieces. The concrete version of the work operates, in the space of this show, a kind of garden of sculptures, in close dialogue with the brutalist architecture of the building in which Room 2 of the María Razuk Gallery is located: the Giselle Building, designed by Italian-Brazilian architect Telésforo Giorgio Cristófani, and characterized, in the façade, by geometric volumes that leap out from the vertical structure, all in apparent reinforced concrete.