Zip'Up: Traços de impermanência: Matias Mesquita

Spectra in concrete 
Drafts on the recent work of Matias Mesquita

"Extinguished of full meaning, they become tombs of permanence, in a dystopia of illusion."

"Queues, a symptomatic outcome of this bureaucratic machine, impersonate its status, coin its heredity and solidify its social control."

These phrases, extracted from Matias Mesquita texts, synthesize two fundamental aspects of his recent production, presented here in two related groups. The support and the materiality of his work are not neutral, as is the traditional white screen, but faced with the image built by the artist, activating in some cases a game of opposites, and in others a symbolic complement.

The materials used as support operate as indexes of the contemporary urban reality, realizing its industrial, massified and anonymous conditions.

The first series, generically called IMPERMANENCE, brings realistic images of skies painted on concrete slabs of different shapes and sizes. With its characteristic light and cloud architecture, the Brasilia sky, recorded by the artist in photographs and faithfully portrayed on a material so foreign to artistic traditions - and yet so present in urban life - generates a situation of strangeness and of cold seduction.

This ephemeral moment, captured and reproduced pictorially, seems fixed, trapped in the concrete, as a reminder of its fragile beauty, its provisional memory, and the inexorable passage of time.

The second series, still untitled and especially performed for the space of Zipper, addresses the representation of the queue. This performative emblem of bureaucracy, of social control and cohesion, finds as ideal support the industrial materials which make up the structure of the contemporary metropolis. Thus, as a symbol of urban life, the anonymous individual projects his spectrum on the city where he lives.

Temporality, matter and memory are the essential elements with which Matias Mesquita builds the image of the reality where he lives.

A refined and brutal poetic.

Manuel Neves

Brasilia, January 2015