A(R)RISCO INTRA_MUROS

At times, these works may seem like writings, but they do not articulate language as texts; instead, they function as figures, where line and color are power (in the Aristotelian sense of the term). The lines present in the works of Rodrigo Paglieri, Marta Mencarini, and Tiago Botelho remain more as scripts for seeing. The artists trace and draw in characters, ideographically, organically, and in this personal way of interacting with the line, they configure and articulate visual differences. These differences manifest as the lines, transformed into drawings, are outlined on the walls, spilling and re-forming movements that seek the interior, emerging, rising, and allowing time for the space, which is the wall, which belongs to painting, which belongs to the stencil. The urgency of communication through sign-figure form in Rodrigo’s work; the time of embryonic and psychedelic exteriorization in Marta’s; the time of internal and sensitive structuring of form in Tiago’s. There is a practice that incessantly investigates a place to materialize, responding to the designs (intentions) that emerge from the relationship between spaces: that which refers to materiality/exteriority and that which alludes to mental topoi. In the intersection, a displacement occurs that allows the gap of the line and the yes of the void, which may or may not acquire color. There is a flow. For the artists, an ex-tension, as the act of differing can be to dilate. They propose a flirtation with the structural rhythm proposed from one to the other without losing their own cadence and pulse. The conversation between the artists that happens intra-muros revolves around instances of the world, territories where figures and thoughts inhabit, simulations of reality that drawing haunts and incorporates.

Drawing and painting activate visual experiences that extend from one plastic sign to another: In Marta Mencarini’s work, we encounter intermittent and turbulent movements of thin lines that uncover stains—generous portions of color that seem to settle for a moment when encountering the geometric pattern indicated by the stencil, but continue their continuous journey through recognizable figures of the natural and artificial world. These visual sensations, provided by the simultaneity of forms, take on another meaning in Tiago Botelho’s work, where he encapsulates mutating silhouettes in a sort of organizational system, linear, the principle of becoming, and, at the same time, a reminiscence of what the figure was before the act of appropriation. But now, under the value of a graphic sign, it becomes again basic material, infinite, full of possibilities.

Figures ready to establish new connection points, like synapses, as the artist himself points out, and which the line communicates. Transformed into signs, Rodrigo Paglieri makes the line gain thickness that moves from the aesthetic to the ethical by incorporating figures—images and texts that lead us outward, and that the practice with the stencil imprints and confirms, reinforced by the assimilation of scraps from the street—decals from posters; appropriation of residues that the urban environment offers, which the artist takes and brings into the exhibition space, transforming the drawing the city has created into an installation. Movements that (r)isk meanings for images, which are not writings, as texts are, but as drawings.