Work: POSSIBLE LANDSCAPE
MEASUREMENT - 90 X 2.30
MIXED TECHNIQUE USING FABRIC AND OTHERS
Artist: Zélia Mendonça.
Description: In a landscape drawing of the Urca route to Sugarloaf Mountain, I placed gemstones and buttons together with other recycled materials from knickknacks and scraps. It is an assemblage.
This work is a representation of Rio de Janeiro as an icon of Brazil. So, although I try to portray the city, I'm talking on a national level. That's why I contrast human evils in the image of nature. Not as a justification, but by showing that these riches are constantly usurped by the crime of political and endemic corruption inserted in Brazilian daily life, endorsed by a voracious individualism. There are stray bullets and those sent, leaving bodies and interrupted lives in this dynamic. That's why I chose to put the scraps of shoes in addition to the bullets.
But what looks like hell also presents itself as beauty. When we do not stick to the details of the work, when we move away from it in contemplation, and have observed the whole, we try to provoke the paradox of values so that our conception of ourselves does not limit us. So that we don't fit into moralism, prisoners of external expectations, feeling guilty or too legislators without reflecting our role in society.
The confrontation with our reality cannot fear the unpleasant. Nor should we allow ourselves to project onto the other what is wrong in us. Therefore, between essence and appearance, it is the conflict between these parts that matters to me. And in this exercise of approaching and distancing, to seek an illusion that also celebrates life, a conscious and reflective illusion, perhaps the very reason for art's existence.