Studio Visits

On a rainy afternoon, I go to Henrique Oliveira‘s studio by taxi. It is located in the area of Lapa in the city of São Paulo. While looking for the right place together with the taxi driver, we immediately figure out where it is, when we pass an open garage type workshop where four men with staple guns work on large wooden structures. I enter and one of Henrique‘s assistants goes to get dinner: pão de queijo, the delicious Brazilian cheese bread rolls.



Henrique tells me that he first studied social communication and publicity before he decided that what he really wanted to do is art. Starting off with drawing, he went on to working with wood, which he mainly found in the streets of São Paulo. With the wooden panels and fence parts he would collect at abandoned places - “tapumes“ in Portuguese, describing the wood used to fence off construction sites - Henrique built two-dimensional structures resembling paintings, but replacing paint with timber. Often associated with the buildings in the periphery and favelas surrounding Brazilian cities, the material and Henrique‘s use of it allude to art history all the same: Reminding of brush strokes and by its wooden nature referring to the brush handle attached to the tool most famously deployed in the history of art, Henrique creates various layers as if the material he uses was paint. Starting off two-dimensionally, he soon began to expand into space, creating pieces that seem to be coming out of the walls, inflating and bloating, always on the verge of exploding into space. These abstract “paintings“ penetrate the viewer‘s space and expose the tactile qualities of art to the spectator. Henrique soon discovered PVC as material that is more flexible and bendable than wood, allowing him to expand even further into space and metamorphosing his formerly rather two-dimensional wall pieces into three-dimensional architectural structures. With the PVC as framework underlaying the wooden surfaces, he creates dynamic “tridimensionals“, as he refers to his works.



Fully exhausting the elasticity of the seemingly flooding and liquid - rather than bulky and bursting - wood, Henrique constructed a huge parcours at the 29th São Paulo Biennial, which seemed to swallow visitors and invited them on a journey through the very inner of architecture or - depending on every individual‘s interpretation - the human body. The work “The Origin of the Third World“ (2010) - wittily playing with the title of a famous painting by French 19th century painter and enfant terrible Gustave Courbet - led up a few metres from the floor and allowed for different paths to be taken. Visitors would find themselves in an organic labyrinth, resulting in occasional ducked head encounters with other people. The site-specifity of Henrique‘s works calls to mind the relational and social dimension that architectural structures always have. By creating a new microcosmos with each piece, he also exposes its insides that seem to be pushing outward, making them available for us to see and help them out of their enveloped invisibility.


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When I came across Marcelo Solá‘s work in a book about emerging Brazilian artists, I immediately contacted him for a studio visit, since his work seemed really interesting to me. When he replied that he does not work in São Paulo but Goiânia, with 1,3 million inhabitants a relatively small city in the centre of Brazil, I was quite disappointed: It seemed impossible to meet him. As luck would have it, an old friend of mine, whose family is from Goiânia, invited me to visit and spend a long weekend with her. So I emailed Marcelo who instantly invited me to his studio downtown.


I visit him on a Monday evening. Walls and floor in his studio are covered with works - framed or still in process - and paint and tools are spread out. Marcelo gives me a tour around the place and we start talking about his painting-drawings.


For his works, Marcelo often uses the technique of monotype and later paints or draws on those prints. His works reflect a feeling of fragments, heterogeneity, and the chaos of contemporary urban structures. Coming from the discipline of architecture, Marcelo‘s work often evolves around buildings, city planning, and human behaviour in spaces like metropolises today. The imperfection of cities, the clutter, and disorder can be traced in his works. A sense of latent sexuality and traces of coincidence can also be felt when engaging with his art. The objects Marcelo designs and draws seem to blow up and force open the two-dimensional surface of the paper or subsurface he paints on, wanting to escape into space and overcome the restrictions superimposed by material. In an attempt to approach and challenge reality by drawing, Marcelo creates configurations, which according to logic and physics cannot exist in reality. He constructs entities that are only possible in his art, functioning like an oneiric continuation of the possibilities offered to us by reality. Continue reading "Studio visit Goiânia: The denial of unity in..." »

I visit Fabio Okamoto at his place in Brooklin. After a rather rough bus ride, I arrive and we start chatting about living in São Paulo and the cultural diversity between its population. Fabio has an education from the School of Architecture and Urbanism at the Universidade de São Paulo. During the week, he works as graphic designer. He has set up his works on the dining table and we start looking at his photographs, which he neatly keeps in cardboard cases.



Fabio explains that he started working with black and white photography and analogue cameras. He tried to find forms and details in the city that the not so attendant viewer would not even notice. His images of São Paulo from the series Hidden City (2001/2003) were taken from one of the high buildings in the city centre and show the typical skyline of never ending concrete. Due to the multiple exposure Fabio employs in surrealist tradition, there seems to be a motion that opens a view on the city the naked eye cannot see. These photographs reveal the feeling of movement that is so typical for this metropolis. In some of the images, the architecture is covered by a veil, a piece of cloth the wind blows into a certain form, which repeats itself in other parts of Fabio’s work. Then, there is a series of spaces that most paulistanos usually would not know themselves, demolished buildings in the city centre, that Fabio prefers to depict at night when there is less activity and a more interesting lighting to capture.

Continue reading "Fabio Okamoto's media permeating photography" »

I look up the directions to go to André Komatsu’s studio. It is located in an area of Sao Paulo I’ve never been to before. There’s a football match the same evening I visit and the atmosphere in the streets is kind of raucous. Arriving at the place, a piece of paper informs me that the bell is broken and that I should knock on the garage door. I enter a huge space that resembles a warehouse. The garage door closes behind me and I meet André and the artists he shares his studio with. The place is covered with works of art and projects in progress.

We start looking at André’s portfolio and he explains how he came to working with performance, then architectural pieces, turning them into drawings and returning again to objects and installations. I am fascinated by the videos of his performances and the way in which they actualise and rethink the space they take place in.



In West or until where the sun can reach (2006), André walks in the city of Sao Paulo, holding a compass and heading West until he encounters an obstacle in his way. When there appears a wall he does not manage to climb over, the performance comes to its end. The restrictions of urban structures and the challenges they impose on us, is of great relevance for a city like Sao Paulo.

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