Modern Residence

Luciana Brito Galeria opens, on April 3^rd, Sunday, at 11am, the exhibition “Modern Residence”, which also inaugurates its new exhibition space: a house designed by Rino Levi with landscaping by Burle Marx, built in the 1950s at Avenida Nove de Julho and never open for public visitation before. The house, known as Castor Delgado Perez Residence, was renovated by the architectural firm Piratininga Arquitetos Associados.

Luciana Brito Galeria has invited its São Paulo-based artists to accompany the renovation of the Castor Delgado Perez Residence and conceive works and interventions for that specific space. This experience was the starting point of the “Modern Residence” exhibition, which comprises works by Caio Reisewitz, Héctor Zamora, Pablo Lobato, Rafael Carneiro, Regina Silveira, Rochelle Costi and Tiago Tebet, other than pieces from the estates Gaspar Gasparian, Geraldo de Barros, Thomaz Farkas and Waldemar Cordeiro.

The exhibition

The occupation of a listed modernist residence by a contemporary art gallery constitutes an innovative project, which allows both public admission to a space that, despite its unquestionable historical value, has been of private access until now, and the opening to new forms of thinking and showing art. Within this context, the conception of the exhibition itself happened in an organic and experimental way, departing from the long interaction of the artists with this dense and multi-layered space.

The displacement from the white cube traditional model does not only mean, after all, occupying and architecture filled with visual and landscaping interferences, but also encompasses a relation with the symbolic stratifications that sustain the space: the specificities of the historical moment of its construction; the Brazilian modernist heritage; the researches and propositions of Rino Levi and Burle Marx; the lives of the families that occupied the house; the transfiguration of a space of living into an space of art; the tensions between public and private; among others. 

From encounters, intersections and dissensions between their practices and the Castor Delgado Perez Residence – understood as more than a house, i.e., as a complex point of converge of historical-social narratives –, Caio Reisewitz, Héctor Zamora, Pablo Lobato, Rafael Carneiro, Regina Silveira, Rochelle Costi and Tiago Tebet conceived distinct forms of occupying the spaces of the residence, its rooms, cellar, gardens, scullery, fireplace, closets… As a consequence, “Modern Residence” is largely composed of hitherto unseen artworks and site-specific projects. Other than aforementioned artists, the show includes the historical core of the gallery: Gaspar Gasparian, Geraldo de Barros, Thomaz Farkas and Waldemar Cordeiro. The exhibited pieces, selected alongside the states’ representatives, establish a close dialogue with the architecture and the imaginary of Rino Levi, especially as most of them are contemporaries to the house, built on the late 1950s.

“Modern Residence” can be visited up until May 14^th. It will be followed by a solo show by Regina Silveira, from June 11^th to August 13^th.

The exhibition space

Fifteen years after innovating the São Paulo artistic scene with its space at Vila Olímpia – one of the earliest venues in the city to be designed by an architecture firm for the specific needs of a contemporary art gallery – Luciana Brito Galeria moves to the Castor Delgado Perez Residence, at Jardim Europa, a project envisioned by architect Rino Levi (São Paulo, SP, 1901 – Lençóis, BA, 1965) and with landscape design by Burle Marx (São Paulo, SP, 1909 – Rio de Janeiro, RJ, 1994). The relocation leaves the white cube model of exhibition behind to make way for a new project where modernist architecture heritage and urban mobility integrate with contemporary visual production. The idea is to seek new ways to perceive and show art, recovering modernist precepts of assimilations between art and life. 

Listed as a cultural heritage, the statement building could not go through structural changes, but was completely renovated to receive the gallery. The project was accomplished by the architecture firm Piratininga Arquitetos Associados, under direction of José Armênio de Brito Cruz, with a team coordinated by Bruno Rossi. The recovery of the original landscaping project and its complements (in non-listed areas of the house) is signed-off by Klara Kaiser, Koiti Mori and André Paollielo.

Rino Levi searched for conciliations between the universal nature of modernist projects with the specificities of the Brazilian reality. Throughout his career, he developed a type of architecture that kept the user’s comfort (visual, thermal, sound) in mind, derived from the interpretation of Brazilian climate, nature and culture – a concern absent in many of his contemporaries. The Castor Delgado Perez Residence project dates back to 1958/59, and integrates a series of introspective houses conceived by the architect. Its landscape project was developed by Burle Marx, with whom the architect has kept a life-lasting professional partnership.