The redefinition of image
Collage has been increasingly present in contemporary culture. We are the image society. English Pop art, created on the latter half of the 50s, with Richard Hamilton's notorious collage, comprised of magazine ads' clippings, was getting closer to mass media and appropriating its signs. However, the 21st century was even more engulfed by images, whether printed or electronic ones. The social interaction became completely mediated by images created and disposed at increasing speed.
There is no clear distinction between production and consumption or appropriation and creation in Zé Vicente's work. The artist's essential activity is to select a pre-existent image and further discover a new possibility to insert it back on everyday life. The nature of these artworks is the connection developed between the images and the city. The raw material of such works is not a traditional raw element, such as a canvas or marble, but printed pictures, which inhabits the publishing industry and have been withdrawn from its context.
Zé Vicente, appropriating newspaper, magazines and general clippings, proposes a different distribution for the pictures he has been collecting. His images are redefined through the direct contact between two-dimensional prints and the urban experience. The artist walks through the streets with his clippings folder in hand, packed with pictures that would have obsolescence as their inevitable end. Wander and roam through the city is a practice Zé Vicente nurture in order to rediscover cracks and hidden or forgotten gaps. Those passing places which receive collages and temporary interferences become his pictures' anonymous leads. Wandering around and adrift are the artist's strategies to find territorial accidents. It is also the necessary media to start a significant match between the physical-body experience and the dynamic and complex cluster that is the city.
Without leaving the high spirits behind, the artist plays with scale differences in a way that we lose reference of the object's dimensions, looming or decreasing the size of the images in comparison to the urban background. In the series Pela rua com recortes (In the street with clippings), he creates a kind of sampler, like a DJ reusing fragments of songs in different contexts. Zé Vicente rephotographs his clippings in positions that do not correspond to the original image's spatial orientation in most of the cases. What was originally vertical becomes horizontal, and vice versa. In new creations, the images that would probably be discarded survive longer, or even become everlasting.
In a video, the artist records one of his trips along the noisy streets of São Paulo and the way he construct his works from the unexpected, the wonder and the improvisation. The freshness and spontaneity of producing senses through picture juxtaposition and background contrast makes the clippings and the city merge themselves into odd units. Drains become natural pools that bathers enjoy; tiles and bricks fragments hide and reveal a female face; a small seedbed becomes the meadow where a woman sunbathes; and broomsticks turn into prison bars. These are some examples of the absurd works presented by Zé Vicente's collages and assemblages. Some of his works have a three-dimensional-ambition, as if the collages were not satisfied with being flat and wanted to be objects, fragments displaced from its context. The pictures themselves, enlarged and shown in the gallery space, do not abandon a certain dirty look from the street world.
The artist brings a little of the dispersion from the external area to the gallery's white cube by reusing civil construction materials. Most of Zé Vicente's photographs have been shared in social media, but now it's about an approach with the exhibit place in which the images gain physical presence. More than that, the gallery itself, inserted in the city, becomes the support for a looming clipping, in which its entrance is treated as a billboard.
Nevertheless, this exhibit, unlike pop icons, neither advertise products, explore consumption signs, nor are disposable. These works provides us with a more undetermined and surreal experience regarding the city and our surroundings. Zé Vicente takes advantage of the chaos and abundance of images that are bombard us every day, proposing another way of seeing the world, and order in which fiction and reality are inseparable.
Cauê Alves