ASSUME VIVID ASTRO FOCUS . yellow wind floral blue (the colors accumulate in its atmosphere weaving lights)

 

amarelo vento azul floral [yellow wind floral blue] is a portal through which one can experience contrasts, venture into chromatic abysses, and strike up an intimate relationship with more than thirty exuberant paintings. The artist collective assume vivid astro focus (avaf) took the colors and shapes they originally developed in 2008 for a mask used at an immersive installation in Rome, and remixed them on the computer to result in independent digital drawings for the artworks featured in this exhibition, made in 2022 and 2023 with acrylic paint on duplex sheet of corrugated kraft paper.

 

For centuries, the subject of color has given rise to a wide range of debates, questionings, theories, experiments and research in the field of art, but also in that of science, sociology and philosophy, as well as many other disciplines. Over the course of avaf’s twenty years of activity, color has been used as a key element for engendering intense artistic sensations. The collective has become known for creating immersive installations where abundance dictates Dionysian experiences. Tapestries, wallpaper, neon lights, performances and music coexist in these settings, which are lined with a myriad of patterns, images, colors and shapes that dialogue with contemporary cultures, queer sensibility and politics. In their projects, avaf primarily aims to create a Gesamtkunstwerk (“total work of art”), where the spectator becomes one with the artwork and color serves as a tool for engagement and communication. Without veering away from this origin, five years ago avaf began to explore, more specifically, pathways in the relationship between people and paintings.

 

At first, avaf’s paintings in amarelo vento azul floral might seem to propose a more controlled sensorial immersion compared to the installations, but their power actually arises from dichotomies – in the interplays between sensation and contemplation, expansion and constriction, absorption and reflection, smoothness and texture, paint and pixel, manual and digital, precision and randomness, Apollonian and Dionysian.

 

Although all the paintings are born from the same digital pattern, during the creative process of their making, each becomes a unique pictorial microcosm in its own right. The paints that avaf uses in these artworks are mixed by hand to achieve the same sort of chromatic vibration perceived on the screens of electronic devices. Drawing inspiration from the iridescent colors on digital screens, avaf’s palette includes more than 1,200 tones, and new formulations arise with every artwork. The search to achieve tones of digital luminosity in paint seeks to dialogue with the daily relationship that people currently have with the displays of their devices. This relationship between the luminosity and surface effects of digital colors and the material colors of painted surfaces emerges in instances of tension in avaf's work.

 

In the predominantly organic shapes, occasionally reminiscent of bodies, genitalia, objects, animals and plants announced in titles, there is an obsession for sharp borders. The delineated areas of color do not in any way blend with or encroach on one another. The tones are purposefully ultra matte, aiming to concentrate the experience of colors without any intermediary barrier (glossy finishing, or glass). In the absence of “obstacles” between the spectator’s body and color, the various contrasting tones are free to flow out from the pictorial limits, even though contained within the outlines of their shapes. Smears and blotches appear inside the areas of perfectly outlined color and reveal even more vibrant underlying layers, as though they were seeking paths for eruption, as reiterated in Pássaro Floral.

 

Aside from these moments in which the brushstrokes manifest themselves, juxtaposing the corrugated and smooth surfaces of the kraft paper contributes to the pictorial cadence. These elements converge in a vertiginous encounter in Divina and Minha Obsessão. Due to its monumental scale, Sereia De Ombreiras seems to require stepping back from it, while its chromatic and formal relationships beckon for closer examination. Such tensions in the pictorial field are accentuated in certain artworks where the shapes extend into cutouts beyond the supposed angular limits of the painting. By their refusal to be contained within the rectilinear surface, these shapes become more than mere parts of the composition, expanding the pictorial surface into the surrounding space, as seen in the pink oval on the side of Torneira De Letrinhas, the volumes at the top of Peitos Pintos Saco Pássaro, and the irradiating forms in Cabeçudinha.

The frames are also disquieting. In their outlining of artworks, the expectation one has of wooden frames is that of containment, but here they play a more of sculptural role, especially in those paintings where the frame follows the shape of a cutout – where the irradiating fluorescent yellow seems to drive the painted surface outward, reinforcing the interplay between containment and expansion. The surrounding space also plays an active role, though it does so in a relationship that neither feeds back into the paintings nor cross-influences them. In the main room, the niches made with colorful wooden studs and boards engender greater corporal proximity with the paintings and do not hinder these encounters from being abyssal. In keeping with the aim of a total work of art, although the colors are anchored in their forms, the proximity allows the energy of the colors to flow out into the spectator.

 

Just as users of digital devices can experience the vertigo of navigating between windows, colors and shapes shot through with the luminosity of pixels and color fields on electronic displays, without their body being physically drawn into them, entering the portal of amarelo vento azul floral is like undergoing an Apollonian sensorial experience permeated by the ecstatic brightness of painted colors, notwithstanding possible Dionysian effects.