SRD
Somewhere between familiarity and strangeness, attraction and repulsion, refinement and precariousness, operates the São Paulo artist Vítor Mizael. Having featured in various museum rooms and publicly tendered art projects, he debuts on the São Paulo gallery circuit with his solo exhibition Taxonomia as part of the Zip'Up project at the Zipper Gallery.
On the heels of Gabinete (2013), his successful show at the Paço das Artes as part of the institution's projects season and which represented a kind of synthesis of his works, Mizael now exhibits a new set of paintings, drawings and objects. It displays less characteristics of a collection and is less susceptible to a supposed cataloging; features that were quite evident in previous shows and projects. Moving in restless fashion, yelping, flapping their wings quickly or in positions that bother the spectator, the pet animals represented by the artist never stop disturbing those watching them.
A certain inexpressiveness runs through Taxonomia. Although the refined trait in portraying various birds in the three dimensional, somewhat sculptural pieces is evident in one of the groupings of the exhibition, the predominantly neutral palette of the pictures, emulating the hues of the walls of museums like the Louvre and Prado, and the support of these drawings - plywood commonly used in transporting artworks around the world - ends up emphasizing a serial and far from subjective character. At the same time, the now absent, now extended limbs of some of the figures relentlessly develop elements of that which we might consider a Brazilian expressionism - bringing to mind Goeldi's gigantic scarlet fish, Grassmann's fantastic hybrid beings and the falling garden horses.
However, the animals on the fringes of Mizael populate both the outskirts and the decadent central areas of Brazilian cities, embodying a subcategory, a troupe with a fine line of existence and whose invisibility becomes a strategy for survival and also a resource that is very convenient for the more favoured. Yet, when we are struck by such experiences, the strangeness is patent. "[...] A city is 'a human settlement in which strangers are likely to meet'"1, highlights the thinker of our 'liquid' world, Zygmunt Bauman.
While the artist's projects for institutions have more to do with criticizing the art system and issues like estate and safeguarding, Taxonomia seems to attest a more mobile approach by Mizael. This means that a small stuffed bird, with its head buried in a plaster base, can be in the same space alongside a circular chassis representing a dog in an aggressive stance, ready to attack, whose brilliant shine and peculiar shape and volume bring to mind a hunting prize, legitimizing the history of the winners versus the losers. In other words, the statutes of the hegemonic power.
For is the symbolic manipulation of 'cute animals' disturbs so many, in a city where oversized pet shops and beauty contests for pedigree animals are proliferating, it is essential to remember that mongrels, for example, find themselves in legal limbo. Wild animals are protected by laws that agencies such as the Brazilian Environment Agency (IBAMA) have to defend and enforce. Mongrels or NDRs (no defined race), meanwhile, are left to their own devices. Unless they are obstructing roads or thoroughfares, for example when lying injured, they depend on an external support that is often inexistent. Not by chance, when Mizael exhibited works at the ArtNexus fair in Madrid in 2013, he suggested a similarity between Latin immigrants, second class citizens, and the dogs arranged in his installation. For Mizael's work discusses, without resorting to half-images, relations of subjection and oppression. And seeing this in specular form is quite unpleasant.
Mario Gioia
1. BAUMAN, Zygmunt. Modernidade Líquida [Title in English: Liquid Modernity]. Rio de Janeiro, Jorge Zahar, 2001, p. 111