Caio Reisewitz: Vitrine

Months prior to Luciana Brito Galeria’s announcing its relocation to the Castor Delgado Perez residence, in 2016, Caio Reisewitz visited the still empty space. His interest for architecture and natural landscapes and, consequently, for their confluence in landscape design, was a perfect fit with the location: a modernist house projected by Rino Levi in whose heart can be found a tropical garden carefully designed by Burle Marx – a garden which is now the core of Reisewitz’s solo show, “Showcase”.

Consistently with his recent trajectory, when the artist expanded his understanding of photography to something less attached to a medium than related to a certain idea of imagetic construction, the work that titles the show, Showcase, is a site-specific installation created through the addition of semitransparent yellow adhesive coats to the glass that envelops Burle Marx’s garden, thus adding a new depth to the space.

If a showcase is a box where one places an object worthy of contemplation, with his installation, Reisewitz questions concepts that are implicit to both the idea of landscape design and to landscape as an artistic genre (which consecrated him as one of the most relevant names in contemporary Brazilian photography), that is: be it physically or virtually, every representation is indeed a construction; furthermore, the object worthy of contemplation is actually the representation of nature, the simulacra of nature, as opposed to nature itself.

The exhibition also includes two small photographs and one photographic collage created after a visit to the Berlin-Dahlem Botanical Garden. While the garden from the Castor Delgado Perez Residence represents one of Burle Marx’s maturity projects, the Dahlem references his formational years: descendant of a German Jewish family, Burle Marx spent his late adolescence in Berlin, and his visits to the Dahlem are seen by biographers as essential to the consolidation of his interests and to the development of his career.

Adding one more layer to the distinct temporalities and interpretational pathways already present in “Showcase”, Reisewitz intend to further develop the project. By photographing his Showcase throughout the exhibition period (bringing back to the form of photographic image an installation that was motivated by an expanded understanding of photography), the artist will create an artist book to be released on the last day of the show.