Exhibition 'Landscape Even If' with Minas Gerais artist Manfredo de Souzanetto is open for free visitation until August 30 in Vitória

The artist's unprecedented solo exhibition in Espírito Santo can be visited for free at the Matias Brotas contemporary art gallery The first solo exhibition of Minas Gerais artist Manfredo de Souzanetto in Vitória, 'Landscape Even If', can be visited for free until August 30 at the Matias Brotas contemporary art gallery. The exhibition features a curation of works ranging from drawings to paintings and sculptures, some of which bring a symbiosis between different materials and supports, a hallmark of the artist's work. As the critic and curator Agnaldo Farias pointed out about Manfredo's works: "a painting that embraces sculpture and vice versa. They complement each other while also standing out in their individuality. It is never a passive support and is not there to be eclipsed by the chromatic matter." According to the artist himself, the name of the exhibition was deliberately chosen to leave the meaning of the work open, allowing for a range of interpretations and meanings, thus expanding the viewer's perception, which looks at everything from natural pigments to wood, as well as the shape of the works and the texture of the pictorial surface. "My work has always dialogued with the third dimension and reveals a play with the dynamics of form and its relationship with space. Because the work is constructed, but its definitive or temporary form is determined by the space where it is placed," explains Manfredo. [caption id="attachment_41276" align="aligncenter" width="300"] Landscape Even If by Manfredo at Matias Brotas Certainly one of the most relevant and creative contemporary Brazilian artists, starting his career in the 70s/80s, Manfredo has developed a specific and personalized language and is considered one of the most promising of his generation, having built an impressive curriculum in Brazil where he has been actively exhibiting, and in Europe, where he has been regularly showcasing his work in recent years. The first works that caught the attention of critics and the public were his drawings. A series about the Minas Gerais landscape accompanied by the slogan "Look closely at the mountains" marked the vision of more than one generation of Minas Gerais residents and received a special chronicle from poet Carlos Drummond de Andrade. [caption id="attachment_41275" align="aligncenter" width="200"] Landscape Even If by Manfredo at Matias Brotas From the 1980s onwards, his work developed as a game of virtuality and concreteness, where often the frame exceeds the limits of the painting and the support fragments, reflecting the search for new possibilities. Using earth pigments, iron oxides, acrylic resin, jute, and wood, he constructs abstract and geometric compositions of great visual impact; these are works in which painting is one of the constitutive elements and seeks to act in real space, without the filter of representation, seeking three-dimensionality. There is in his work a constant back and forth between the sensuality of the curve and the lively edge of the acute angle, the vibration of color and the tactility of matter, where we move from the muted to the vivid, from the organic to the geometric, in which the forms worked in volume as an abstract organic body create discontinuities and variations, allowing for the imagination of configurations from a fragmented structure that invades space, dynamizing it. [caption id="attachment_41274" align="aligncenter" width="300"] Manfredo de Souzanetto In the late 1990s, the meaning of Manfredo's work is expanded by the use of non-pictorial materials whose objective is to speak of color, matter, and texture, a vocabulary par excellence of pictorial making, removing from painting its character as a colored surface. It is also a work that situates itself in a border region between painting and sculpture, the plane and the three-dimensional, using materials such as wood, porcelain, glass, leather, string, plastic, metals, and pigments that will produce color and matter in his work. In the words of critic and curator Agnaldo Farias, "it is then necessary for me to defend the poetic trajectory of Manfredo de Souzanetto as a refined reflection on the landscape. It is not that each work of Souzanetto represents a landscape: each work is in itself a landscape. Each work is a territory of small dimensions with hidden contours that once fixed to a wall, thanks exactly to its formal irregularity and the concreteness of its colors, overflows its limits, incorporating and disturbing its rigid and vertical frontality." Exhibition “Landscape Even If” by Manfredo de Souzanetto at Matias Brotas Contemporary Art Free visitation until August 30 Matias Brotas contemporary art: Av. Carlos Gomes de Sá, 130 - Mata da Praia, Tel: (27) 99933-8172 / 3327-6966 Opening hours: Monday to Friday: 10 am to 7 pm Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/matiasbrotasarte