A Gentil Carioca is pleased to present Vinicius Gerheim's first international solo show at the Independent Art Fair 2022 in New York.
From the beginning, the artist’s greatest motivation to create the images he paints came from the constant desire to hide and protect himself from watchful eyes. Gerheim was born in 1992 and grew up in Juiz de Fora, which is a relatively small town in Minas Gerais, Brazil, and a place where his body and gestures were not welcomed. Creating these images was a way of dealing with things that couldn’t be translated into language. In his early works, he looked for strategies to take revenge on these watchful eyes.
Gerheim’s latest works draw on repetition as a main artistic language. He recalls and re-enchants elements that make up the national identity of his country and were part of his childhood: tablecloths, blankets, his backyard, his garden - safe places to create his gestural repertoire. It was in heavily patterned curtains that the artist found his motivation to create tension between figures, backgrounds and weavings. Behind these curtains there may be a secret garden where Gerheim can exist, live and love in his own body.
That's why the artist is interested in repetition. When you repeat something for a long time, you no longer recognize it. It’s like when you repeat a word over and over until you can no longer understand its meaning, you can only feel its texture. This phenomenon plays out in figurative elements that are seen as national identities that have been splintered and repeated by different strands. The real social environments and the intentions of their production lose their meaning to become fetishized images. Through repetition Gerheim creates a body that challenges and questions the flatness of the canvas, hiding secrets, covering up and adorning realities that are not as beautiful as the seduction of their forms suggest.
-
