FARTURA
Adriano Costa
Allan Gandhi
Alexandre da Cunha
Alfredo Jaar
Ana Clara Tito
Anna Livia Taborda Monahan
Ana Mazzei
Arorá
Cildo Meireles
Cipriano
Dan Coopey
Darks Miranda
Felipe Seixas
Gabriel Branco
Hiram Latorre
Iagor Peres
Juliana dos Santos
Juliana Frontin
Marepe
Marina Borges
Palma
Paulo Nazareth
Pedro Wirz
Rodolpho Parigi
Tonico Lemos Auad
The group show Fartura [Plenty] brings together works by more than twenty artists in dialogue with a painting of the same name by Marepe. In this 2024 piece, the artist depicts a human figure with three pairs of arms seated next to a basket overflowing with fruit—the same fruit scattered on the ground, hanging from the branches that emerge in the upper left corner of the canvas, and held in the multiple hands of this “Shiva” figure in lotus position.
The decision to use this particular painting as a starting point for bringing together a wide range of works by contemporary artists—each at different stages in their careers and pursuing vastly distinct research paths—stems primarily from the idea of abundance, which has characterized Marepe’s practice from the beginning of his career in the 1990s to the present. Although his paintings are less widely known than his sculptures and installations, they have always been part of his production. Today, with the benefit of critical distance from the dominant conceptualism of thirty years ago, this aspect of his work deserves renewed attention. It also serves as a prompt to reflect, in our current moment, on the meaning of plenty — a concept that differs from the notions of accumulation and growth that have guided Western societies for centuries and are becoming increasingly unsustainable.
Going against the grain of what many artists of his generation felt compelled to do, Marepe entered the international art circuit at the turn of the millennium but never saw the need to relocate to a major urban center in order to continue working. For over thirty years, he has remained in Santo Antônio de Jesus, a town in the Recôncavo region of Bahia, located about 200 km from Salvador and home to just over 100,000 inhabitants. It is there — among family histories and the local material culture — that he finds the raw material for a practice rooted in Duchampian principles, while also echoing Surrealism, Arte Povera, and Conceptual Art — all filtered through the lens of Santo Antônio de Jesus.
Conscious of the significance of his place of origin — diametrically opposed to Duchamp’s Paris or New York — Marepe names his versions of the readymade as necéssaires: assemblages of objects from an industrial (or even pre-industrial) economy that supplies the basic needs of populations with limited access to the commodities of consumer society. And yet, as Ricardo Sardenberg aptly notes in an unpublished text: “If his poetics speak to the depths of Brazil, it’s because they emerge from that soil, without ever reducing it to an ethnographic fact.” Perhaps the reason Marepe’s work resists reductive categorizations lies precisely in its distance from the fads and clichés often dictated by the market which are more acutely felt in the so-called cultural capitals.
As someone who has closely followed Marepe’s work over the past three years, I am continually surprised by him. With no allegiance to any particular style or trend, one day he comes up with a series of scribbled radiators, another day a large star-shaped sculpture made of ladders, and then drawings and paintings that mix human figures and symbols that seem to operate within a logic that is both personal and universal. His enviable drive to invent is constant, resulting in a prolific and multifaceted body of work that finds echoes in the pieces assembled in this exhibition.
Fartura was conceived collaboratively by the Luisa Strina team with the intention of highlighting the diversity of practices and perspectives among a new generation of artists. Marepe’s presence reverberates in the materiality of artists such as Adriano Costa, Ana Clara Tito, Felipe Seixas, Paulo Nazareth, and Pedro Wirz; his iconic Embutidinhos (2001) are reflected in the folding screen by the duo Palma; his Sangue de novela (2004) in Marina Borges’ blood puddle; the surrealism of his figures finds resonance in works by Allan Gandhi, Anna Livia Taborda Monahan, Darks Miranda, Iagor Peres, and Rodolpho Parigi; the recurring image of the egg in Marepe’s paintings reappears in works by Cildo Meireles, Dan Coopey, and Pedro Wirz; botanical abundance emerges in Hiram Latorre and Juliana dos Santos; bling as a form of abundance appears in Gabriel Branco’s photographs and Alexandre da Cunha’s golden dustpan, which elevates a humble tool into an object of value; the contradiction between abundance and scarcity, embodied in the laboring bodies of the 1980s Serra Pelada gold miners, captured in historical images by Alfredo Jaar, echoes in notions of material excess and lack in the works of Arorá and Juliana Frontin. Finally, Tonico Lemos Auad’s multiplied houses reinforce the subversive nature of Marepe’s choice to remain in his hometown—or, to quote Sardenberg once again, his “radical sedentarism.”
Kiki Mazzucchelli
