Nino Cais: Wind Opera: Casa Triângulo, São Paulo, Brazil
Ópera do Vento [Wind Opera] the first solo show by artist Nino Cais at the gallery. Treating on various themes including the immaterial character of the artwork, the show features about 30 drawings, 35 interventions made on pages of books, 5 objects, a video and an installation with 85 sheet music stands.
As the basis for his artworks, the artist resorts to the world around him – books, photographs, items of clothing and everyday objects take on a new meaning through his interventions and unusual juxtapositions. In his words, “the interventions on the images create a sort of magnifying glass in the strict sense, not only proposing a new meaning but also magnifying the image’s original meaning.”
Nino Cais is a multidisciplinary artist: video, photography, collage and drawing are some of the languages he works with in his research.
For this show, the artist has been collecting iconographic books which contain portraits, landscapes and still shots from film; on their pages he carries out interventions by way of cutting, tearing and the addition of colors. Delicate drawings of tools made with graphite are overlaid by large dense splotches of black oil paint. A video presents images of classical sculptures cut out from books, moving across a landscape as though they were creating a dysfunctional timeline, without beginning or end. Objects with various uses are combined and result in unforeseen combinations: men’s shirts of white cotton receive dinner plates tucked into their sleeves. The initial strangeness gives way to a sensation of rest, as though there were a transcendent or sacred sense, like the white fabric that envelops liturgical objects in the Catholic Church, one of the artist’s childhood memories which has been explored in some of his previous works. The objects also comment on the body as a matrix of everything that exists in the world, a sort of mold from which everything is born. The exhibition treats on the fluidity between randomness and planning, while valorizing procedural construction.
