Rafael Carneiro | Casa Família Deleite
Luciana Brito Galeria is pleased to announce its first exhibition in 2021,"Casa Família Deleite", a solo show by Rafael Carneiro. This exhibition occupies not only the gallery’s annex, but also the settings in the former modernist residence, designed by Rino Levi. "Casa Família Deleite" presents a further unfolding of the artist’s continuous research: paintings and drawings (twenty artworks in total), conceived in the last two years and being shown here for the first time. Rafael Carneiro is presenting a diverse group of works, which seeks to escape from the normal labels and commitments of painting, to approach the complex universe of the images of culture and collective imagination.
Technical rigor is one of the main qualities in the work of Rafael Carneiro, who has, over the years, developed a highly original research in painting. The artist has been developing a methodology for image transcription – from photography and his own repertoire to the canvas of the painting, a process which itself becomes the main thematics of his work. The imagetic meaning of the figures in his work is diluted by the technique he uses, which decontextualizes, reconfigures and resignifies. He has a vast private collection of images, which he uses to more freely articulate various forms of composition, through an organic process of creation.
Initially, Carneiro’s investigation was satisfied with wholly transporting the photographic images to the canvas of the painting, in a process closely related with photorealism. Gradually, he began to break up the unity of these images, subtracting or adding new elements to them, in order to compose more complex narratives. This technique works like “collages” of slices of different realities, which, when combined, gain autonomy to tell other stories. This takes place in the work Pássaros [Birds] (2020), featured in this show, which aptly demonstrates these articulations of various meanings through images from the artist’s collection, associated with other, totally original ones.
In Balthus-chiclete [Balthus-Bubblegum] (2020), characters from the work of Balthus (1908-2001) are randomly draped with bubblegum. Although the title and the elements are inspired by the original work by the Polish-French artist, the relationship should not be considered categorical. For their part, in Totoro (2020) and Rauchiana [Rauchian] (2020), the images that are completely original can also be considered imagetic translations of the artist’s repertoire, with the difference that Rauchiana makes a direct reference to German painter Neo Rauch (1960), composing a study-homage of the work of that artist. These imaginary figures form surrealist compositions, which seem to have come straight out of a colorful dream. In another set of paintings, Pelados [Naked] (2020) and Pelados 1 [Naked 1] (2020), the artist deconstructed a publication on nudism to compose narratives of his own, which refer to this world of nature and freedom. These images convey the starkness of the nude bodies’ emancipation, insofar as they position them in a rather awkward and somewhat comical way, in the settings of the gallery, since they can be unpretentiously seen from the rooms of the residence designed by Rino Levi.
The exhibition also features a group of seven drawings, all of them in mixed media on paper and in smaller formats. In them, the artist associates figures, shapes and color fields, using colored crayons, collages and painting, which all together compose narratives of imaginary and nearly playful stories. These original elements seem familiar to us, as they are part of a common, popular repertoire. When we observe them, our gaze is led to all the corners of the work. There is no main object. There is no main theme. The artist tells us a story, but it is up to the observer to decode its meaning.
