Eu sou a pintura

I AM THE PAINTING

Painting is the action. The body is the surface on which the artist slaps on paint, makes collages, superimposes fabrics and ornaments. He is the work’s subject and object. Photography is part of the construction and the making of the instant, the pose, the ephemeral dressing up of nature into something tangible. The ambiguous and transgressive images make use of wordplay, fantasies and features of the body that embody feelings, desires and dreams, supposedly not theirs.

Alexandre Mury’s tableaux vivants use parody and pastiche to stage another story, another art form, based on renowned references from famous paintings and culture in general. They result from a process to which the artist dedicates himself during days of painstaking and meticulous preparation of sets, costumes and makeup to create the fanciful simulacrum into which he immerses himself body and soul.

The original does not exist. It vanished a long time ago in the world of virtual images with which the artist coexists in his travels through the web, where time and place are mixed in a bewildering simultaneity. Navigating this infinite source, Mury elects iconic images with which to establish a dialogue, a relationship that includes the viewer's gaze in a triangular game.

Upon articulating his own language, he brings into closer proximity the cultivated and trivial, sacred and profane, sublime and banal images that overlap different worlds and beseech the memory of the viewer/participant to make sense of it. Art speaks to art, the present slides into the past and vice versa. It is in this dialogical nature of the work where the artist writes his own time and identity.

Mury nurtures the discussion of the traditional notions of feminine and masculine in the images that test the limits of visual androgyny. The coverings further test the artist's body with regard to his identity of gender, race, sex; bearded-woman, man-cactus, living-dead, black representation of white figures. He undertakes a carnivalized reading – in the sense of a topsy-turvy world, defined by Mikhail Bakhtin – of the icons of culture and the great characters of literature, history, religion, mythology, prepared from clothing, wigs, hairpieces. The result is a double identity, fragmented and multiplied through pseudo-self-portraits that each and every time give us a different face, another person, another story, another color.

For the new series of works, Mury decides to seek more color as the common thread to his experiences. But ultimately, what color is it? Is it light or matter? Thing or painting? Optical vibration or a chromatic spiritual scale, as Kandinsky desired? In Hippocratic medicine, the theory of humors pointed to black bile as the root of melancholy and yellow bile as that of cholera. To the blood type, reddish in its features, were attributed characteristics of optimism and joy.

Besides the luminous vibrations and sensory experience, colors can bring with them a philosophical history, politics, marked by constant changes throughout history and opposite

meanings depending on the culture, proposing another universe of ambiguity. Is red an ecclesiastical, or carnal passion, color? Is it the emblem of royalty or revolutions? In his research, Mury rigorously delivers himself to monochromatic limitations, even knowing beforehand that for a "live model" the experience will never be complete. He seeks references in Whistler, Klimt, Kupka, Kokoschka, Picasso, Djanira, choosing pieces in which color is worked in a particularly significant way.

The adoption of monochrome inhibits the coloristic exuberance of his previous work, forcing him into a more analytical approach, the question of the primary defining characteristics of visual form and volume, the secrets of chiaroscuro and chromatic ranges. He submits to the subtraction of a spontaneous vitality in favor of reflection and constriction of the limitations of each color, the requirements of each so that the shape and contours are perceived.

In just a few years Mury achieved for himself a unique and distinctive place in the arts panorama, playing with the transgression of social codes and challenging the repressive solemnity of cultural canons. His work adopted a lexicon of everyday, prosaic and humorous elements with which he composed his own language, which flirts with kitsch, abuses the identity nomadism that characterized Pop culture and bets on the fertile freedom and regenerating capacity of art.

ELISA BYINGTON

Sociologist, art critic, curator and doctorate in art history, author of the books Galleria Borghese (2000), Palazzo Pamphilj a Piazza Navona (2001), O projeto do Renascimento (2009), Giorgio Vasari, A Invenção do Artista Moderno (2011), Antonio Dias: Arquivo Íntimo - Trabalhos em Papelão (2013). Collaborated with the magazines Isto É, Bravo!, Republica, Carta Capital, Iberian Art, Icon, Il Giornale dell'arte, Flash Art.