I first saw Fabiano Gonper‘s work in large scale at the Street Biennale in São Paulo in the end of 2010. The first edition of the biennial event gathered street artists and works by visual artists, which were exhibited in outside and public areas of the city. Fabiano‘s work was displayed on the facade of a building on the busy downtown street Avenida São João. The piece resembles a drawing, with black lines on a white underground describing power relations and manipulation mechanisms in the business world - which can be applied to any other world just as well, even or especially the art world.
When I visit Fabiano at his studio, he explains that power relations have always interested him. Originally trained as civil engineer, the artist from João Pessoa, a city on the east coast of Brazil, decided to dedicate himself to art. In his works, he depicts mainly men who are in important positions, company executives or politicians, in the world of money and political power. He finds his inspiration in the poses of influential figures in magazines, newspapers, photographs and even in videos of the auctions houses Christie‘s and Sotheby‘s, while people are bidding for expensive artworks. In his pieces, he combines the people and gestures in a way that interconnects them with each other and thereby reveals specific distributions of power, as in the series “O Manipulador“ (The Manipulator - 2008).
At times, Fabiano also works with collage, as in the series “Desenhos Secretos“ (Secret Drawings - 2004-2009), addressing the different layers that are involved in these power relations: He cuts the drawings that he makes on translucent paper and superimposes the single pieces over one another by experimenting with a projector to produce different effects and constellations.
Recently, Fabiano started to transform the aesthetics and elements of his drawings to films he refers to as “videodesenhos“ (video drawings), such as the work “RDS #03 - Do Sujeito / Localização / Ruído“ (About the Subject / Localisation / Noise - 2010). Creating the effect of moving images and collage at the same time, Fabiano invents fictional worlds in which he places his subjects. While the image flickers, the videos oscillate between deconstructing and reinforcing power relations in an uncertain timely and spatial dimension.
RDS #03 - Do Sujeito / Localização / Ruído | Fabiano Gonper from blanktape on Vimeo.
The “Gonper Museum - work in progress“ is another piece in which Fabiano addresses power structures and its underlying mechanisms: He questions how artworks get acquired by museums and how they become sacred and gain a certain immortality in an institution‘s collection. At the same time as criticising these mechanisms, Fabiano uses them for his own purposes in order to achieve a certain acceptance from side of his audience. In the project, Fabiano acts as all the positions that accrue within a museum: the conservator, curator, artist, director, graphic designer, head of marketing... Representing and incorporating the Gonper Museum, he negotiates with institutions to display his museum within their spaces. While Fabiano sometimes shows his own work within the museum, at times he appropriates the museum‘s collection and brings together works in a show that is at the same time his curatorial piece as it is his work of art. During the 29th Panorama da Arte Brasileira in 2005 at the Museum of Modern Art in São Paulo, Fabiano united works from the museum‘s collection by well-known Brazilian artists, amongst others Regina Silveira, Mauro Piva and Iran do Espírito Santo. A commission or invitation by a museum or gallery thus leads to a site-specific intervention, in which Fabiano draws the fictional lines of the Gonper Museum onto the walls of the institution, creating a space within a space - half fictional, half real. In a way, the Gonper Museum can be understood as institutional critique in the sense of artists like Andrea Fraser and Fred Wilson: Fabiano criticises the institution from within by absorbing its strategies and in order to put light onto something usually obscured and hidden - mainly collecting mechanisms and the power relations and conflicts of interest underlying them. Fabiano also addresses the by Boris Groys proclaimed death of the art piece when it enters a museum as sacred space, where it loses its life, the relation to the outside world and due to the standstill of time in a museum is also deprived of its relevance.
Paula Nishijima
Biography
Júlia Frate Bolliger
Harum Marcio
Felicitas Rohden
Vinicius Spricigo
Beto Shwafaty
Stefanie Hessler
Flauberto Berlin
http://www.flickr.com/photos/flaubertoplasticartist/
http://www.flickr.com/groups/britishmuseum/discuss/72157607211706090/
http://www.flickr.com/photos/flaubertoplasticartist/show/
http://www.google.de/#hl=de&source=hp&q=flauberto&aq=f&aqi=&aql=&oq=&fp=a0c2fb81ffe4bd08
http://www.facebook.com/album.php?aid=256749&id=566963515
Flauberto Berlin
http://www.flickr.com/photos/flaubertoplasticartist/
http://www.flickr.com/groups/britishmuseum/discuss/72157607211706090/
http://www.flickr.com/photos/flaubertoplasticartist/show/
http://www.google.de/#hl=de&source=hp&q=flauberto&aq=f&aqi=&aql=&oq=&fp=a0c2fb81ffe4bd08
http://www.facebook.com/album.php?aid=256749&id=566963515