O PRIMEIRO DIA DE DADÁ

With Flora Rebollo

On view at Galeria Quadra, rua Dias Ferreira 175/301, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, from November 10th until December 16th 2022

Between micro and macro, the body´s folds and house corners, the middle and the border, the everyday familiar world and the immensity of the universe, Dadá´s first day, Flora Rebollo´s solo exhibition at Quadra Gallery, evokes an anthropo-cosmic dance in which centrifugal and centripetal forces cross and enmesh in a constant flux, as each artwork can be seen either as an anticipation or a continuation of another. The artist´s paintings and drawings stem indeed from a common space: an experimental, playful space, in which techniques, matter and elements alternate and repeat themselves, highlighting the counterpoints and scale effects that permeate a body of work united by a wide, intuitive and horizontal narrative.

In Flora Rebollo´s drawings, the centrifugal forces at work seem to coalesce, to extract the image´s essence in a direct way, frequently more figuratively; revealing a sample of her pictorial vocabulary as a kind of cabinet of curiosities, made of associations of gestures, images and talisman objects belonging to the artist. In this library, ordinary items coexist along with cosmic elements, organized in a sequence in which chronologies mix up. Animals look like letters. Chairs dialogue with cosmic beings. Clocks mimic the sun, and geometric shapes embrace the spiral curves of the universe.

Yet, in the paintings, the pictorial elements show characteristics of the macroscopic; they spread onto the canvas, as in the Carangueijeira´s case, whose body spins outside of the frame like spit expanding towards the corners. Made of stripes of stitched canvas, the artwork remind us the confusion between the creator and the creature from the Frankenstein tale. From her own skin to the surface of the canvas, the stamps that the artist printed with her bare hands materialize the artwork.

In this dimension of blurred frontiers, in which the form lies next to the formlessness, and the physical limits between the body, the artwork and the outside space all disappear, the body of works - paintings, drawings and object-sculptures – presented by Flora Rebollo, remind us that it is from the absence of contours that the primordial world is being born. It is like a vortex that can gobble everything, including the most distant galaxies, only to regurgitate them in new arrangements and begin all over again, in an auto anthropophagic act of creation and destruction.

In its sway of images and the horizontal transition from micro to macro, Dada´s first day mimics the flux that moves in the artist´s mind and studio. Contrasting with the spatiality of previous exhibitions, Dada´s first day, whose title refers to the book from the artist´s childhood, “O dia a dia de Dadá” (Dada´s daily life), brings us closer to the intimacy of the everyday, in a very human scale, a scale of daily notes collected through time. In this way, Dada´s first day highlights, in a kind of mirrored context, the gesture, the matter and the pleasure of creation. Flora Rebollo thus reveals the successive developments of the creation of a visual language: from the first steps to the most elaborate associations, organized and disorganized by a spiraled hand acting alone.