Fabiana de Barros and Michel Favre: Home

Luciana Brito Galeria is opening the exhibition HOME, with a never-before-shown installation by visual artists Fabiana de Barros and Michel Favre. The artists create a space where the invisible and the visible are blended through the view of an infrared camera. A circuit of white electric wires composing a “spider web” extends throughout the exhibit room; as these wires are heated by the current passing through them, they become visible to the infrared camera, and in its view they are overlaid onto the likewise warm bodies of the visitors in a “spider web” image that “engulfs” the human body.

The installation brings together various artworks linked with the question of the visible and the invisible: four simultaneous video projections, including an interactive one, connected through the path of the electrical wires heated by the current passing through them. The artwork aims to intervene in a space that looks inert, but which is nevertheless cut through by lines of force that can be revealed. This certainty points out that no place is neutral, and that the void does not exist: every space is filled by the energy left there from what has already occurred and what is taking place. The result arises as the present is immersed into these invisible and unexpected dimensions.

For Fabiana de Barros and Michel Favre, this exhibition is a synthesis of their previous works contextualized by the “spider web” that functions as a metaphor for the notion of the home. Their work has been developed within a partnership, with Fabiana’s focus on relational and public art on the one hand, and, on the other, Michel’s work in cinema, concerned with the question of the perception of the forces that rule the world – ranging in context from the most intimate and personal to the intensively public.

These two focuses of the artists are found in various contemporary tendencies, especially the question of the human being’s relation with his/her environment, whether in public or private. “Formally, this work dialogues with the theories linked to the relation between a viewer and an artwork, between the visible and the invisible,” Michel Favre affirms.

In the artists’ creations, the spectator already knows what he/she is going to discover; the important thing is the way in which one appropriates facts to create his/her own universe and references. The collaboration between Fabiana and Michel also involves the exchange between cinema and the plastic arts, as well as the current questioning concerning the expositive proposal, the product and the public.