ZEBRA´S STRIPES AND PARENTLESS THINGS / AS LISTRAS DA ZEBRA E AS COISAS SEM PAIS

With Marcelo Pacheco

On view at Quadra gallery, 175 rua Dias Ferreira, Leblon, Rio de Janeiro, from March 6th until April 10th 2021

Zebra´s Stripes and Parentless Things

Zebra´s Stripes and Parentless Things is a picturesque portrait of a detour that turned out to be a road, in between travels in Europe and Asia and missed exhibitions eventually visited as life ´s twists and turns led law graduate Marcelo Pacheco, to embrace visual arts. Like The Zebra´s popular character, from Alexandre Jardin´s fiction, the artist chose to walk off the beaten path, electing the fantasy of a world in which people and things are allowed to reinvent themselves in total autonomy.

From his first contact with art through photography, the artist brings a special attention to the frame, to the geometry encountered in the city´s grids and shapes, in the patterns of its sidewalks and squares or simply framed by the artist´s gaze, his vision and lens of his surroundings.

For his first solo show at Quadra gallery, Marcelo Pacheco presents, in Zebra´s Stripes and Parentless Things / As Listras da Zebra e as Coisas sem Pais, a selection of his artworks, such as paintings and elements of furniture in a loose association of colors and patterns, gathered in an unpretentious dance.

Inspired by various elements of classic, modern or contemporary art, the artist includes among other references, an intuitive practice that stemmed from his observation of Johns´ or Motherwell´s Abstract Expressionism, as well as from the automatic creation that these famous Americans inherited from European surrealists. Following a spontaneous affiliation to this latter movement, Pacheco uses images taken from the popular iconography or objects and fabrics that bear an affective load. By doing this, he questions, beyond an apparent formalism, the difference between daily life elements and artworks; exploring the existence of a gap between art and life, in dialogue with artists such as Rauschenberg (who wasn´t by mere chance Motherwell´s student) or even artworks such as Louise Bourgeois´ “Ode à l´oubli”.

By creating layers that gather a broad range of a revisited Art History, of crafts, as well as an affectionate look to domestic components like shirts, lamps or sheets used to cover storefronts or fair stands, Marcelo Pacheco dialogues with patterns created or reproduced in their infinite variations by his contemporaries and predecessors, composing solutions that allow this convergence of disparate elements. He creates a poetic realm where simplicity and sophistication can coexist, along with questions linked to painting itself.

Just as the zebra´s stripes confuse its predators and symbolize the affirmation of an individual within a group, or a certain anti-conformism even, so, the artist´s brushstrokes blur the distinction and hierarchies between visual arts and popular culture and reveal, in between, a unique pattern, a singular vision of the world and of things, as unique as a fingerprint. In this world, Gilberto Gil and Arnaldo Antunes´ lyrics, altered by the artist´s approximative comprehension become others, and things not only don´t have peace but don´t have relationships either: wearing their distinct weight, volume, shape, color or texture; they free themselves of any kinship to become unique, such as the zebra´s stripes.

MARCELO PACHECO

Campinas, 1984, lives and works in São Paulo.

Graduated in Law from the Universidade de São Paulo in 2009. He started to paint in 2013 and to exhibit from 2016, in salons and groups shows. He got his first solo show at Sancovsky gallery in São Paulo in 2018 curated by  Douglas de Freitas. End of 2018 he moved to the artist run space and studio Massapê Projetos (SP), inaugurating a site specific work there in August 2019 as part of the exhibition “Featuring” with Thomaz Rosa and Leandro Muniz. He was nominated for the Pipa Prize in 2020.