BE THERE
Fernanda Gomes 2006Presented by Baumgartner Gallery September 9, 2006- October 4, 2006Fernanda GomesExact end date unknown.Baumgartner Gallery is pleased to present a one-person show by Brazilian artist Fernanda Gomes. This is her third exhibition at the galley. Impelled to the flush, an installation by Gomes is the furthest thing from a random gathering of selected works into an art space. For Gomes, space itself is the selected work, hallowed, ciphered, then amassed afresh into a self-contained and self-actualizing congress of parallels. These parallels, or the invisible alphabet of sensations and memories that construct Gomes’s artistic phrases, are familiar to us, though possess, in the finite, transcendent world she submits them to, a dire sense of dispossession. They will manifest themselves in the form of dental-floss upholsteries, meandering rivers of stones and bricks, labyrinths of wicker-chair stackings, or the curled scrabs of leaf-paper scarred from meticulously discarded cigarette buds. Placed together, their knack for continuity challenged, Gomes actively puts forth a question to the objects themselves: “Is there a possible return from insignificance in a signifying world?” Gomes’s is a unique world of fragments and de-fragmentation. Things minimal, benign, or nearly imperceptible become a centrifuge for our most nuance-heightened attention. In this, Gomes’s newest and one of her most subtly crafted installations, we discover once again the element of permanent flight that is synonymous with Gomes and her nomad architecture, where each spec of her artificial landscape strives to radiate the grandiose of its every minute quality. Paint on the walls itself suddenly breathes life and becomes drastic. For Gomes, the exhibition of paint is here also a tribute to and celebration of the medium and of the essence itself, pondering the tradition of Malevich, Klein and others, whilst it simultaneously meta-sized into an object, it too no more exempt from the relentless denouement of superficies that all of Gomes’s objects will endure. And yet, Gomes’s art is not preoccupied with re-inventing the world, or desperate to asset quantum “originality” to the significance of her landscapes. Hers is also an art that embraces and emphasizes the concrete characteristics of its objects, reluctant to impose plain language to what Gomes considers the subtle, idiomatic personalities of all things perceived. Insisting on the idea that in beauty imperfections do not juxtapose but in fact play an equal part as perfection itself, Gomes defines her landscapes in discriminating terms. A clear-wrapping-tape, transparent, nearly imperceptible, and yet in this installation, it will serve as an underlying compass, delimiting and demarcating zonings within the space. A canvas tethered with horizontal threading. Wire hangings and an egg-pedestal. These things either beg to be named and re-named, or reject the very notion. Fluctuating, and unpredictable to the eye, they mobilize and punctuate Gomes’s world, leaving us, as we confront it, with an exclamation and an invigorating question mark. Fernanda Gomes was born and educated in Brazil. She has been actively showing her work in galleries and museums for the past eighteen years in such renown institutions as Museu de arte moderna de Rio de Janeiro, the Kunstmuseum Bonn, and most recently the Museu Serralves in the Portugal. She lives in Rio de Janeiro.
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