Boom
The exhibition Boom will be opened until the 30th of June 2017 at the Pivô Gallery in Sao Paulo, Brazil.
At the first floor of Copan Building you might see an industrial cement mixer sliced in four parts, approximately from 1.7 to 2.5 meters of diameter. It’s Mix(Boom), an artwork by Alexandre da Cunha specially created for this space, in the Pivô Gallery.
It takes a little to perceive the link between this rusty artefact and the space that hosts it.
Copan building is a project developed by Oscar Niemeyer during the ‘50s and is the largest reinforced concrete structure in Brazil with approximately 400 kilos of concrete per cubic meter covering 35 floors. Product of the incredible economic development of the country it was commissioned by Banco Nacional Imobiliario and Companhia PanAmèrica (whence COPAN) as a residence and hotel complex: a double bet on economic and cultural increase in value of Sao Paulo.
Now the center of the city is one of the most problematic and dangerous in South America. After the economic boom of the ‘50 a possible Sao Paulo has exploded too, leaving debris of its image in buildings like Copan.
Also Da Cunha exhibition is made of debris: as in his previous works, he creates assembly of found materials. To prepare BOOM in the Pivô Gallery the artist, usually based in London, had lived and worked for two months in Copan builing in order to create new site specific artworks and choose the collocation of some of the old ones.
At the center of the exhibition space we find the oldest work: Contratempo, 2013, a collection of thousand explosions images found by the artist and projected on a wall.
In the surrounding, irregular space are placed artworks created combining a wide range of objects trouvè. Sculptures Couple IV and Couple V (2017) are made of pieces of concrete urban furniture and marble plates. The curved concrete surfaces of these sculptures find a new meaning as an echo of Niemeyer lithe spaces.
Kentucky (Biombo) is another site-specific installation made of cleaning mops, it creates a light, permeable membrane that manage to modify the perception of a space made of extremely heavy materials.
Portal is the more evident materialization of this exhibition’s creative process: leaked, rusty metal plates, fragments of an explosion, clots are arranged next to Contratempo and find a new form on the wall, creating a door integrated in the space and use of the gallery itself.
From the blast of ordinary Da Cunha creates another level of reality where
meanings are based on more thin, soft relationships.
Text by Federico Godino
