Rodrigo Matheus

[São Paulo, 1974. Lives and works in London]

With a production that transits through different media, in his art Rodrigo Matheus does not stick to particular techniques or styles. In his first works, he incorporated and articulated industrialized or designed products found in the everyday collective experience, emulating and employing their aesthetic characteristic within the contemporary art circuit. Recently, he made a series of works in which he appropriated materials characteristic of that same circuit, such as artwork labels and materials used in setting up art exhibitions, using them to create temporary sculptural situations. These configurations were only maintained during the period of the exhibitions they were shown in, dissipating after their end, when these materials were returned to their places of origin and ceased to be considered as art.

For the two new commissions he produced for the show Além da Vanguarda, Matheus also operates with a re-signification of existing materials. Here, he seeks to dialogue directly with the local history of the power of the agrarian elites in the state of São Paulo and the commercial transactions they made with England in the early 20th century, when the term “globalization” was still unheard of. In one of these pieces, he gathers a series of documents relating to various commercial transactions between Brazil and England and arranges them on a bidimensional surface, thereby conferring materiality to a system based on transatlantic trade, the accumulation of capital, and the exploitation of slave labor. In the second work, he uses papers from that same period that were used to wrap oranges exported from Brazil to England. These oranges were wrapped one by one in a delicate paper which bore the inscription of its origin and the company’s logo. Here, Matheus brings these papers back to their country of origin, using them to construct a delicate bidimensional wall piece in which they are used as small decorative pennants of regional festivals and adorned with fishhooks and bait that recall the large rivers in the interior of the state of São Paulo. Through these material evidences, Matheus evokes a history of commercial transactions supported by slave labor and submitted to a systematic erasure, but whose echoes are still felt in the social fabric of contemporary Brazil.