Marcelo Cidade

The series “Pessoal e Intransferível” seeks to highlight the duality and questioning of two important themes in Brazilian society: education and the visual arts. Marcelo Cidade addresses these two themes by joining the notebook object with the concrete material.

When addressing the issue of access to education in Brazil, it is important to remember that the country had a strong and high-quality public education program. It was during the 1980s, with the military regime that education in Brazil suffered a sudden aggravation, losing its recognition of excellence.

The artist also alludes to the 1970s, using concrete material in the form of triangular or pointed shapes on the notebooks which symbolize education. In other words, two forms of culture are evoked in these pieces; the neo-concrete and the confinement of education in the country, in addition to the problem of illiteracy in Brazil.

Marcelo Cidade was born in São Paulo in 1979, where he lives and works.

Through an often subversive and informal practice, the artist questions the ideals of modernist architecture, appropriates urban spaces and, by means of various aesthetic operations, invents new idioms, constructing fresh and surprising spaces.

The intimate bond which, for Cidade, holds together art and life authorizes the artist to explore the continual oscillating flow between the social and the personal sphere.

Comparing established social relations and values, Cidade produces an “aesthetics of resistance”, creates works that express complex social conflicts and brings signs and situations from on the street into spaces given over to art.

The artist’s works emphasize an encounter between art and society, without neglecting to privilege poetic expression and the discussion of language, they are also inspired politically by notions of challenge and transgression.

One of Cidade’s interests is the public space generated in the urban and technological flux of the surveillance society.

He concentrates on one place to reach another one, setting in motion a process of dislocation from the historic-geographic to the poetic.

The city is the privileged site of events, and it is here that the artist looks for his work materials. Streets, walls, flyovers, squares, shutters are a challenge for his gaze.

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Nowadays where economists transform simple commodities into financial data, the real content on the news are not the facts themselves, but the information related to the assets' profit or loss. In this work the artist employs the economic section from newspapers and transforms them into a painting, deleting and emphasizing information as an attempt to polish and wipe out every memory of the contemporary. Critic to the mass media, which often conceals our daily life, he reframes the work to become an aesthetic and ornamental painting.

The work "Expansao por Subtracao" consists of numerous fragments of broken and sharp mirrors. In São Paulo broken pieces of glass are often used as a barbed wire to protect fence walls, as a defense of private property from external intrusion. In this case, glass is replaced by mirror, an extremely attractive material that also creates beautiful light reflections on the back wall. In addition to the theme of security and control and to the theme of danger and threat that may arise from something highly seductive, all recurring themes in Marcelo Cidade's work, this installation also has a specific form. It is the exact form of the modernist windows of many buildings in São Paulo, and constitutes a question of the ideals of modernist architecture and a different aesthetic operation.

Between 1964 and 1990 the American artist Dan Flavin produced a series of sculptures called Monuments. Made from fluorescent tubes, they were a tribute to the constructivist Vladimir Tatlin, referencing the Russian artist and architect’s Monument to the Third International, or Tatlin’s Tower. This immense tower had been conceived as the home to the Third International, following the 1917 Revolution, and was to have been the beacon of the Monumental Propaganda planned by Lenin. In the series (un) monuments for V. Tatlin, Marcelo Cidade recreates Flavin’s Monuments using structures for fluorescent tubes. While Flavin’s aim in using the lights was to stress the temporariness of materials and, therefore, of systems – 'the American minimalist aesthetic is articulated as an observation of the industrial degradation of Fordism and emphasizes the appropriation of no longer used elements and a new critical functionality', Cidade specifies – the Brazilian artist explores the theme of ruins. In the works re-created by Cidade, there is no further space for temporariness, there are only the useless remnants of a Utopian plan.