Lucas Bambozzi: Presenças Insustentáveis

Luciana Brito Galeria is opening the exhibition Presenças Insustentáveis [Unsustainable Presences] by Lucas Bambozzi, the first show the gallery has hosted by this artist. It features a single installation that takes up the gallery’s entire ground floor.

This interior space is the representation of an empty apartment molded by visual suggestions projected on its walls, windows and doors – at times real, at others fictional. It is one architecture filled by another, one place that is transformed into various.

The scenes present parts of provisory bedrooms and other household spaces, filmed over the last four years while the artist was looking for apartments or houses to rent in the city of São Paulo. The environments suggested in these recordings oscillate between what one sees and what one imagines may have taken place in them.

Based on the idea that the presence of the other is always subjectively perceived, this artwork deals with the evidences that inform our perception of space in relation to the people who move through or live within it. The images are like vague visions, resulting from the deceptive notion that the forms can produce. These are transformed, the walls are modified, the space is reconfigured and memory is attributed to this environment.

According to the artist, “the show presents my uneasinesses in a field of new investigations. An investigation that does not reflect known formulas of art videos, different from my films and videos from the 1990s. The search is based on the ordinary and the banal, extracting from them another form of perception for the information contained in the images. Another architecture, another approach to filmmaking, and other possibilities of encounter between space and the images in movement.”

The set of elements seen in Presenças Insustentáveis involve recurrent techniques and questions in Lucas Bambozzi’s oeuvre. In the words of art critic Arlindo Machado, “The viewer is struck by the artist’s very particular sensibility for working with electronic images and his uncommon talent for exploiting the accompanying audio. Lucas Bambozzi’s images are always one step away from melting or dissolution, which gives them an aspect of fundamental imprecision that sustains the semantics proposed. (...) At the same time, the very precise film editing allows for the control of the duration of each shot. These language resources make it possible to construct thematic bodies of a poetic nature.”

Lucas Bambozzi has worked with video and electronic media since the beginning of the 1990s, being one of the internationally best known Brazilian artists in the field of new media. He was born in Matão, state of São Paulo, in 1965, and earned his degree in social communication and journalism from the Federal University of Minas Gerais, in Belo Horizonte. His artworks include installations, video clips and experimental videos. He is a cofounder of ForumBHZVideo, and a video curator at the Museum of Image and Sound in the city of São Paulo. He also works as a critic, curator and distributor of creative works in electronic art.

His recent solo shows include Da Obsolescência Programada, em 3 Atos, presented during the ON_OFF Festival: Experiências em Live Image (Instituto Itaú Cultural, São Paulo), 2009, and at TransitionMX, in Mexico City. In 2009, the artist participated in the shows Restraint (OBORO et Maison de la Culture Marie-Uguay, Montreal), Geografías Celulares(Espacio Fundación Telefónica, Buenos Aires), Petit Mal (Museo Universitario de Arte Contemporáneo, Mexico City), Outros Silverinos Remix(Centro Cultural Banco do Brasil, São Paulo) and the traveling show RE:akt! Reconstruction, Re-enactment, Re-reporting, which was held in Bucharest, Ljubljana and Rijeka. Lucas Bambozzi’s work has received national and international awards from various sources, including the 5th Petrobras Cinema, the 4th Prêmio Sergio Motta and the 20th Locarno VideoArt Festival.