CPL, oil and acrylic on canvas (2018) and Arrebol, carcoal and oil painting on canvas (2019)

CPL, oil and acrylic on canvas (2018) and Arrebol, carcoal and oil painting on canvas (2019)

Sketchbook IV Aturdido, Acrylic, charcoal and pencil on linen (2019); Fonte para Hockney; Busto para Bacon; Fonte de Livorno and Constâncio II, acrylic on canvas (2019)

Sketchbook IV Aturdido, Acrylic, charcoal and pencil on linen (2019); Fonte para Hockney; Busto para Bacon; Fonte de Livorno and Constâncio II, acrylic on canvas (2019)

Roni Horn, oil painting, wax pencil and charcoal on linen (2018) and Piazzas, oil painting and pencil on linen (2018)

Roni Horn, oil painting, wax pencil and charcoal on linen (2018) and Piazzas, oil painting and pencil on linen (2018)

Ezra, Embroidery on linen (2019)

Ezra, Embroidery on linen (2019)

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Umbigo do Desejo

With Matheus Chiaratti

On view at Quadra Galeria, rua Dias Ferreira, Leblon, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, from April 24th until May 24th 2019

Failed and fragile loves, veiled desires, memories of bodies, moments and travels, of life in Brazil´s interior, its religious adornments and processions coexist with references from literature, art history and contemporary art and merge into Mattheus Chiaratti´s pictorial field. 

Umbigo do Desejo, Chiaratti’s first solo show in Brazil, brings experiences and reminiscences in the form of encrypted images, of subjective loose constructions, reinventing, between abstraction and figurative, stories into history. 

The articulation of elements as a rebus evokes a technical construction, almost cinematographic of the image. The proposition allows the capture and revelation of an essence that goes beyond what the eye can capture. It refers to the concepts developed by Walter Benjamin regarding photography and cinema, which, not inadvertently were the background and focus of Chiaratti before starting painting. 

In parallel, words permeate the body of work: letters appear or vanish while the artwork titles suggest and combine personal and artistic references, elaborating themes as affection, sexuality, tradition and nature. The importance of words is yet emphasized by an acrylic box containing the almost 900 pages of a WhatsApp conversation between two lovers, establishing a formal link between the art object and the storytelling that remains otherwise hidden. The pages of the artwork, simple impressions, can be manipulated by the public, revealing a moment of extreme intimacy. 

The embroideries, show the friction between Chiaratti´s country origins and his life in a metropolis such as São Paulo. The mere object refers de facto to the Catholic paraphernalia, while embodying allusions to artworks from artists like Rivane Neuenschwander and Leonilson, to chaos and desire and their opposites. 

The drawings outline the elements developed in the paintings, where images that form Chiaratti´s pictorial vocabulary merge and reflect off one another: baroque of the churches, landscapes from São Paulo’s countryside, fragments of bodies, familiar faces or portrait of poets, statues reminiscent of Italy, desire´s blue waters, environments evoking the impersonal coldness of furtive meeting places contrasting with the warm colors of an imaginary Africa. 

In Matheus Chiaratti´s painting, the intimate memories are treated as secrets and as such, kept with care. As in the parcourse of the artist artworks, the exhibition is built as a diary and reveals, in an entanglement of forms and symbols, the ambiguity of feelings and situations of intricate and affectionate worlds. In this construction, image and language condense and open, despite the intricacy, a breach where the unspeakable appears. Dialoguing with Freud´s dream or Lacan´s desire, Umbigo do Desejo reveals the artist´s fascination for the pulsions, the primitive and the intimate, through texture, color, patterns and voids, invisible zones or keys of the hidden narrative. 

Matheus Chiaratti (Birigui, 1988) 

Graduated in Image and Sound from the Federal University of São Carlos (UFSCar), Matheus Chiaratti works with visual arts since 2012, when he created the analogical photography collective Companhia Rapadura. Since then, he dedicated himself to painting and literature, participating from group shows in São Paulo, Buenos Aires and Berlin. In 2018, he won the acquisition prize from the traditional Salon Luiz Sacilotto of Santo André. He also initiated the arte_passagem project, in which he invites young artists to interfere in a commercial showcase, in downtown São Paulo. In 2018, Chiaratti participated to the Palazzo Monti artistic residence in Brescia, Italy and subsequently in February 2019 had his solo show Rivolvita at Galerie21 in Livorno, Italy. 

O Facinora, oil painting on canvas (2018) and Caixeta, paper and acrylic box (2015)

O Facinora, oil painting on canvas (2018) and Caixeta, paper and acrylic box (2015)