Dudi Maia Rosa: Naipes

From March 21 through April 28 2006 Galeria Brito Cimino will feature “Naipes” (“Suits” of playing cards), the solo exhibition of original works that Dudi Maia Rosa produced in 2006. These new works will be presented publicly concurrently with the dedication of Dudi Maia Rosa e as mortes da pintura (Dudi Maia Rosa and the deaths of painting), the first book on the oeuvre of this artist who, throughout his career, has admirably handled the issues continuously posed to contemporary painting. A Metalivros publication, this book by Oswaldo Corrêa da Costa will be officially dedicated at Galeria Brito Cimino during the show opening.

Featuring eight new works by Dudi Maia Rosa, “Naipes” revisits essential aspects of the artist’s poetics that informs both a process of technical refinement he has pursued since the early 1980s, and his experiments with a new figuration that declines narrative and turns to “appropriate”, minimally rectified forms. The title of the exhibition – “Naipes” (suits of cards) – refers to aspects related to card games and, at the same time, to the extremely reduced palette of black, white and grey hues that the artist adopts in his works, somewhat as a tribute to Cubist aesthetics and the Duchampian spirit.

The “game” that Maia Rosa proposes with his paintings seemingly aims at reversing the rupture with the support and reinstating the traditional canvas format – something the artist has been doing since his early solo exhibitions. In his current production, Maia Rosa quotes the geometry of his previous paintings on a square and crystal-clear support that refers directly to the canvas, but which he presents to spectators as something “original.”  The paintings rendered on this new support follow the same strategy and deliver the characteristic opacity of oil paintings. However, countering the usually parsimonious compositions executed with this technique, they reveal a surface created on the backside of the support with spontaneous brushstrokes. Overall, what we see is a choreography that amazingly harmonizes and balances color, medium and support.

Thus, these eight paintings that Maia Rosa has executed in 2006 are presented as “playing cards” arranged into original combinations and sets through an informed technical experimentation that, however, is far from having exhausted its possibilities in face of the artist’s main objective: to devise a pictorial medium that challenges traditional painting while, at the same time, ensuring its survival, even if in ironic manner and with a tone of tribute.

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book release - Dudi Maia Rosa e as mortes da pintura

Dudi Maia Rosa e as mortes da pintura  [Dudi Maia Rosa and the deaths of painting] is a bilingual publication (English and Portuguese) written by New York-based Brazilian researcher Oswaldo Corrêa da Costa (Ed. Metalivros, 190 pages).  The book features a review of the career of the São Paulo artist from 1978, the year when he presented his first solo exhibition, through 2003.

The author investigates the art production of Maia Rosa as a pioneer in the development of a painting that acknowledges and transcends the several deaths of modernist painting and, at the same time, examines the internal logics of the modern trends that brought about these deaths. The book illustrated with more than 160 pictures is also meant to present critical aesthetic issues of the second half of the 20th century such as the crises of painting and its canons, represented in the production of Brazilian and foreign artists. The formal transformations and technical innovations that have distinguished Maia Rosa’s oeuvre during nearly three decades are therefore reviewed in this book in a comprehensive context as well as in the light of his specific contribution to Brazilian contemporary art. The publication also includes an appended anthology of works that Maia Rosa produced in the last couple of years.

The book publication has been sponsored by the advertising agency F/NAZCA Saatchi & Saatchi.