For Frieze Masters 2020, Galeria Millan presents a selection of works by Artur Barrio. Born in Portugal and based in Rio de Janeiro, the artist belongs to a generation of that came of age in the counterculture of the late 1960’s, when critical thinking reached its most rebellious character. Since then, this feature has shown itself to be outstanding in his work, as political practice, along with a strong concern with the evidence of fragments we leave behind. Inspired by Dada, Situationists, Viennese Actionists and the Japanese group Gutai, the Barrio generation has conjured up the so called Conceptual Art and its derivatives in video, performance and installation, whose reminiscences are still among us.
One may say that Barrio’s works aimes to question briefly about the scraps that which remains in the ends. This is what can be seen when we come across their extensive use of symbolically disdained, cheap and degradable materials, as opposed to expensive ones with permanence pretensions. In that sense, Barrio’s production incites sensorial ability through a connection of acts, ideas and behaviors, associated with ephemeral experiences capable of disrupt the standard regards and dynamics of everyday life, as the Situações series executed in public spaces. We have selected representative works of the artist production, such as A partida de tênis (1982), CadernosLivros (1973-2008), 6 movimentos (1974), Puídas...Esgarçadas...Rotas...(os)... (1981) and the Manifesto LAMA/CARNE/ESGOTO (1970).
Once there is no possibility of recording events that establish their own time and space, Barrio is always recording his experiences, describing how everything happens in life: ideas, daily events, movements, they unravel themselves sometimes together, sometimes in an independent way. His Registros series, in which we can observe the Works A partida de tênis, 6 movimentos, e Puídas...Esgarçadas...Rotas...(os)..., appears as an evidence of something intangible, works that fulfill the opposite sense of what would be the paragon of the register, reaffirming the transitory nature of Barrio’s work.
The notebook happens to be another support for the artist’s recordings. CadernosLivros, iconic works in which the artist includes the entire process of elaborating his nomad poetics, transits between the spectra of the collected documentation and the artwork. Barrio refers to them as “the embryo’s work, almost in a raw state, the germination of ideas for their consequent achievements”.
The Manifestos are works in which the artist reiterates the essence of the art object as reality rather than representation. In these writings, Barrio champions the role of the artist and the artwork as the principal means of triggering the rupture with the status quo. Going beyond the critic of the canonic processes of artworks’ production and the interaction between spectator and work, the driving force of the neoconcrete - a movement to which he participated closely -, Manifesto LAMA/CARNE/ESGOTO reveals a concern not only with what remained from experience, but even with that which is not experienced, that which happens far from our awareness, as interpreted by Agnaldo Farias.
Artist’s quotes:
″...My work is linked to subjetive/objective situation -:- mind/body, I consider this relation one thing only, as it it that will deflagrate the psycho-organic situations of the involvement of the spectator, leading him/her to participate more fully in the proposal presented, whether in its tactile, olfactory, gustative, visual and auditory aspects, or in implications of pleasure or repulsion…”