Fissure

Without limit, is available worldwide and is written by Henrique Oliveira. Indeed, it seems that no area is commensurate with its utopias. Its organic structures, usually monumental, thus offering as overflowing chimeras. They display as it too full of life far exceeding the given contours walls, partitions, ceilings give way in turn to their passing.

Thus the GP & N Vallois Gallery in 2011, the facility seemed Desnatureza hatching ground and tender in its push to puncture the ceiling irresistibly. As a bindweed, sculpture whose roots draw their source in the imagination of the artist, snack crawling up the space of the White Cube.

This exhibition Fissure_ * _ * revives the in situ process of the artist who deeply its mark in the gallery and metamorphosis in depth.
Oliveira, through these tensions, these vital forces, gives probably see the illusion that nature takes its course. Triumphant, she destroyed the city. The concrete gives way and crack under the relentless evidence of its strength. In this dynamic offered to look, there's probably a dialectic where subterranean meet, interact and compete for nature and culture, especially through the prism of organic and built, the anime and the inanimate. Oliveira did it anyway enter the forceps in an institutional world some idea of ​​nature. A teeming maze, which can just as well merge with it encounters.

In his installation Baitogogo Palais de Tokyo that displays a successful transplant that has "taken" with the building structure, Oliveira made to interpenetrate protruding beams and trunks of trees imaginary. Point collusion in front so read between nature and culture, much less a sermon on earth ravaged by human presence. The artist appears in a rather formal research on how the man puts his hand on the world around him. The tapumes, thin strips of wood used for hoarding in Brazil may recall in this regard how things shape - sometimes awkwardly - their territories, inhabit the land they have.

Sometimes "the urban epidermis", an expression of the artist, grow anarchically. While cities implode under their weight. His works in three dimensions or drawings on paper, consisting of protrusions, growths may be recessed a portrait of the demographic context in which he grew up.

The use of poor materials shows how Oliveira was fascinated by the construction, the development of space. It is not surprising that the artist be returned to New Orleans after the disaster of Hurricane Katrina. There was, in these devastated landscapes and bloodless, completely rebuilt. A world to rethink, a place in which to breathe new life. So Henrique Oliveira went there to pick up mattresses, cushions, remains of domestic life Quiete to raise them in a puddle, deformed, to explicit poverty. Condensation has here openwork as mattresses and gnawed by vacuum. Several years after the doldrums, they still appear open wounds, such as residual and historical open bite.

Born into a series around mottled furniture, sofa sets meanwhile the passage of time on its weathered and soiled skin. We can no longer sit, to rest. Its function is dead and annihilated. He became the symbol of irreversible accident.

Junk, natural elements, material deprivation ... his creations have a close relationship with Arte Povera. However, if the artist readily admits proximity to the theoretical claim of this movement, the use of recycled materials is more a way of forcing the boundaries of contemporary sculpture and its relation to space.

Henrique Oliveira invents dreamlike forms through which life, how the demiurge raises real ex nihilo a universe of fantasies contours.

Leah Chauvel-Lévy