Eu só vendo a vista

MAC, Niterói (2017)
 

Coupled with the main hall’s exhibition, the new team of curators and direction consider the museum’s Veranda space to be important for the experimentation with installation and site specific works. Unlike exhibition spaces that confront their surroundings as a white cube – which here would be difficult due to Oscar Niemeyer’s architectural proposal – we believe this area can spawn projects that, after due research, can question the relationship between the museum, the landscape and the human body.

Considering this purpose, artist Marcos Chaves was invited to realize the first of this series of interventions in this sinuous space. With a career spanning almost 30 years, the artist’s visual research is expressed through different media such as photography, sculpture, video and installation. In his production, there is a constant interest on the relationship between image and text, usually through a humor-friendly perspective.

In this project, Marcos Chaves continues his twenty year long experiment centered in a single quote: “Eu só vendo a vista” (I only sell the view). A string of meanings is available to the public, such as a take on the relentless real estate market in Rio de Janeiro. In Portuguese, the word “vendo” also means “to blindfold”. Besides, the Portuguese word “vista” conveys the idea of “cash payment” as well as “view”, as if here the “panoramic view” was created by the encounter between nature and the heritage of modernist architecture.

Here the public is faced with the artist’s first architectural spacialization derived from this quote. Exhibited in the veranda, one of the most popular places amongst visitors for tourist photos as well as for the pleasure of leisure, Marcos Chaves’ quote informs and deforms; it hides part of the landscape so as to divert our attention to what is behind: the Guanabara Bay and the same Sugarloaf mountain that is also shown in the first photographic version of this piece, also present in the exhibit.

In photographies, as a song says, “Rio de Janeiro remains beautiful”; in our day-to-day, we know that these waters and mountains are closer to the “purgatory city of beauty and chaos”. We must cover our eyes to overlook some aspects and focus on the temporary beauty of others. Marcos Chaves’ work is about the doubt and tension between “looking” and “seeing”. The public of MAC Niteroi is invited to contemplate and reflect about it.

Raphael Fonseca and Pablo Leon de La Barra