FÁBIO MAGALHÃES 2021

Critic and curator, was director of de Museu de Arte de São Paulo (MASP), Memorial da América Latina/SP. It is currently curator and artistic director to "Museu de Arte Contemporânea de Sorocaba".

BLOW - WORKS BY JAIME PRADES

“...the continuous breathing of the world
that's what we heard
and we call it silence”
Clarice Linspector

The plastic expression of Jaime Prades is in permanent transformation with recurring poetic unfoldings. However, a large part of this dynamic takes place by revisiting his own work and reflecting on it, on what has already been built, to remake it, pierce it through continued transgressions. The artist's incessant concern to move, to go beyond, to set out on new paths.
Galeria andrea rehder contemporary art presents a set of recent works by the artist, carried out between 2018 and 2021. The exhibition reveals the freshness of his current language and the adoption of a new graphic path that dialogues with the pictorial. In the works of this show, Jaime Prades established two visual actors that interact with each other, keeping their identities – the spelling of strong expression and permanent agitation (activity); and the pictorial, of rest and harmony (passivity).
The Sopro exhibition brings a disquieting poetics, and to carry it out the artist radically transformed his color palette, established a new visual art. The space that was fragmented and tensioned, now presents itself as continuous, with diffused tones. In the wide symphonic spaces of light and color, undulating areas of lines emerge that move in the vast space of reverberated tones, suggesting the concept of Taoism, Yin and Yang that represent the duality of everything that exists in the universe.
Jaime Prades developed a harmonic and integrated technique between pencil and oil paint. While the graphics impose intense movement, the pictorial expression, in turn, suggests immobility, perhaps a slow movement, like something that moves in the continuous immensity of the universe. This fusion between opposites generates a poetics full of energy, mystery and magic. The turbulent dynamics of the graphic elements cohabit with the lyricism of the nebulous landscapes.
By building the difficult and beautiful relationship between graphic and pictorial expression, the artist creates metaphors of time, between the ephemeral and the permanent in the counterpoints of rest and movement.
The exhibition also features a set of works entitled “Mandorlas”, with a strong graphic protagonism, formed by concentric undulating lines that form a whole, a kind of territory, in the central part of the support. Certainly, these works allude to mandalas, which in Sanskrit means circles, and were used in meditation rituals – a kind of image and reference of the world.
There are also two assemblages, built in aluminum, steel, iron and wood. In them, the artist expresses in three-dimensional poetics similar to two-dimensional works. It is important to point out that Jaime Prades dedicates himself continuously and with a wide domain to three-dimensional expression.
When looking at the works in this exhibition, I notice that something reminds me of Gustav Klimt's atmosphere, but I must be dreaming.

Fabio Magalhães
curator