Extensores [A Gentil Carioca]

João Modé presents Extensores, where five long strings connect over the skylight of A Gentil Carioca, tied to some buildings in the Saara region – an open market in the historic center of Rio de Janeiro – and others in the surroundings, with a knot in suspension. As a spatial extension of the look to the neighborhood, the work earns a crossing potency through tension, which also gives it the dimension of the built weave by a complex, vital and collective time.

The project consists in the installation of five Extensores coming from several buildings in the neighborhood [some from a very distant neighborhood...] meeting in a single node over the gallery's skylight, connecting the interior space of the gallery to some buildings in the Saara region – an open air market in the historic center of Rio de Janeiro – and others places around, with a knot in suspension.

Extensores are somehow an extension of the look. A crossing of space. They connect/separate things and situations.

In 2017 I started to develop the project – when I held my first exhibition at A Gentil Carioca – and discussed with some responsible people for the surrounding buildings, but we saw that it would be too complex for the time we had at that moment. In the same year, I worked at the piece Cinco extensores se encontrando sobre a Gentil, a photographic printing and thread, made three years later for the exhibition Entre Desejos e Utopias.

It is worth remembering that the exhibition A Cabeça happened with the exhibition space completely empty. Only three wooden stairs gave access to the building's attic. There, a series of objects were organized/disorganized with defined positions and install situations, like a big fish that swam alone in an aquarium at the end of a corridor with a tangle of wood and a wool rope through the entire space.

I like to think of the attic as a place that has the same drawing but in another dimension. A place of memory. The strings connected over the gallery, coming from different parts of the city, reinforced this mesh that we are building in our experience.

The other version of the Extensores that has not yet been made, was born at the end of 2001, when I took part in a collective exhibition “Outra Coisa” with Brígida Baltar, Eduardo Coimbra, Raul Mourão and Ricardo Basbaum in Vitória, state of Espírito Santo, at the Vale Museum, where I proposed an Extensor that it would come from the Mestre Álvaro hill to enter the museum space, but the project was not possible since the distance was more than 15 thousand meters crossing urban and rural areas...

I started the Extensores in 2001, in a group exhibition curated by Ricardo Basbaum and Miguel von Perez in a shed by the Douro River in the city of Porto. At the time, I had been shredding a velvet and gathering the removed yarns. I made a long line that crossed the entire length of the space entering a window of a small building inside the shed.

In 2002 I did the second Extensor in an exhibition called “Love’s House” that took place in a hotel of the same name in Lapa. Each artist took a room, there I peeled off the walls revealing the previous layers of painting and showing the history of that place. In addition, a cotton and sisal rope coming from the corridor entered the space making a knot in another that went out for 100 meters through the city space to a building on Lapa Street, connecting the interior space of the hotel with the outside, the street space.

There is a tension in the rope, in the Extensores, that when you hold it is like you are in the place where it is tied, even though you cannot see exactly where it is. It is another type of measurement.

At the same time, I started working with wires and that’s when the REDE project came about.

In the exhibition Para o Silêncio das Plantas, held in the summer of 2011 at the Stables of the School of Visual Arts of Parque Lage, a large Extensor had a point near the park entrance gate tied in two palm trees. The ropes got together and went towards the building, crossing it and going into the forest space, where it was tied at the base of a tree that was not seen from the exhibition space. [publication Para o Silencio das Plantas].

In the last solo exhibition I did at the gallery A Gentil Carioca [2015], Algumas coisas que estão comigo I also installed Extensores that came from the work Galáxia [a group of semi-precious stones]: one that connected the two gallery buildings and another that went to the city space.

below I leave some references of other works that dialogue with the proposal:

Brazilian artist, lives and works in Rio de Janeiro. His work is articulated by a plural notion of languages ​​and spaces of action. Since 2013 he has been developing a group of works in fabrics that he calls “Construtivo [Paninho]’. Using sewing and embroidery, the artist appropriates kitchen towels, sheets and cloths of his daily use to build works in homage to the geometric/abstract tradition of brazilian art. A form of 'construtivo-afetivo'. He has a degree in Architecture and Visual Programming, with a master's degree in Visual Languages ​​from the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro. He was a founding member of the Visorama group, which promoted debates on contemporary art issues between the late 1980s and the 1990s.

In 2019 he presented an individual at the Peter Kilchmann gallery, in Zurich, Switzerland and was a finalist for the Marcantônio Vilaça Award, at the FAAP Museum, São Paulo. In 2018, he took part in the collective exhibition 'Las Calanques' at FRAC Marseille, France. In 2017, he participated in the exhibitions “35º Panorama de Arte Brasileira” at the Museum of Modern Art - MAM in São Paulo, “BAHAR/The Instanbul Off-Site Project for Sharjah Biennial 13” in Abud Efendi, Turkey, “Presente para Iemanjá ”at Casa França Brasil, Rio de Janeiro. In 2016 he took part in the “Aichi Triennial” in Nagoya, Okazaki and Toyokashi, Japan, in the “Gran Bienal Tropical” in San Juan, Puerto Rico, in “Ponto Transição” in Fundição Progresso, Rio de Janeiro and in “A Cor do Brasil ”at the Rio Art Museum - MAR, Rio de Janeiro. In 2015, he opened two solo exhibitions, “O passado vem de frente numa brisa” at the Museu do Açude, Rio de Janeiro and “Algumas coisas que estão comigo” at A Gentil Carioca Gallery, Rio de Janeiro. In 2014, he held the solo shows “Land, die raum” in Berlin, Germany, “Desertão” at CCBN Cariri, in Juazeiro do Norte, Ceará and the project “REDE” at the Museum of Contemporary Art – MAC, Niterói, Rio de Janeiro. In 2008 he participated in the 28th Bienal de São Paulo, among several other participations in his artistic trajectory.

João Modé's works integrate collections such as Pinacoteca do Estado de São Paulo, Museum of Modern Art of São Paulo, Museum of Modern Art of Rio de Janeiro, Frac Bretagne, France and also important private collections in Brazil and abroad.